War of currents

The War of Currents (sometimes called, War of the Currents or Battle of Currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s including commercial competition, a debate over electrical safety, and a media/propaganda campaign that grew out of it, with the main players being the direct current (DC) based Edison Electric Light Company and the alternating current (AC) based Westinghouse Electric Company. It took place during the introduction and rapid expansion of the alternating current standard (already in use and advocated by several US and European companies) and its eventual adoption over the direct current distribution system. Three aspects have been conflated together into the "war": open competition involving large electric companies and their developing systems, a general fear in the public's mind of death by accidental electrocution from high voltage AC leading to a debate over its safety and regulation, and the debate and behind-the-scene maneuvers associated with the introduction of the electric chair.

The introduction of large scale outdoor arc lighting systems in the mid to late 1870s, some of them powered by high-voltage alternating current, was followed in 1882 by Thomas Edison's low voltage DC electric distribution "utility" designed for indoor business and residential use as an alternative to gas and oil-based lighting. In 1886 George Westinghouse began building an alternating current system that used a transformer to step up voltage for long-distance transmission and then stepped it back down for indoor lighting, a more efficient and less expensive system that directly competed for the market the Edison system was designed to serve. As many other electric companies joined in and the use of AC spread rapidly, Edison's company made claims in early 1888 that alternating current was hazardous and inferior to the patented direct current system.

In the spring of 1888, a media furor arose over a series of deaths caused by pole-mounted high-voltage AC lines in New York City and around the country, attributed to the greed and callousness of the local AC-based lighting companies. In June of that year a New York electrical engineer named Harold P. Brown came to prominence as an opponent of the use of alternating current, claiming the AC-based lighting companies were putting the public at risk using high-voltages and installing it in a slipshod manner. Brown's campaign immediately gained the assistance of Edison and his company, aiding Brown in his public electrocution of animals with AC, trying to claim that AC was more dangerous than DC. Historians noted, and documents from the period seem to show, that there grew to be collusion between the Edison company and Brown in their parallel attempts to limit the use of AC: assisting Brown's attempt to push through legislation to control and severely limit AC installations and voltages (to the point of making it an ineffective power delivery system), providing technical assistance in Brown's tests to show AC would be the best current to power the new electric chair, and colluding with Brown and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse AC generator.

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