War of Currents - Background

Background

During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison's direct current was the standard for the United States, and Edison did not want to lose all his patent royalties. Direct current worked well with incandescent lamps, which were the principal load of the day, and with motors. Direct-current systems could be directly used with storage batteries, providing valuable load-leveling and backup power during interruptions of generator operation. Direct-current generators could be easily paralleled, allowing economical operation by using smaller machines during periods of light load and improving reliability. At the introduction of Edison's system, no practical AC motor was available. Edison had invented a meter to allow customers to be billed for energy proportional to consumption, but this meter worked only with direct current. The transformation efficiency of the early open-core bipolar transformers was very low. Early AC systems used series-connected power distribution systems, with the inherent flaw that turning off a single lamp (or the disconnection of other electric device) affected the voltage supplied to all others on the same circuit. The direct current system did not have these drawbacks as of 1882, giving it significant advantages.

Alternating current had first developed in Europe due to the work of Guillaume Duchenne (1850s), Ganz Works (1870s), Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (1880s), Lucien Gaulard, and Galileo Ferraris.

A prototype of the high efficiency, closed core shunt connection transformer was made by the Hungarian "Z.B.D." team (composed of Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy and Miksa Déri) at Ganz Works in the autumn of 1884. The new Z.B.D. transformers were 3.4 times more efficient than the open core bipolar devices of Gaulard and Gibbs. Transformers in use today are designed based on principles discovered by the three engineers. Their patents included another major related innovation: the use of parallel connected (as opposed to series connected) power distribution. Ottó Bláthy also invented the AC electricity meter to compensate the competition of AC and DC technology. The reliability of the AC technology received impetus after the Ganz Works electrified a large European metropolis: Rome in 1886.

In North America one of the believers in the new technology was George Westinghouse. Westinghouse was willing to invest in the technology and hired William Stanley, Jr. to work on an AC distribution system using step up and step down transformers of a new design in 1886. After Stanley left Westinghouse, Oliver Shallenberger took control of the AC project. In July 1888, George Westinghouse licensed Nikola Tesla's US patents for a polyphase AC induction motor and transformer designs and hired Tesla for one year to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse purchased a US patent option on induction motors from Galileo Ferraris in an attempt to own a patent that would supersede Tesla's. But with Tesla's backers getting offers from another capitalist to license Tesla's US patents, Westinghouse concluded that he had to pay the rather substantial amount of money being asked to secure the Tesla license. Westinghouse also acquired other patents for AC transformers from Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.

The "War of Currents" is often personified as Westinghouse vs. Edison. However, the "War of Currents" was much larger than that: It involved both American and European companies whose heavy investments in one current type or the other led them to hope that use of the other type would decline, such that their share of the market for "their" current type would represent greater absolute revenue once the decline of the other current type enabled them to expand their existing distribution networks.