Who invented alternating current power

If animals did not make his point clearly enough, Edison also became embroiled in the adoption of the first electric chair to execute a human. While he opposed capital punishment initially, an opportunity not to be missed fell into his lap. New York dentist Alfred P Southwick approached him concerning his desire for a more humane method of execution than hanging, believing electricity could be the answer.

The second burst of 1, volts did not kill him, so he had to be hit a second time, after an agonising wait while the generator charged. With double the voltage running through his body, Kemmler bled and his hair began to singe, while the smell of burning flesh made some witnesses retch. The most gruesome death came on 11 October Western Union lineman John Feeks lost his footing while up a pole in downtown Manhattan and grabbed what should have been a low voltage telegraph wire — not knowing that it had become connected with a high voltage line several blocks away.

He died instantly, but his body got entangled in the web and it would take over half an hour for his fellow linemen to cut him free. All the while, Feeks burned. Blue spurts could be seen shooting out from the body and blood dripped down onto the street, where a lunchtime crowd of thousands had gathered, looking up in utter horror at the macabre scene.

In the aftermath, wires in New York were cut down and moved underground, leaving the city without electricity over winter. His years of championing DC fizzled out as he stepped aside to pursue other projects and a merger in with Thomson-Houston turned his company into the more AC-friendly General Electric GE. That did not stop the struggles for power with Westinghouse Electric, and it actually would not take long for GE to catch up once the commitment to DC had gone. It was another success for AC as Westinghouse won the contract by underbidding GE, providing his company with its most public and spectacular display yet.

Beyond the glittering sight of hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs outside, generators were on display in the Electricity Building and Tesla had a space to show off his work with his usual panache and showmanship. He demonstrated the theory of his induction motor by placing a copper egg into a rotating magnetic field, where it would spin on its axis of its own free will.

The fair, while a monumental triumph in its own right, also gave Westinghouse the reputation needed to secure the highly desired contract to build a hydroelectric plant on the Niagara Falls. By the time the great machinery began generating power, on 16 November , for the city of Buffalo more than 20 miles away, there could be no doubt that AC had won the War of the Currents.

Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Thomas Edison brought together inventors at Menlo Park, his invention factory. Image by Alamy. Edison v Westinghouse: your guide The two men wanted the same thing — to control power distribution — but they had very different ways of achieving it Before the war Edison: Thomas Edison achieved worldwide fame in for his phonograph. Currents Edison: Direct Current DC The electrical charge flows in a single direction at a constant voltage or current, as seen in a battery.

Pros of the current Edison: As Edison got there first, DC stations had become the standard he even developed a meter so customers could be billed according to consumption. Cons of the current Edison: DC had a small transmission range before losing significant amounts of energy. Battle tactics Edison: Edison launched a vicious smear campaign to discredit AC.

After the war Edison: He continued inventing and developing the ideas of others or buying them. Read more about inventions and scientific history… Morse code : who invented it, how long did it take, and how long before it was accepted? From Velcro to Viagra: 10 products that were invented by accident Leonardo da Vinci : his life, inventions and milestones in his career. Jonny Wilkes Freelance writer. When it comes to polyphase AC, it appears that there is no true "father," but rather a number of researchers.

William Stanley , the inventor of the transformer in the US was funded by George Westinghouse, an industrialist in railway air brake and signal systems who sought to improve upon the limitations of the DC systems. In Germany, Werner Siemens and others took the lead and produced the first long distance transmission of AC power AC motors were a different matter and the two leading figures on opposite sides of the Atlantic approached the problem independently. Galileo Ferraris , a physicist at the university of Turin, described in the rotating field principle.

Tesla, seeking commercial development of an AC motor, developed a two phase system of supply. Tesla in a letter to Electrical World of May 25, recognized Ferraris' work and also cited the work of Oliver Shallenberger at Westinghouse. Shallenberger claimed to have intuited the principle after the observation of the twisting of a meter spring in the field of an AC coil. Electrical World of April 15, attempted to sort this issue by giving field theory primacy to Ferraris and multiphase system primacy to Tesla.

Many, including Thomas Hughes in his book Networks of Power Johns Hopkins U Press available from Amazon believe that the issue of primacy of the idea will never be settled completely. The Tesla system patents, though two phase, were the basis of the Westinghouse system at the Columbian Exposition and then at Niagara Falls. Anthony, director of the electrical engineering program at Cornell. Tesla was subsequently feted by the science academies of London and Paris.

Three phase customer connections were not common until the s; acceptance delayed by an inability to balance single phase customer loads on three phase AC lines. Only after the work of Charles Fortescu at Westinghouse and also that of Edith Clark at GE in the period were standardized equations available for the engineering of three phase distribution.

As for other AC pioneers there are many - Frank Sprague , usually associated with railways, was an early proponent of AC research. Having the mathematical skills to devise the practical formulae to adapt the British Hopkinson 3 wire system to Edison lighting applications, he went on to develop practical industrial motors which made small utility companies financially viable with the establishment of a daytime motor load.

As consultant to the Edison company in NY he recommended the use of AC in a large central plant to be distributed through "receiving" stations in which a transformer would step down the voltage and apply it to a "receiving motor" reversed alternator to drive DC generators.

That report in September ,, but a few months after the first Stanley installation in Great Barrington , shows how universal was the thinking toward large scale AC generation. In that sense, the conversion substation could be said to have been invented by Sprague.

Thus the story has many participants, most of whom replicated another's work, sometimes simultaneously, often with no knowledge of the other. Even the standard power converter of the day had multiple fathers. Benjamin Lamme who led development of AC at Westinghouse described his rotary converter as the overlaying of a DC generator on a synchronous motor and believed it unique until he discovered that Charles Bradley Bradley Electric was later acquired by of GE had applied for a patent as well and there are indications that others had the same idea.

Sebastian Zinni DeFerrante , a leader in British arc lighting while still in his mid teens, had installed underground 10, volt lines in London as early as Moreover, in an era prior to the refined understanding of inductance, capacitance and reactive power issues, and prior to the development of steel with magnetic characteristics ideal for alternating fields, the issue of the best frequency was another major concern.

Joseph Cunningham has contributed information for television programs and technical publications. See more of his articles on the IEEE website. IEEE membership may be required to view some material.

Also join us on Facebook to give us feedback. Schaghticoke Power Station and Steinmetz's monocyclic power experiment. Great Barrington The first AC power distribution system using transformers. Early AC Power. Louis Bell Almirian Decker Shallenberger - William Stanley designs an improved version of the Siemens single phase alternator - Fall - Elihu Thomson's AC power system is rejected by the patent office.

Ernst F. Alexanderson - pioneer in wireless and TV transmission. Ernst Julius Berg - developed two way wireless audio communication. Worked on AC power. Charles F. Brush - pioneered Generators, lamps, trolleys and an early profitable industry.

Mikhail O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky - pioneer of 3 phase AC power systems. Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were American inventors and pioneers of aviation. In the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight; they surpassed their own milestone two years later when they built and flew the first fully practical In , Connecticut-born gun manufacturer Samuel Colt received a U. Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the Developed in the s and s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication.

It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War.

For years, scientists and It was the height of World War II, and Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault.