The War Of Currents: The Battle of AC vs DC in America

An essay i wrote over the War of Currents

 

The harnessing of the conduction of electricity is one of the most pivotal parts of modern science today. Using electric flow through currents in electronics has resulted in a very a large amount of modern technological advancement today. The effects can be seen in an incredible number of ways including creating a DC circuit with a smaller device including computers, cell phones, other various electronic devices while AC circuits reverse the flow and even play a role in carrying “audio and radio signals…on electrical wires.

In the late 1880’s and early 1890’s a duel between two men began over the process of transmitting electrical power from large-scale areas to smaller more confined areas. The competition was dubbed the “War of Currents” and involved Thomas Alva Edison, an American Inventor and entrepreneur, and George Westinghouse, an American businessman and entrepreneur. The main process of the competition was because the methods used by each man involved were different. Edison favored DC power, which stands for direct current, while Westinghouse used AC power, standing for alternating current.

Before being able to discuss electrical power transmission regarding the “War of Currents”, one should know more about the strides made in the study of electricity itself up to the point of the war.

The main discoveries of electricity started in 1752 and the War of Currents began in the late 1880’s. Electricity has been referenced in ancient Egyptian text regarding a fish known as “The Thunder of the Nile”² from certain fish that shocked men when they touched them. This knowledge doesn’t give much except show awareness of its existence; the real knowledge of it remained a mystery until William Gilbert experimented with rubbing amber. Gilbert is credited mostly with his discoveries of magnetism but he is also credited with “…differentiating between electricity and magnetism and even coined the term electricity from the Greek word for amber.”³

The most popular reference regarding electricity is most likely the famous Kite Experiment performed by American founding father Benjamin Franklin performed in June of 1752. Franklin also experimented with a Leyden jar in an experiment “…showing the difference in the positive and negative nature of electricity.”⁴

Several other discoveries involving the strides different people made regarding electricity leading up the war of currents include Luigi Galvani in 1971.  He discovered that electricity is what is passed from the brain through the body via the neurons; The recognition of electromagnetism, the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena, is due to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1820. Michael Faraday and the electric motor in 1821, and electricity was linked to magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell.

The War of Currents started in the late 1880’s when Thomas Alva Edison, found a market in delivering electric light directly to a home or a business. This wasn’t the first time a current of electricity was used for lighting. The Arc light was the first use of electric light. In the 1870’s arc lamps had begun to be heavily installed into cities using centralized power plants. The use of arc lighting used a very high voltage, which allowed it to travel very far across cities from its central point, but due to high voltage became a huge fire hazard. M Whelan states that arc lighting had many problems including “carbon rods needed to be replaced after a short period of time, this became a full time job in a city, they produce dangerous UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C rays, create a buzzing sound and flickered as the light burned.”⁵ He expanded even farther saying that they also “created large amounts of RFI (radio frequency interference)… the unenclosed lamp could easily electrocute or severally burn technicians, Carbon Monoxide emissions (bad for indoor use!) It only worked in the past because buildings were poorly insulated and fresh air could enter.”⁶ The inability to be used in small buildings is where Edison’s idea came into play. Light directly into a small room had not yet been touched yet and that idea, along with making it marketable is really what sparked this war.

To further understand Edison’s place in all of this more about him leading up to the war should be known. He had already been a prominent inventor leading up to the war and also already a successful businessman. He was born in 1847 in Ohio. He started his life as a businessman at a young age, his first business was “selling candies and vegetables on a train car”⁷, while conducting science experiments on the train in his downtime. Edison actually created a rule in which experiments cannot be done on the train due to one of his experimental failures showing that Edison’s first love was experimenting. His love for it would later lose be the reason in which he lost job as a telegrapher because during the night shift he spent to much time conducting different experiments. Before being fired however he was able to invent many useful things for the telegraph. Actually most of Edison’s first inventions revolved around the telegraph including the “automatic repeater”⁸ a device that’s function is described as “transferring code between unmanned stations which allowed a smoother translation of code between stations for those who took the code a slower pace.”⁹ Edison “broke out” with his invention of the phonograph. By putting a needle down on grooves he was able to emit a sound. Most called this a “work of magic”¹⁰ it was such a momentous discovery that he was dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park”¹¹ and though he didn’t have much to do with the further development of the invention but the fame he gained from it’s first discovery would follow him throughout his life. After garnering his fame with his many patents he went on to pursue electric light. In 1878 is when he first started working on electric illumination to compete with oil and gas based lighting. He hoped to counter the problems that others had with electrical lighting including high current, high cost, and low life for illumination. Using carbon filament his first successful lamp was able to stay lit for “13.5 hours and further improving on it to make the first commercially practical incandescent light.” After the improvement of his light he was able to from his company in which he named The Edison Electric Light Company.

