Dr. Paul Israel

Tesla told this story about his motor, about how he knew it would work and would wear well over time because he ran it in his head over and over, imagining the wear and how the motor worked.

Edison did that in practice with real devices, and that's what the Westinghouse engineers did as well.

So there's this sort of difference between Tesla, the sort of idealist inventor, and someone like Edison, who's really more an inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator.

When Westinghouse established his first alternating current station, he had a number of very skilled inventors and engineers working for him who developed that system.

And they drew also on work that was going on in Europe at the same time.

So in 1886, the first Westinghouse station appears in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

And Edison begins to pay attention to AC and does some investigation.

And there are a couple of things he's very concerned about.

One is...

The AC system works at these very high voltages, and that can be unsafe if not dealt with by the way in which the system is developed and designed.

And so Edison writes this memo about AC in which he says, sooner or later, Westinghouse is going to electrocute someone.

And one of the things you have to understand at this very moment is that the higher voltage arc light systems that were used for street lighting in American cities were strung along the streets.

The wires were strung along the street right next to telegraph and telephone wires.

And there were occasional accidental electrocutions of linemen from telegraph and telephone companies whose lines crossed with an arc light.

And so this fear of the electrical system was real on the part of many people.

And Edison was concerned about this.

The other thing was the AC system had these transformers and other elements that Edison thought would add to the costs.

Now, what he didn't recognize is that the advantage of AC is that you could build larger central stations that could distribute power over longer distances.

It meant you didn't need a station every couple of miles in a city like New York.

So between the Pearl Street station that Essen built in lower Manhattan and