American Genius (2015) s01e08 Episode Script
Edison vs Tesla: The Electricity
THIS PROGRAM INCLUDES DRAMATIZATIONS INSPIRED BY HISTORY.
SOME EVENTS HAVE BEEN ALTERED FOR DRAMATIC PURPOSES.
ALTERNATING CURRENT GENERATOR VOLTS: 1.
000 - ALTEN:7200 Electricity holds the power of life and death.
At the end of the 19th century, unlocking this force of nature is a puzzle as tempting as it is dangerous.
It's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Vast fortunes and brilliant minds will be pitted against each other in an all-out battle to harness the power of electricity.
Thomas edison.
Nikola tesla.
Two inventors with opposing visions on a collision course with each other and history.
Gentlemen, I give you the future of electricity.
It's the epic war to power the world.
A team of young engineers is under pressure to find a solution to a daunting challenge.
DID YOU KNOW? AMERICAN GENIUS THOMAS EDISON WAS A FORWARD THINKER.
HE HOLDS OVER 2.
300 PATENTS IN HIS NAME ACROSS MULTIPLE COUNTRIES How many tries is that? I don't know, a hundred maybe? Persistence, patience, perseverance.
When something doesn't work there's always another solution.
Just 31 years old, thomas edison is the most Famous inventor on the planet.
He's already brought the world an astonishing invention, the phonograph.
and earned himself the nickname: "The Wizard of Tenlo Park.
" Edison represents for lots of people the essence of yankee ingenuity.
He was brilliant.
He was insightful.
But equally extraordinarily hardheaded and practical pragmatic businessman.
His success as an inventor is unrivalled.
But now edison is trying to do something no one has done before: create a safe, inexpensive light source that could replace the gas lamp.
And is powered by electricity.
He's experienced over 100 failed attempts.
But now, in october of 1879, edison is about to find the element that will allow his light bulb to burn steadily, safely and repeatedly: carbon.
The use of carbonized thread is a breakthrough.
But the invention of the light bulb is only half the battle.
To replace gas lighting with electricity, edison will have to design and build an entirely new industry.
It wasn't enough to just have a light bulb.
Because remember, in 1879 when edison's working on this there are no preexisting sockets.
There are no plugs.
There is no wiring in your house.
So if you're going to have lighting in your house or in your business, you're going to have to build everything.
So it meant that edison had to think in terms of an entire system.
But edison isn't the only genius trying to solve the problem of electricity.
By reversing the direct electrical current, the dynamo can function as both a motor and a generator, giving us at least the potential to Waste energy.
Mr.
Tesla? There is too much friction.
If you remove the commutators, the machine would run more efficiently.
And how do we create a rotating field without the commutators? I don't know.
In a university in Austria, an ambitious physics student is formulating an idea for a radical new way of generating electricity.
His name is nikola tesla.
Nikola Tesla had a vision, a vision of what's to come into the future.
Tesla had enormous dreams, and he had the genius to carry them out.
A generator creates an electrical current that naturally reverses its flow periodically.
In tesla's time, electrical current is delivered by channeling that current in a single direction.
It's called direct current.
But tesla envisions fully harnessing a generator's naturally alternating current.
A/C would be a stronger and more efficient way to deliver electrical power.
But there's just one problem: it's never been done before.
It was very radical, because nobody had figured out how to make an A/C motor that would work, because they were all thinking about the traditional way in which you design a motor.
Tesla was a dreamer.
He could envision a technology in his mind.
This is going to be the future of edison electric.
Thomas edison is on the verge of creating a system that will allow him to bring his new light bulb into people's homes.
Over here is the first generator.
This is the second generator.
Edison pitches his direct current concept to his investors as safe, simple and reliable.
Hoping to convince them that his system could be the new standard light source in people's homes.
We'll have more than 500 customers.
- Not bad - For starters.
Welcome to pearl street station.
Located in manhattan, pearl street station is the first power plant in the world.
Within two years edison builds eighteen new power plants.
But each can only provide power within a half-mile radius.
You could only really build power plants in very densely populated cities, because otherwise it wouldn't be economically feasible.
So right away, rural and smaller towns were kind of frozen out of that power equation.
Over 3,000 miles away, at an edison factory outside Paris, nikola tesla has a different idea.
For years, tesla has been trying to perfect his own invention, an alternating current motor.