Prior to the War of Currents, Edison discovered DC or “Direct Current”. DC was made specifically for his electrical light company it has much less of a history leading up to the war. Edison’s favored this technique throughout the entirety of the war, which lasted from about 1887 to 1892. Direct Current powers systems that only flow at one, or a constant, polarity of voltage or current.

An example of how this works is that throughout the whole circuit the value of the voltage stays the same throughout and the value of the current remains the same throughout also. A good definition of a direct current circuit is an “electrical circuit that consists of any combination of constant voltage sources, constant current sources, and resistors.” In this case, the circuit voltages and currents are independent of time. Edison and DC were actually the standard in United States because of its effectiveness in motors and incandescent lights, which at the time were the primary sources of light.

The man that was competing with Edison and his electric light company was George Westinghouse. A successful engineer and prominent entrepreneur leading up to the war Westinghouse had fewer projects compared to Edison. Westinghouse was born in 1846 in Central Bridge, New York. Early in his life he was put in a situation to be a good with machinery, as his father owned a machine shop. After stints in the army Westinghouse would finally create his first invention at the age of nineteen called the rotary steam engine, which is a variation of a rotary engine. His largest pre 1880’s invention, similar to that of Edison, made at the age of 22 was air brakes in 1869. Westinghouse was able to “revolutionize the railroad industry, making braking a safer venture and thus permitting trains to travel at higher speeds. Westinghouse made many alterations to improve his invention leading to various forms of the automatic brake.” The Westinghouse system patent describes the invention “using a compressor on the locomotive, a reservoir and a special valve on each car, also a single pipe ran the length of the train which both refilled the reservoirs and controlled the brakes, allowing the engineer to apply and release the brakes simultaneously on all cars.” Even more ingenious to the system is that he put a failsafe system incase of a rupture that would cause all cars to break. Upon hearing of Edison’s work with DC currents in the United States instead of the AC system in Europe, Westinghouse became interested in electrical power distribution.

Westinghouse, being the entrepreneur that he was, didn’t actually discover what he used but instead purchased patents from others to use through his company. AC, which stands for Alternating Current, is a process described as “the flow of charge that changes direction periodically. As a result, the voltage level also reverses along with the current.” Unlike DC, which maintains a constant current, and constant voltage, AC currents are distributed as “alternating” because “voltage may be increased or decreased with a transformer. This allows the power to be transmitted through power lines efficiently at high voltage, which reduces “the power lost as heat due to resistance of the wire, and transformed to a lower, safer, voltage for use.” AC was initially discovered first by Hippolyte Pixii using the principles laid out by Michael Faraday. The first practical use of AC power was in Europe by Guillame Duchenne in the 1850’s for electrotherapy. He stated in his discovery that “AC is better at stimulating muscle contractions then DC” and AC is still the system used in electrotherapy today. Other who involved in AC development includes The Hungarian company Ganz Works in the 1870s, consisting of Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti, Lucien Gaulard, and Galileo Ferraris. A Russian engineer named Pavel Yablochkov actually invented a lighting system using AC two years before Edison was able to finish DC. Then Lucian Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs developed a larger transformer that caught the attention of Westinghouse thus making him use this technique for his work. In Empires of Light Jill Jonnes tells that after  “Westinghouse paid a substantial amount to license Nikola Tesla's US patents for a poly-phase AC induction motor and obtained a patent option on Galileo Ferraris' induction motor design”.

Upon the initial starting of the Edison Electric Light Company, America became dominated by DC power because it was also dominated by incandescent lamps, which were primary receivers for DC systems. At the beginning of the AC discovery the use of “transformers to alternate the current from a high voltage to a low voltage and series circuit connectivity caused a lot of problems making it not very practical in its beginnings.” The only advantage that AC found at the beginning was that DC was only able to carry 110 volts from a generator a very short distance, which is something that came to be very crucial in the AC takeover. Starting in the 1880s alternating current gained an additional advantage with the development of functional transformers that allowed “voltage to be "ramped up" to much higher transmission voltages and then dropped down to a lower end user voltage for business and residential use.” The Ganz Works team helped the transformer problem by creating a transformer named the “Z.B.D. transformer” that was 3.4 times more effective then the original transformers presented by Gaulard and Gibbs, who are stated above. These transformers were so effective most of the method they were made originally is still used today in modern transformers. Another thing that these circuits made was a parallel distribution, which fixed one of the most complex flaws involved in AC. George Westinghouse actually entered entered the electric lighting business in 1884, and started to transfer the AC system in Europe to the United States, the first move he made was hired William Stanley Jr. to work on it. Westinghouse became aware of the new European transformer based AC systems in 1885 when he read about them in the UK technical journal Engineering. Westinghouse realized the scale that AC reached was vastly larger then that of DC and wanted to harness that in the United States to challenge the light electricity market. He grasped that AC combined with transformers meant “greater economies of scale could be achieved with large centralized power plants transmitting stepped up voltage very long distances to be used in arc lighting as well lower voltage home and commercial incandescent lighting supplied via a voltage switch, used to lower the voltage, transformer at the other end.” Westinghouse saw the potential of reaching customers in between areas supplied with DC power as the reach was very short and building them to close to each other would cause build up in areas blocking transportation. Using the knowledge, Westinghouse purchased the patents rights in the United States to the Gaulard and Gibbs transformer and imported several of those as well as Siemens AC generators to begin experimenting with an AC based lighting system in Pittsburgh. William Stanley used the Gaulard and Gibbs design and designs from the ZBD Transformer to develop the first practical transformer and forming the Westinghouse Electric Company”. Westinghouse then acquired the induction motor patent from Tesla with plans to incorporate it in a completely integrated AC system. This system allowed Westinghouse’s AC system to take off and begin its rise to glory throughout the war.

