Tesla vs Edison

You've heard that Tesla beat Edison. The real war over electricity was stranger, and Tesla was barely in the room.

On a December afternoon in 1888, in Thomas Edison's laboratory at West Orange, a consultant named Harold Brown wrapped wet cotton waste around the legs of a lame mare. The meter had broken, so the men read the voltage off a row of glowing lamps. Three tries failed. On the fourth, at 5:28, the current ran for twenty-five seconds, and the water steamed from the cotton. Brown wrote that death had been instantaneous and painless. Edison's name headed the list of witnesses.

*Tesla vs Edison: The True Story of the War Over Electricity — and How the Legend of Nikola Tesla Was Made* tells the real story of the War of the Currents, and of how a fight between companies became a myth about two men.

From Edison's first power station on Pearl Street to the first current from Niagara Falls, this narrative history brings the war to life through the people who actually fought it. Edison built the first electric system that worked. George Westinghouse, the air-brake man, bet his company on alternating current. Harold Brown killed animals to prove AC was deadly. And behind them all stood Nikola Tesla, whose motor patents were the prize the war was fought over, and whose legend was written long afterward by somebody else.

Inside, you'll discover:

• Why Edison's direct current couldn't pay its way much past a mile from the power station

• What Tesla really did at the Edison Machine Works, and who he actually worked for

• Where the famous story of the unpaid $50,000 comes from, and what the record shows

• How Tesla's 1888 motor patents became the weapon in a war between Edison and Westinghouse

• Who really electrocuted the animals, and how far Edison lent his lab and his name

• How a batch of stolen letters, printed under the headline "FOR SHAME, BROWN!", exposed a secret payment

• What went wrong at Auburn prison in 1890, when William Kemmler became the first man executed by electricity

• Why the war ended in a patent swap between rival companies

• Who invented the martyred Tesla of the internet, and the torn-up contract no document supports

The War of the Currents was fought over patents, copper, and public fear. Its most famous story of betrayal first appeared in a biography published in 1944, decades after the fight was over.

There are no saints and no villains here. Edison built the first electric system that worked, Westinghouse mortgaged his own home to stay in the fight, and Tesla patented the motor the whole war was fought over.

Step into the laboratories, courtrooms, and boardrooms where electricity was sold to the world, and meet the inventors, financiers, and newspapermen who turned a business war into a legend.