And now he finally has a working prototype.
But to prove his idea, nikola tesla will have to come to america and confront the most famous scientist in the world.
Thomas Edison has begun the process of wiring the country and the world using a system called direct current.
But he is about to cross paths with nikola tesla, a man who is convinced that he knows a better way to power the world.
EDISON'S LABORATORIES It must have been amazing for Tesla.
I think he must have seen Menlo Park as a big playground.
I'm sure tesla thought, "I finally found my home.
I finally found a kindred spirit".
It's been three days.
What's going on? We adjusted the rotors.
It's got to be the commutators.
But before tesla can present edison with his big idea for alternating current he'll have to earn his trust.
Mr.
Edison, sir! I have a letter from my supervisor.
So what do you do, Mr.
esla? - I'm an inventor.
- Ok.
And I can fix things.
Is that right? Yes, I can fix anything.
Look at this.
Got any experience with generators? Yes.
Edison gives Tesla a difficult task: To fix a problem plagued generator, the first of its kind ever installed on a ship.
S.
S.
OREGON EAST RIVER, NEW YORK CITY I think edison would do that with a lot of people that he hired.
He would send them out into something that might seem very difficult or even impossible.
And just see if they could handle that.
A short circuit burned out some of the armature coils.
It was an easy fix.
Tesla just showed that he was able to, kind of be parachuted into a problem and come up with a novel solution.
I think that's something that, that edison really admired because that was part of his own genius.
The edison electric company is growing at an incredible rate, and now supplies power to the barons of american industry.
But edison's direct-current system has its limits.
It can only deliver power effectively within about a half-mile of a power station.
Nikola tesla believes his alternating current can travel much farther and bring electricity to everyone.
But the power of alternating current comes at a cost.
They both have their dangers and their advantages in the distribution of electricity.
But at that particular moment in time, at the voltages that were being operated, and their understanding of the system of the time, the high-voltage A/C seemed clearly more dangerous.
Despite the dangers, Nikola Tesla is convinced his system is superior.
You have two minutes.
Imagine a central power station with one generator.
What kind of generator? Alternating current.
It can do the work of many DC generators and It's dangerous.
You can't control it.
You'll burn down the city.
If you want to impress me, improve the system we've got.
You crack that, you get the $50,000 prize.
Tesla takes edison's challenge to heart and tries to devise a way to make edison's direct current more efficient.
Tesla discovers that if he shortens the magnetic cores, he can triple the output of the generators.
The solution, it's in the starters.
If you redesign the units.
File your suggestions with my assistant.
About the bonus? The $50,000.
You said if I successfully designed a DC generator, - That i would get a bonus of $50,000.
- That was a joke.
How is that a joke? You obviously don't understand our american sense of humor.
Get back to work.
As a result of not getting the $50,000 from the edison company, Tesla basically decides that: "you know what? I don't really need the Edison company.
" Instead of working for Edison, Tesla will work against him, determined to prove that he is right.
the war for the future of power is about to begin.
By 1885, Thomas Edison's direct current is transforming downtown new york into a city of light.
But his former employee, Nikola Tesla, believes dc is too limited and that his alternating current is the future of power.
Now, he has to prove it.
Nikola Tesla leaves Edison's lab and for a while is unemployed and has a hard time finding work.
There's not a lot of work for experimental electricians at the time.
With no other Job prospects, Tesla is forced to find work digging trenches.
Trenches for underground cable for Edison electric.
By the time we get this system laid it'll be out of date.
It can carry a current a half mile.
Pathetic.
I could design a plant with a range a hundred times larger for a fraction the cost.
Is that true? You can count on it.
He talks about it while he's digging the ditches and one of the people that finds out that he's got this idea is the superintendent of the ditch-digging project.
Ynd he says, "you need to come and meet my friend," a wall street financier who had invested and developed a whole series of companies.
For tesla it's the opportunity of a lifetime.
But simply explaining alternating current to investors won't be enough.
He needs to show them exactly what it can do.
This is not for conversion, but makes use of full possible voltage.
No commutators, no brushes, no more breaking parts.
But more importantly, no friction.
Gentlemen, if I may.
This is one of the characteristics of Tesla that's really important, is he was very good at coming up with sort of simple demonstrations to show people what the possibilities were for the technology he was working on.
