- In the late 18 hundreds, there was a battle
between different kinds of electricity,
alternating and direct
that was called the war of the current.
Now a major motion picture
starring my boyfriend, Benedict Cumberbatch.
There's thousands of videos about this conflict
but this is the first, as far as I know
that covers the actual physics
of why they were in conflict
as well as the crazy horse killing history.
Ready, let's go.
♪ Electricity electricity ♪
- One day in the spring of 1885,
a 38 year old American named George Westinghouse
read an article that changed his life.
The article was about something called
alternating current or AC.
Now AC wasn't new.
In fact, 54 years earlier in 1831
Michael Faraday had found that moving a strong magnet
into or out of a coil of wire
will create or induce a current.
He created the idea of magnetic fields
and stated a law that if the magnetic field
in the coil changes, current is induced.
Faraday's paper inspired a Frenchman
to spin magnets near coils of wire.
In this machine, the coils would get current
that would go back and forth or alternate.
However, at the time they thought
that alternating current was useless
and use brushes to force the alternating current
into post direct current or DC.
Twenty-five years later, in 1856, scientists removed brushes
and successfully used AC to light lamps.
What made this article in 1885 different
and so interesting to Westinghouse
was they added another machine to the AC generator,
a transformer which altered the voltage and the current
after it had been created.
To understand how a transformer works,
I need to take a step back and describe voltage and current
which are not the same thing.
Current is how much charge is moving in a wire over time.
Think of water running through a faucet.
Voltage is how much electromotive force there is behind it.
Think of the water pressure in your faucet.
A battery has the same constant voltage,
whether it's in a circuit or on the shelf
while the current that the battery produces
depends on the circuit it's connected to.
With AC you're making the voltage and current,
not with a chemical reaction, like a battery
but by changing the magnetic field in a coil.
This changing field has a certain amount of power
which transformed into a certain amount
of oscillating voltage,
and a certain amount of oscillating current.
You can change the voltage
but if you increase the voltage,
you have to correspondingly
decrease the current and vice versa.
A transformer is actually a deceptively simple device,
just two separate coils that are wrapped
around an iron ring or bar.
Coils of wire with current in them act like a bar magnet
called an electromagnet,
alternating current and loops of wire.
Therefore act like a magnet
that is constantly changing direction.
An alternating current in the first coil
creates an alternating magnetic field in the first coil
which creates an alternating current in the second coil.
If the second coil has more loops,
you get more voltage and less current.
If the second coil has less loops,
then you get less voltage and more current, that's it.
With transformers, you can build your power plant far away
and then transform me electricity
to high voltage and low current.
So that a lot less power will be lost to heat
as it goes down the line.
Then your houses, you can transform it to lower voltage
and high current and use it as you wish.
And luckily for Westinghouse, Edison's new light bulb
works just as well for direct current
as it did for alternating current.
Still most people did not want to use alternating current.
Why not?
Well for several reasons,
one, there was no alternating current motor at the time.
Two, alternating current with those high voltages
was very dangerous.
And three, alternating current could not be used
with the most advanced generators at the time.
See, in 1866, at least three people
including a German named Siemens
of the Siemens Company discovered generators
that use self excitations or using electromagnets
and rerouting some of the electricity
produced by the generator to charge up the electromagnet.
Before one way valves or diodes,
they couldn't use self excitation with AC.
So most engineers felt that AC was a step backwards,
not a step forward.
Despite this Westinghouse had a vision
that AC was the future.
He sent a message to young engineer named, Guido Pantaleoni
who was in Italy for his father's funeral
to get the patent rights
to the transformer site unseen, which he did.
Pantaleoni also got some Siemens generators
even though Siemens himself assured him that quote,
"There's nothing whatever in alternating current,
it was pure humbug.
And his self excitation system
had rendered alternating current useless."
In fact, almost all of Westinghouse's employees
thought it was a bad idea
and it was only his personal will to put it through.
By January of 1886, Westinghouse
created the Westinghouse Electric Company
with stock worth $1 million.
Meanwhile, a Westinghouse employee named William Stanley
tried to secret run of the AC system
in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Three months later they're almost ready to light up
a local department store when Edison people
beat them to it and lit up a local mansion.
Undeterred a week later,
Stanley electrified a store from a barn about a mile away.
They kept the details of their device secret,
even as far as hiding their transformers in basements
but let it be known
that they could electrify any building in town.
Soon Westinghouse's people
had four to five times more business
than the Edison people did.
Westinghouse was ecstatic, Edison was not.
Edison's people begged him to move to AC, but he refused.
He felt that the dangers of AC
would turn people off electricity altogether.
He wrote his friend, the private note,
"Just as certain as death,
Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months."