Using the transformers the first multiple voltage AC power system with incandescent lighting system was used in Greater Barrington, Massachusetts. It is said that Westinghouse AC power system “Expanded to the point where it could light 23 businesses along main street with very little power loss over 4000 feet, the system used transformers to step a 500 AC volt current at the street down to 100 volts to power incandescent lamps at each location”. By 1887 Westinghouse’s company had been described to have had “68 AC power station plus he was getting royalties off of another AC powered electric company with 22 stations allowing him to collect money from 90 stations in the United States.” The compared to Edison’s numbers, which were still higher, containing “121 DC based station” but because of the reach of DC they were not able to cover the area that the AC power units were. This is when the “War of Currents” began to get vicious. Safety concerns arose for AC systems and above ground wiring it used in some cities. AC systems were also infringing in DC system territory, which was against patents Edison had. Edison began to use that to his advantage as he released pamphlets regarding the concerns. In these pamphlets called “A Warning from the Edison Electric Company”. In this pamphlet he would tell customers that “stating that the competitors were infringing on Edison's incandescent light and other electrical patents” and that if a lawsuit was made would most likely end up on the losing side.

The movements involved in the safety of AC cause a large tear in the battle between AC and DC. Many people advocated against the large multitude of wires created from AC being spread across entire cities. Many cities were able to resolve this by changing the location of the wires to under the city instead of over the city. Sadly for Edison there was not enough to stop AC system from claiming its dominance. At the end of the war Edison admitted defeat as no longer the major stockholder in his company. Edison lack of major ownership of the company actually “loosened animosity between the AC companies and the DC companies.” He then sold the remainder of his stock and proceeded to pursue an iron-ore company. Large generators were then made that were able to link single and multi AC power systems with DC systems allowing powers to be linked so not many major changed had to be made immediately. Thus ending the war giving the win the AC power and Westinghouse. Regardless of the winner in the electric light business AC power and DC power are both still used heavily in modern time.

The impact of DC on modern science is in the invention of certain electronics. Modern scientist even figured out a handheld way to adapt AC to DC. “Everything that runs off of a battery, plugs in to the wall with an AC adapter, or uses a USB cable for power relies on DC.” The batteries being taken out cause a ripple in the direct current allowing it to be turned on and off. The fact that the only pieces affecting current are the batteries and the power switch indicate that it contains DC. DC is used almost all automotive vehicles. Another modern impact of DC power is high voltage power transmission as one wants to constantly transmit voltage and current at very high volume.  Light aircrafts also usually run on DC. DC systems take on smaller systems to work. The impact of AC is still mostly in light and used in the transfer of information with devices like the television, telephone, and general electrical transmission. AC systems are for more large-scale areas now. Larger scale electrical manipulation and things like that.

The war of currents was the establishment of the basic uses of electrical conduction. Without these two systems and the use in during this time, one cannot know the impact that would have been made between the two of them. Technological advancement since has revolved around harnessing these systems to use in different ways. As electronics become smaller and smaller these techniques have to be harnessed on a smaller scale, like things that can fit in the palm of your hand, compared to during the war when the scale they were trying to dominate was large buildings and even entire cities.  Westinghouse, Edison, and all involved in the garnering of electricity through a controlled current can be thanked for the convenience of a personal computer, a smart phone, and even something as small as a hearing aid. The battle changed the effect of electricity on human lives permanently and it is incredible to wonder what could be the next stride the field takes.

Author's Note

Due at midnight 7/6/16 and would like some quick feedback regarding grammar and structure.