A rotating magnetic field.
Alternating current.
Gentlemen, the future of electricity.
Tesla's able to show how a spinning egg controlled by electricity is analogous to an engine.
The demonstration is a hit and Tesla gets his first investors.
Now he's ready to take on Edison's electric empire.
Tesla's opportunity may be coming at just the right time.
By 1888, edison's system is struggling to meet demand.
But he still refuses to abandon direct current.
Five years of investment, personally and, from bankers like JP Morgan in developing a direct-current system.
He's going to build central stations.
People are going to invest in those central stations.
He's going to earn money from those.
He knows it's going to work.
TESLA ELECTRIC CO.
NEW YORK - APRIL 1887 But now edison has competition.
With his investors' money, Tesla opens a lab not far from Edison's pearl street station, determined to show the world what alternating current can do.
Tesla's idea of alternating current was very much a populist idea.
It wasn't that a few big power plants would be producing power for a few large companies.
It was that everyone could be electrified.
But he still needs to find a way to boost A/C's power.
Alternating current travels in waves with gaps in between the peaks.
Tesla envisions a second signal out of sync with the first to fill in the gaps.
Tesla does have a vision about alternating current.
It comes to him in a kind of picture and he's able to see that as the way to transmit electricity over long distances.
And from that point on head really held fast to that and is eventually proven correct.
As alternating current comes closer to being realized, Thomas Edison's electric empire is about to face its greatest threat.
The most famous inventor in the world, Thomas Edison, is being challenged by an unknown genius, Nikola Tesla.
But, to break Edison's monopoly on electricity, Tesla must prove that alternating current can do more than just light the world.
It can also power machines.
Gentlemen.
Good afternoon.
No commutators.
Two phases.
One fifth of a horsepower.
I give you the future of electricity: alternating current.
Tesla's system can power a motor with almost no friction, and can deliver that power more efficiently than Edison's.
Finding an alternating current motor that could be used to help compete with the DC systems was important.
The motors would be the future to the success of this industry.
Now, alternating current not only turns on the light at great distances, it can power almost any kind of machine.
The motor allows you to use electricity for all sorts of applications.
Running elevators.
Running fans.
Running dental drills.
Tesla's motor comes along and is the game changer.
Now that Tesla has perfected his idea, it's time to sell it.
Tesla's motor gets the attention of George Westinghouse, one of the richest men in America.
Westinghouse was kind of, a railroad baron for many years.
and he saw electricity as this untapped market.
As a way to really make his fortune.
I'll pay $5,000 for a 60-day option.
Then, contingent on purchase, $60,000 total.
And i'll cover legal fees.
We reject your offer.
Options, contingents, legal fees.
This is the talk of someone investing in something he does not believe will succeed.
For the electricity you will sell, for every horsepower, you pay $2.
50.
Westinghouse accepts and pays the modern-day equivalent of some $2 million to secure the rights to tesla's patents.
Together, tesla and westinghouse will build a power system to rival Edison's.
But one technical hurdle remains: the high voltage needed to send electricity over long distances and power large machines can be deadly.
So alternating current is great but you have to work out all of the insulation, all of the safety devices, because 100,000 volts will kill you.
To solve the problem, Tesla looks to a new device developed by european engineers called a "transformer".
You can have a transformer to basically, when that 100,000 volt current gets to the location where you want to use it, you can step it down from a hundred thousand to 110 volts, which is safe for inside your house because the transformer allows you to do that step-down function.
The transformer will not only make alternating current possible, it will make it safe.
IS ALTERNATING CURRENT THE FUTURE? But in spite of the advantages of A/C power, Edison is committed to building his empire with direct current.
Edison's great weakness is his inability to shift his mindset as the industry changes, as the market changes.
He wasn't going to let naysayers prove him wrong, that he could solve the problem.
He was invested both financially and his personal reputation.
If tesla and Westinghouse want a power war, Edison is ready to give it to them.
The battle lines have been drawn in the war over electricity.
Thomas Edison's strategy: prove that alternating current is deadly.
How do you know it's so dangerous? It's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Imagine being the first person to get on a hot air balloon, before they'd invented a way to land it.
What is your system? There's no danger to life, health, or person, with any current generated by edison dynamos.
Edison believed that the A/C system was much more dangerous, because of the higher voltages.
