The History of the Grid — The War of Currents

In understanding the challenges of the United States’ grid, it’s useful to travel back to its beginning. The next few posts will try to unwrap as much of the relevant information as we can. But this first entry might be the most fun to read…

The modern US electric grid, sometimes called “the Biggest Machine in the World,” dates back more than 150 years, but today North America has more than a trillion dollars in assets and 200,000 miles of transmission lines.

One piece of the grid’s history is particularly important — if not fascinating: the battle between competing electric transmission and distribution standards and their champions that became known as the “War of the Currents.” Its two bitter adversaries were inventor Thomas Edison, a native Ohioan who eventually became known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park” in New Jersey, and George Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh native and Union Army soldier initially known for inventing railroad air brakes.

Edison, who was convinced that his Direct Current (DC) system was the best and only way forward, built his first “central station” in a building on Pearl Street in New York City. And in 1884, a remarkable Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla, who had worked at Continental Edison in Paris, walked in the door at Edison’s New York City office, introduced himself, and went to work for the Edison Electric Company. Tesla invented an induction motor that only worked on Alternating Current (AC). Knowing that Edison had no use for AC, Tesla took to designing motors for DC, but couldn’t make them work; eventually, he left, and after a stint doing odd jobs, ended up, ironically, working for George Westinghouse.

Westinghouse, who was more a businessman than a scientist, became interested in electricity after visiting Edison’s lab and seeing his incandescent lights in operation. He purchased several existing US Patents for DC applications, similar but not identical to Edison’s, created the Westinghouse Electric Company, and set up small lighting operations at hotels in New York City and Pittsburgh, among other places. But he soon realized that DC could only be transmitted about a mile, and began advocating for an AC system, which could move current much longer distances and was based on 60 cycles per second — which we still use today. Westinghouse’s system used new devices called transformers, to step the voltage down from incoming transmission lines to allow AC to be used for indoor lighting.

The bitter “Battle of the Currents,” lasted well into the 1890s. But in 1893, the Westinghouse Electric Company won the bid to supply electrical power for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and won the central part of the contract to build the Niagara Falls hydroelectric project later that year. Westinghouse shared the Niagara Falls contract with General Electric, which was created when Thomas Edison lost control of Edison Electric and was renamed. Edison had made his mark; in 1882 he established the first investor-owned utility. But the few remaining DC commercial power electric generation and distribution systems declined rapidly, and the grid, as we now call it, was built on Alternating Current.

Part 2 will focus on FDR-era policies which helped regulate growth and monopolies on the grid to ensure fairness in costs and access.

Written by George Katilus IV, Marketing Associate at LineVision

‍