The DC/AC War

Thomas Edison, he is my hero, he was a Direct Current (DC) man and he did not want to change the grid to Alternating Current (AC). DC worked well with incandescent lamps and motors the primary loads of the day. In those days the DC grid had many problems the low voltage 110 volt and the high resistance of the transmission lines meant large loses. Thomas Edison selected 110 volts DC because his light bulbs needed 100 volts to give them the same light output as gas lights and he knew that it would lose at least 10 volts by the time it reached the load. Power plants were usually a mile or so from the load to reduce the losses. George Westinghouse wanted to change the system to Tesla’s AC current. Edison did not like this because he did not like to do the math, he was a brute-force inventor, which of course I am as well although you would not know that from my pending patent. DC is straight forward and easy to calculate with Ohm’s Law. DC in the old days could not be stepped up or down easily it required specialized equipment to transform to higher or lower voltages. AC allowed for higher voltages for power transmission, which reduced the cost of the grid and only required a simple transformer to change the voltage to the required 100 volts AC needed by the load. Nikola Tesla was a mathematician and loved working with AC currents as he could understand them well. After all he was the father AC current and of the radio. He was also a little eccentric and I hope to follow in this foot steps. Although living in a hotel-room with pigeons, wearing a new red tie each day and requiring 18 napkins at dinner is a little much, but I am working at it.

“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”

Thomas A. Edison
US inventor (1847 - 1931)

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931
US (Serbian-born) electrical inventor (1857 - 1943)

William made a comment that he has seen a TV commercial stating “that half of electricity being generated does not reach end user”. I am trying to find this commercial and the data behind it. If anyone can tell me the product I am trying to find the source. It is a TV commercial it must be true.