And so from his standpoint this was a crucial problem and there are certainly plenty of other people who see this as a potential danger in the streets of the city.
To prove his point, Edison's team decides to go negative.
The edison managers come to edison and they say we're going to have to take this anti-A/C campaign up another notch.
He's got so much at stake that he's willing to do this smear campaign.
They conduct experiments with dogs.
There are demonstrations for the newspapers and public where they show that larger animals could also be electrocuted.
AUBURN PRISION To seal his case against A/C, Edison needs to go beyond animals.
It's time.
Edison is asked to advise the state of new york on a new way to execute criminals.
For the first-ever electric chair, Edison recommends his rival's system.
a thousand volts course through convicted murderer william kemmler.
But it's not an instant death.
It turns out to be quite a gruesome execution, which serves edison quite well because that's what he wants to show.
He wants to show very dramatically that alternating current is what he calls the death current.
WESTINHOUSE HEADQUARTERS PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA They could've done him in better with an axe.
INMATE WESTINGHOUSED So this is how alternating current will be judged.
As the battle for power turns ugly, Westinghouse needs a major public victory for A/C.
The "current wars" are about to have the ultimate showdown.
How do you know it's so dangerous? Iit's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Thomas Edison is waging a relentless campaign to defend his direct-current system against Nikola Tesla and his backer westinghouse electric.
Their final showdown will come at one of the largest natural power sources in North America: Niagara falls.
The Niagara falls power company is looking for a way to harness up to 225,000 cubic feet of water flowing down the falls every second and generate the power equivalent of more than a million tons of coal per year.
Edison meets with his board to pitch his plan for the falls to generate D/C power.
Gentlemen.
We have a proposal we'd like to submit to the niagara commission.
Edison electric's already got a proposal.
Edison electric is becoming a new company: general electric.
Behind Edison's back, the board decides that alternating current is the way to go.
and they know that edison will never go along with this, so they shut him out of any of the proceedings.
I built this company.
it would be nothing without me.
investor: and you're driving it into the ground.
it's time to turn a profit.
You're penny counters.
You can't see anything but your ledgers.
Leave the business to us.
Edison has lost the confidence of his board and control of his empire.
Edison's very bitter.
He's the brains behind the company.
he's technically the reason the company exists.
they just care about what's going to make them money.
Edison will be forced to watch the battle for Niagara falls from the sidelines.
While nikola tesla makes the pitch for westinghouse.
Gentlemen, Mr.
Nikola Tesla.
A pleasure.
Ten generators, 2,250 volts each producing 37,000 kilowatts.
Here the current is increased to 22,000 volts for travel.
How far? Albany, new york city, chicago.
This will revolutionize the industry as we know it.
The niagara contract goes to Westinghouse, and tesla's alternating current wins the pivotal battle of the current wars.
But for Westinghouse, it may be too little too late.
Tesla's licensing fees.
They're crushing us.
The endless legal battles with edison and fees owed to tesla have driven westinghouse electric to the brink of bankruptcy.
To keep Westinghouse in business and save his vision for AC power, Tesla decides to give up the millions of dollars in licensing fees he's entitled to, a move that costs tesla his personal fortune.
People don't realize but tesla suffered from mental illness.
today we call it ocd, obsessive-compulsive disorder, but back then we were clueless about this.
and so because of this obsessiveness that he had, it impaired his work later in life.
when he should be enjoying the fruits of his endeavors, other people were raiding his patents, other people were capitalizing on his work without giving him proper credit, and he was suffering from mental illness.
Tesla will live out his last years in a new york hotel.
In 1943, he dies penniless and alone.
His rival, thomas edison, will be awarded over 1,000 patents in his career, more than any other inventor.
But losing the current wars to Nikola Tesla would mark the most bitter defeat of his career.
In the electricity battle you see Edison probably at his most human.
He allows his ego to take over.
Edison bought into his own myth a little bit.
He loved being the wizard of menlo park.
he loved being the publicly-acclaimed genius, and the idea of losing a big battle in electricity was just something that he didn't want to face.
Tesla's alternating current would go on to power America for the next century and beyond.
The battle between Edison and D/C and Tesla and A/C was ultimately won by Tesla.
Today 99.
99% of all the electricity in this country is generated and distributed using alternating current and that comes down to the ideas and the vision that tesla had in the late 1880s.
