Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

The Suppression of Fuel Savers and Alternate Energy Resources 417
profit from his improved dynamo. When Tesla went to the boss and asked
for the promised $50,000 bonus, however, Edison would not pay.
"Tesla," he said, "you don't understand our American humor."
Nikola Tesla had a well-developed sense of humor, but when someone
reneged on a verbal deal he was not amused. He walked out, and into a
job on a crew digging ditches with pick and shovel.
Two years later Tesla's luck changed; he had the opportunity to develop
his "polyphase system" of AC and patented the AC motor, generator
and transformer. By 1891, Tesla had forty patents on his AC induction
motor and polyphase system.
An industrialist and inventor of the railroad air brake, George
Westinghouse of Pittsburgh, helped Tesla to change history. Westinghouse,
a stocky, adventurous man with a walrus mustache, shared Tesla's vision of
a power system that could harness hydroelectric resources such as Niagara
Falls and could send high-voltage electricity on wires over vast distances.
He bought all of Tesla's patents on the polyphase AC system, and signed a
contract to pay Tesla a million dollars cash, plus royalties of $2.50 per
horsepower produced by the system. Tesla thought he would never have
to worry about money again; he could invent to his heart's content.
HIGH STAKES
One of the first challenges that Westinghouse and Tesla faced together
was what was called the War of the Currents—the AC/DC battle. It was a
time when America's power grid had not yet been built but DC proponents
were nevertheless becoming an entrenched interest group stubbornly
lighting the use of alternating current (AC) for generating, sending and
using electricity. Thomas Edison led the opposition. His own inventions
used direct current (DC). However, DC does not travel well. To give people
electrical lights, heat and other uses of the current, a power plant had
to be built for every square mile served. At the end of a mile of DC power
line, light bulbs barely glowed. Skyscrapers and their elevators would
have been impossible to build if Edison's views had won.
Tesla knew that AC was the better system for electrical distribution; it
could easily travel for hundreds of miles down very slender wires at high
pressures (high voltage) and then transformers could reduce the voltage
for household use.
In the War of the Currents, most of the casualties were animals. During
the time that Edison gave speeches defending the merits of DC over AC,
the neighborhood around his New Jersey laboratory was mysteriously losing
dogs and cats. Throughout 1887 Edison or his staff grabbed animals off
the street by day, and at night invited reporters and other guests to watch
what happened when an unsuspecting dog was pushed onto a tin sheet and