Westinghouse then secured the contract to light the World Fair in Chicago by underbidding the competition. Edison: He continued inventing and developing the ideas of others or buying them.
Some were world-changing innovations — his motion picture projector, the Kinetoscope pictured — while a few proved less successful, notably his venture in mining iron ore. To make matters worse, Edison faced competition from other DC companies too, such as Thomson-Houston. With the proliferation of electrical providers came expensive lawsuits over patents, which dragged on for years. Or all of the above. Whatever the reason, Edison showed how cutthroat he could be by launching a fearmongering smear campaign.
Sure enough, accidental electrocutions occurred when wires had been poorly installed or insulated as thousands of volts coursed through them, and Edison regularly used these deaths as fodder in his damning evidence against AC. Nevertheless, he continually claimed that his own DC remained perfectly safe. His campaign would go much further than rhetoric. Enlisting the help of electrical engineer Harold P Brown, he staged a number of grisly experiments where stray dogs bought for 25 cents from local boys , calves and a horse would be brought to one of his laboratories and electrocuted.
If animals did not make his point clearly enough, Edison also became embroiled in the adoption of the first electric chair to execute a human. While he opposed capital punishment initially, an opportunity not to be missed fell into his lap. New York dentist Alfred P Southwick approached him concerning his desire for a more humane method of execution than hanging, believing electricity could be the answer. The second burst of 1, volts did not kill him, so he had to be hit a second time, after an agonising wait while the generator charged.
With double the voltage running through his body, Kemmler bled and his hair began to singe, while the smell of burning flesh made some witnesses retch. The most gruesome death came on 11 October Western Union lineman John Feeks lost his footing while up a pole in downtown Manhattan and grabbed what should have been a low voltage telegraph wire — not knowing that it had become connected with a high voltage line several blocks away.
He died instantly, but his body got entangled in the web and it would take over half an hour for his fellow linemen to cut him free. All the while, Feeks burned. Blue spurts could be seen shooting out from the body and blood dripped down onto the street, where a lunchtime crowd of thousands had gathered, looking up in utter horror at the macabre scene.
In the aftermath, wires in New York were cut down and moved underground, leaving the city without electricity over winter.
His years of championing DC fizzled out as he stepped aside to pursue other projects and a merger in with Thomson-Houston turned his company into the more AC-friendly General Electric GE. That did not stop the struggles for power with Westinghouse Electric, and it actually would not take long for GE to catch up once the commitment to DC had gone. It was another success for AC as Westinghouse won the contract by underbidding GE, providing his company with its most public and spectacular display yet.
Beyond the glittering sight of hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs outside, generators were on display in the Electricity Building and Tesla had a space to show off his work with his usual panache and showmanship.
He demonstrated the theory of his induction motor by placing a copper egg into a rotating magnetic field, where it would spin on its axis of its own free will.
The fair, while a monumental triumph in its own right, also gave Westinghouse the reputation needed to secure the highly desired contract to build a hydroelectric plant on the Niagara Falls. By the time the great machinery began generating power, on 16 November , for the city of Buffalo more than 20 miles away, there could be no doubt that AC had won the War of the Currents.
Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the Developed in the s and s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century.
Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and It was the height of World War II, and Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Nikola Tesla. Tesla's Death Ray. Thomas Edison. World's Oldest Recording. Thomas Edison In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras.
Morgan his idea of a wireless globe. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant.
In the same manner any picture, character, drawing or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. White quickly got to work designing Wardenclyffe Tower in , but soon after construction began it became apparent that Tesla was going to run out of money before it was finished. An appeal to Morgan for more money proved fruitless, and in the meantime investors were rushing to throw their money behind Marconi. In December , Marconi successfully sent a signal from England to Newfoundland.
Tesla grumbled that the Italian was using 17 of his patents, but litigation eventually favored Marconi and the commercial damage was done. The U. Thus the Italian inventor was credited as the inventor of radio and became rich. By , Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world. He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was potentially a high-functioning autistic. He became obsessed with cleanliness and fixated on the number three; he began shaking hands with people and washing his hands—all done in sets of three.
He had to have 18 napkins on his table during meals, and would count his steps whenever he walked anywhere. Near the end of his life, Tesla became fixated on pigeons, especially a specific white female, which he claimed to love almost as one would love a human being.
One night, Tesla claimed the white pigeon visited him through an open window at his hotel, and he believed the bird had come to tell him she was dying. Nikola Tesla would go on to make news from time to time while living on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel. In he made the cover of Time magazine, which featured his inventions on his 75th birthday.
He hoped to fund a prototypical defensive weapon in the interest of world peace, but his appeals to J. Morgan Jr. He died in , in debt, although Westinghouse had been paying his room and board at the hotel for years.
0コメント