Tesla's clearly the winner of the battle of A/C versus D/C.
SOME EVENTS HAVE BEEN ALTERED FOR DRAMATIC PURPOSES.
ALTERNATING CURRENT GENERATOR VOLTS: 1.
000 - ALTEN:7200 Electricity holds the power of life and death.
At the end of the 19th century, unlocking this force of nature is a puzzle as tempting as it is dangerous.
It's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Vast fortunes and brilliant minds will be pitted against each other in an all-out battle to harness the power of electricity.
Thomas edison.
Nikola tesla.
Two inventors with opposing visions on a collision course with each other and history.
Gentlemen, I give you the future of electricity.
It's the epic war to power the world.
A team of young engineers is under pressure to find a solution to a daunting challenge.
DID YOU KNOW? AMERICAN GENIUS THOMAS EDISON WAS A FORWARD THINKER.
HE HOLDS OVER 2.
300 PATENTS IN HIS NAME ACROSS MULTIPLE COUNTRIES How many tries is that? I don't know, a hundred maybe? Persistence, patience, perseverance.
When something doesn't work there's always another solution.
Just 31 years old, thomas edison is the most Famous inventor on the planet.
He's already brought the world an astonishing invention, the phonograph.
and earned himself the nickname: "The Wizard of Tenlo Park.
" Edison represents for lots of people the essence of yankee ingenuity.
He was brilliant.
He was insightful.
But equally extraordinarily hardheaded and practical pragmatic businessman.
His success as an inventor is unrivalled.
But now edison is trying to do something no one has done before: create a safe, inexpensive light source that could replace the gas lamp.
And is powered by electricity.
He's experienced over 100 failed attempts.
But now, in october of 1879, edison is about to find the element that will allow his light bulb to burn steadily, safely and repeatedly: carbon.
The use of carbonized thread is a breakthrough.
But the invention of the light bulb is only half the battle.
To replace gas lighting with electricity, edison will have to design and build an entirely new industry.
It wasn't enough to just have a light bulb.
Because remember, in 1879 when edison's working on this there are no preexisting sockets.
There are no plugs.
There is no wiring in your house.
So if you're going to have lighting in your house or in your business, you're going to have to build everything.
So it meant that edison had to think in terms of an entire system.
But edison isn't the only genius trying to solve the problem of electricity.
By reversing the direct electrical current, the dynamo can function as both a motor and a generator, giving us at least the potential to Waste energy.
Mr.
Tesla? There is too much friction.
If you remove the commutators, the machine would run more efficiently.
And how do we create a rotating field without the commutators? I don't know.
In a university in Austria, an ambitious physics student is formulating an idea for a radical new way of generating electricity.
His name is nikola tesla.
Nikola Tesla had a vision, a vision of what's to come into the future.
Tesla had enormous dreams, and he had the genius to carry them out.
A generator creates an electrical current that naturally reverses its flow periodically.
In tesla's time, electrical current is delivered by channeling that current in a single direction.
It's called direct current.
But tesla envisions fully harnessing a generator's naturally alternating current.
A/C would be a stronger and more efficient way to deliver electrical power.
But there's just one problem: it's never been done before.
It was very radical, because nobody had figured out how to make an A/C motor that would work, because they were all thinking about the traditional way in which you design a motor.
Tesla was a dreamer.
He could envision a technology in his mind.
This is going to be the future of edison electric.
Thomas edison is on the verge of creating a system that will allow him to bring his new light bulb into people's homes.
Over here is the first generator.
This is the second generator.
Edison pitches his direct current concept to his investors as safe, simple and reliable.
Hoping to convince them that his system could be the new standard light source in people's homes.
We'll have more than 500 customers.
- Not bad - For starters.
Welcome to pearl street station.
Located in manhattan, pearl street station is the first power plant in the world.
Within two years edison builds eighteen new power plants.
But each can only provide power within a half-mile radius.
You could only really build power plants in very densely populated cities, because otherwise it wouldn't be economically feasible.
So right away, rural and smaller towns were kind of frozen out of that power equation.
Over 3,000 miles away, at an edison factory outside Paris, nikola tesla has a different idea.
For years, tesla has been trying to perfect his own invention, an alternating current motor.
And now he finally has a working prototype.
But to prove his idea, nikola tesla will have to come to america and confront the most famous scientist in the world.