The next year Edison published an 84 page warning
he's saying, "It is a matter of fact
that any system employing high pressure,
I E 500 to 2000 volts jeopardizes life."
He railed that the Westinghouse system was cheap but deadly
and that they quote ought to unite in a war of extermination
against cheapness that involves inefficiency and danger.
This was not a misplaced fear.
High powered electricity was a new toy
and companies were putting electrical wires
Willy nilly with no interest in public safety.
New York in particular was blanketed
and wires from Telegraph telephone and lighting companies.
Although Edison insisted on bearing his wires underground.
In 1888 after a terrible snow storm
damaged many of the wires
there was a series of deaths
attributed to high voltage wires that was widely published
in the newspapers.
On June 5th, 1888
a man named Harold Brown published an article
about the constant danger from sudden death
from the quote, "Damnable fatal alternating current."
Brown was then given space
in one of Edison's laboratories
and started conducting gruesome experiments
electrocuting dogs with alternating current.
The next month, brown gave his first demonstration
to scientists and reporters
which caused most people to walk out
quote, "Unable to endure the revolting exhibition."
For the next two years,
Brown repeated these horrible demonstrations
on dogs and even horses, but not an elephant.
That was not by brown and was unrelated
to the war of the currents.
But his biggest coup was in the electric chair
with AC current, of course.
On August 6th, 1890
a murderer named William Kemmler
was the first man since the death by electrocution
in an action that Edison won the call, Westinghoused.
Suffice it to say the electrocution did not go well.
The only silver lining to his disturbing demand
was that it ruined Brown's reputation
and he quietly slinked away from public
and Edison distanced himself from Brown
and pretended to have never heard of him.
Meanwhile a corky but brilliant
former employee of Edison's named Nikola Tesla
had invented a new type of AC and a corresponding AC motor.
What was different about Tesla's design
was actually multiple AC systems in one.
Recall that when a coil of wire passes by an electromagnet
it gets current that goes back and forth, AC.
Tesla's idea was to use multiple coils of wire
so that the coils would get the same current
at the same frequency, but at different peak times,
this is called polyphase current.
If that current is put into an artfully designed motor,
the changing current will continuously push the coils
with a magnet and make it spin at a constant speed.
Tesla determined that his motor works the best
at 60 cycles per second or 60 Hertz.
In 1888 while Brown was killing dog Westinghouse paid Tesla
and his company, $70,000 in cash, a note
plus $2 and 50 cents per horsepower
on every Tesla motor from then on.
Three years later, there was a stock market crash
and Westinghouse was in deep trouble.
He went to Tesla and pleaded for release
from the payments on his motors saying, quote,
"Your decision determines the fate
of the Westinghouse Company."
Tesla then tore up his contract
Westinghouse still wasn't out of trouble.
He was being sued
for patent infringement by Edison for $1 billion.
That's billion with a B in the late 18 hundreds.
This brings us to JP Morgan.
Morgan, like everyone else involved in electricity
have been watching the success of AC systems
which Edison stubbornly refused to use or accept.
He orchestrated a coup,
merging Edison's company with another,
firing Edison from his own company
and even removing Edison's name from his own company.
From that time on, instead of Edison's General Electric
it was plain, General Electric or GE.
Edison pretended he had moved on saying quote,
"I can't waste my time over electric lighting matters
for they are old."
But truthfully he was heartbroken.
Edison's secretary said the quote.
"I know something had died in Edison's heart.
He had a deep seated in, during pride in his name.
And that name had been violated,
torn from the title of the great industry
created by his genius,
through years of intense planning, an unremitting toil."
From then on even GE used alternating current,
the war of the currents was over.
Two years later there was a Colombian Exhibition in Chicago
and it was enormous, covering 600 acres
with over 200 new buildings
and the total of 27 million visitors
and Westinghouse lit it with AC light at Tesla 60 Hertz.
At the fair Tessa gave demonstrations to adoring crowds
for something brand new, wireless electricity
which was to make him a superstar, at least for awhile.
However, in order to talk about Tesla and wireless,
I first have to take a step back
and talk about the connection between light and electricity
and how that led to radio and wireless.
And that all started when a college student
asked Michael Faraday in 1845, if he could turn light
with a magnet, how Michael Faraday dreamed
that light was an electromagnetic wave
is next time on the Secret History of Electricity.
♪ Electricity electricity ♪
- Thanks for watching my video.
Please remember to give her the thumbs up if you like it
and forget to do anything, if you don't like it.
Also, if you're confused about how a generator works,
I have a video about that.
If you wanna know more about how Edison
got so powerful in the first place,
I have a video about that.
And make sure to check out the video
I'm working on right now
about Michael Faraday and the electromagnetic wave.
It's gonna be a good one.
Okay, have a good day.
(bright upbeat music)