Thomas Edison has begun the process of wiring the country and the world using a system called direct current.
But he is about to cross paths with nikola tesla, a man who is convinced that he knows a better way to power the world.
EDISON'S LABORATORIES It must have been amazing for Tesla.
I think he must have seen Menlo Park as a big playground.
I'm sure tesla thought, "I finally found my home.
I finally found a kindred spirit".
It's been three days.
What's going on? We adjusted the rotors.
It's got to be the commutators.
But before tesla can present edison with his big idea for alternating current he'll have to earn his trust.
Mr.
Edison, sir! I have a letter from my supervisor.
So what do you do, Mr.
esla? - I'm an inventor.
- Ok.
And I can fix things.
Is that right? Yes, I can fix anything.
Look at this.
Got any experience with generators? Yes.
Edison gives Tesla a difficult task: To fix a problem plagued generator, the first of its kind ever installed on a ship.
S.
S.
OREGON EAST RIVER, NEW YORK CITY I think edison would do that with a lot of people that he hired.
He would send them out into something that might seem very difficult or even impossible.
And just see if they could handle that.
A short circuit burned out some of the armature coils.
It was an easy fix.
Tesla just showed that he was able to, kind of be parachuted into a problem and come up with a novel solution.
I think that's something that, that edison really admired because that was part of his own genius.
The edison electric company is growing at an incredible rate, and now supplies power to the barons of american industry.
But edison's direct-current system has its limits.
It can only deliver power effectively within about a half-mile of a power station.
Nikola tesla believes his alternating current can travel much farther and bring electricity to everyone.
But the power of alternating current comes at a cost.
They both have their dangers and their advantages in the distribution of electricity.
But at that particular moment in time, at the voltages that were being operated, and their understanding of the system of the time, the high-voltage A/C seemed clearly more dangerous.
Despite the dangers, Nikola Tesla is convinced his system is superior.
You have two minutes.
Imagine a central power station with one generator.
What kind of generator? Alternating current.
It can do the work of many DC generators and It's dangerous.
You can't control it.
You'll burn down the city.
If you want to impress me, improve the system we've got.
You crack that, you get the $50,000 prize.
Tesla takes edison's challenge to heart and tries to devise a way to make edison's direct current more efficient.
Tesla discovers that if he shortens the magnetic cores, he can triple the output of the generators.
The solution, it's in the starters.
If you redesign the units.
File your suggestions with my assistant.
About the bonus? The $50,000.
You said if I successfully designed a DC generator, - That i would get a bonus of $50,000.
- That was a joke.
How is that a joke? You obviously don't understand our american sense of humor.
Get back to work.
As a result of not getting the $50,000 from the edison company, Tesla basically decides that: "you know what? I don't really need the Edison company.
" Instead of working for Edison, Tesla will work against him, determined to prove that he is right.
the war for the future of power is about to begin.
By 1885, Thomas Edison's direct current is transforming downtown new york into a city of light.
But his former employee, Nikola Tesla, believes dc is too limited and that his alternating current is the future of power.
Now, he has to prove it.
Nikola Tesla leaves Edison's lab and for a while is unemployed and has a hard time finding work.
There's not a lot of work for experimental electricians at the time.
With no other Job prospects, Tesla is forced to find work digging trenches.
Trenches for underground cable for Edison electric.
By the time we get this system laid it'll be out of date.
It can carry a current a half mile.
Pathetic.
I could design a plant with a range a hundred times larger for a fraction the cost.
Is that true? You can count on it.
He talks about it while he's digging the ditches and one of the people that finds out that he's got this idea is the superintendent of the ditch-digging project.
Ynd he says, "you need to come and meet my friend," a wall street financier who had invested and developed a whole series of companies.
For tesla it's the opportunity of a lifetime.
But simply explaining alternating current to investors won't be enough.
He needs to show them exactly what it can do.
This is not for conversion, but makes use of full possible voltage.
No commutators, no brushes, no more breaking parts.
But more importantly, no friction.
Gentlemen, if I may.
This is one of the characteristics of Tesla that's really important, is he was very good at coming up with sort of simple demonstrations to show people what the possibilities were for the technology he was working on.
A rotating magnetic field.
Alternating current.
Gentlemen, the future of electricity.
Tesla's able to show how a spinning egg controlled by electricity is analogous to an engine.
The demonstration is a hit and Tesla gets his first investors.
Now he's ready to take on Edison's electric empire.
Tesla's opportunity may be coming at just the right time.
By 1888, edison's system is struggling to meet demand.
But he still refuses to abandon direct current.
Five years of investment, personally and, from bankers like JP Morgan in developing a direct-current system.
He's going to build central stations.
People are going to invest in those central stations.
He's going to earn money from those.
He knows it's going to work.
TESLA ELECTRIC CO.
NEW YORK - APRIL 1887 But now edison has competition.
With his investors' money, Tesla opens a lab not far from Edison's pearl street station, determined to show the world what alternating current can do.
Tesla's idea of alternating current was very much a populist idea.
It wasn't that a few big power plants would be producing power for a few large companies.
It was that everyone could be electrified.
But he still needs to find a way to boost A/C's power.
Alternating current travels in waves with gaps in between the peaks.
Tesla envisions a second signal out of sync with the first to fill in the gaps.
Tesla does have a vision about alternating current.
It comes to him in a kind of picture and he's able to see that as the way to transmit electricity over long distances.
And from that point on head really held fast to that and is eventually proven correct.
As alternating current comes closer to being realized, Thomas Edison's electric empire is about to face its greatest threat.
The most famous inventor in the world, Thomas Edison, is being challenged by an unknown genius, Nikola Tesla.
But, to break Edison's monopoly on electricity, Tesla must prove that alternating current can do more than just light the world.
It can also power machines.
Gentlemen.
Good afternoon.
No commutators.
Two phases.
One fifth of a horsepower.
I give you the future of electricity: alternating current.
Tesla's system can power a motor with almost no friction, and can deliver that power more efficiently than Edison's.
Finding an alternating current motor that could be used to help compete with the DC systems was important.
The motors would be the future to the success of this industry.
Now, alternating current not only turns on the light at great distances, it can power almost any kind of machine.
The motor allows you to use electricity for all sorts of applications.
Running elevators.
Running fans.
Running dental drills.
Tesla's motor comes along and is the game changer.
Now that Tesla has perfected his idea, it's time to sell it.
Tesla's motor gets the attention of George Westinghouse, one of the richest men in America.
Westinghouse was kind of, a railroad baron for many years.
and he saw electricity as this untapped market.
As a way to really make his fortune.
I'll pay $5,000 for a 60-day option.
Then, contingent on purchase, $60,000 total.
And i'll cover legal fees.
We reject your offer.
Options, contingents, legal fees.
This is the talk of someone investing in something he does not believe will succeed.
For the electricity you will sell, for every horsepower, you pay $2.
50.
Westinghouse accepts and pays the modern-day equivalent of some $2 million to secure the rights to tesla's patents.
Together, tesla and westinghouse will build a power system to rival Edison's.
But one technical hurdle remains: the high voltage needed to send electricity over long distances and power large machines can be deadly.
So alternating current is great but you have to work out all of the insulation, all of the safety devices, because 100,000 volts will kill you.
To solve the problem, Tesla looks to a new device developed by european engineers called a "transformer".
You can have a transformer to basically, when that 100,000 volt current gets to the location where you want to use it, you can step it down from a hundred thousand to 110 volts, which is safe for inside your house because the transformer allows you to do that step-down function.
The transformer will not only make alternating current possible, it will make it safe.
IS ALTERNATING CURRENT THE FUTURE? But in spite of the advantages of A/C power, Edison is committed to building his empire with direct current.
Edison's great weakness is his inability to shift his mindset as the industry changes, as the market changes.
He wasn't going to let naysayers prove him wrong, that he could solve the problem.
He was invested both financially and his personal reputation.
If tesla and Westinghouse want a power war, Edison is ready to give it to them.
The battle lines have been drawn in the war over electricity.
Thomas Edison's strategy: prove that alternating current is deadly.
How do you know it's so dangerous? It's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Imagine being the first person to get on a hot air balloon, before they'd invented a way to land it.
What is your system? There's no danger to life, health, or person, with any current generated by edison dynamos.
Edison believed that the A/C system was much more dangerous, because of the higher voltages.
And so from his standpoint this was a crucial problem and there are certainly plenty of other people who see this as a potential danger in the streets of the city.
To prove his point, Edison's team decides to go negative.
The edison managers come to edison and they say we're going to have to take this anti-A/C campaign up another notch.
He's got so much at stake that he's willing to do this smear campaign.
They conduct experiments with dogs.
There are demonstrations for the newspapers and public where they show that larger animals could also be electrocuted.
AUBURN PRISION To seal his case against A/C, Edison needs to go beyond animals.
It's time.
Edison is asked to advise the state of new york on a new way to execute criminals.
For the first-ever electric chair, Edison recommends his rival's system.
a thousand volts course through convicted murderer william kemmler.
But it's not an instant death.
It turns out to be quite a gruesome execution, which serves edison quite well because that's what he wants to show.
He wants to show very dramatically that alternating current is what he calls the death current.
WESTINHOUSE HEADQUARTERS PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA They could've done him in better with an axe.
INMATE WESTINGHOUSED So this is how alternating current will be judged.
As the battle for power turns ugly, Westinghouse needs a major public victory for A/C.
The "current wars" are about to have the ultimate showdown.
How do you know it's so dangerous? Iit's untested, unproven, uncontrollable.
Thomas Edison is waging a relentless campaign to defend his direct-current system against Nikola Tesla and his backer westinghouse electric.
Their final showdown will come at one of the largest natural power sources in North America: Niagara falls.
The Niagara falls power company is looking for a way to harness up to 225,000 cubic feet of water flowing down the falls every second and generate the power equivalent of more than a million tons of coal per year.
Edison meets with his board to pitch his plan for the falls to generate D/C power.
Gentlemen.
We have a proposal we'd like to submit to the niagara commission.
Edison electric's already got a proposal.
Edison electric is becoming a new company: general electric.
Behind Edison's back, the board decides that alternating current is the way to go.
and they know that edison will never go along with this, so they shut him out of any of the proceedings.
I built this company.
it would be nothing without me.
investor: and you're driving it into the ground.
it's time to turn a profit.
You're penny counters.
You can't see anything but your ledgers.
Leave the business to us.
Edison has lost the confidence of his board and control of his empire.
Edison's very bitter.
He's the brains behind the company.
he's technically the reason the company exists.
they just care about what's going to make them money.
Edison will be forced to watch the battle for Niagara falls from the sidelines.
While nikola tesla makes the pitch for westinghouse.
Gentlemen, Mr.
Nikola Tesla.
A pleasure.
Ten generators, 2,250 volts each producing 37,000 kilowatts.
Here the current is increased to 22,000 volts for travel.
How far? Albany, new york city, chicago.
This will revolutionize the industry as we know it.
The niagara contract goes to Westinghouse, and tesla's alternating current wins the pivotal battle of the current wars.
But for Westinghouse, it may be too little too late.
Tesla's licensing fees.
They're crushing us.
The endless legal battles with edison and fees owed to tesla have driven westinghouse electric to the brink of bankruptcy.
To keep Westinghouse in business and save his vision for AC power, Tesla decides to give up the millions of dollars in licensing fees he's entitled to, a move that costs tesla his personal fortune.
People don't realize but tesla suffered from mental illness.
today we call it ocd, obsessive-compulsive disorder, but back then we were clueless about this.
and so because of this obsessiveness that he had, it impaired his work later in life.
when he should be enjoying the fruits of his endeavors, other people were raiding his patents, other people were capitalizing on his work without giving him proper credit, and he was suffering from mental illness.
Tesla will live out his last years in a new york hotel.
In 1943, he dies penniless and alone.
His rival, thomas edison, will be awarded over 1,000 patents in his career, more than any other inventor.
But losing the current wars to Nikola Tesla would mark the most bitter defeat of his career.
In the electricity battle you see Edison probably at his most human.
He allows his ego to take over.
Edison bought into his own myth a little bit.
He loved being the wizard of menlo park.
he loved being the publicly-acclaimed genius, and the idea of losing a big battle in electricity was just something that he didn't want to face.
Tesla's alternating current would go on to power America for the next century and beyond.
The battle between Edison and D/C and Tesla and A/C was ultimately won by Tesla.
Today 99.
99% of all the electricity in this country is generated and distributed using alternating current and that comes down to the ideas and the vision that tesla had in the late 1880s.
Tesla's clearly the winner of the battle of A/C versus D/C.