George Westinghouse

Very true.

And his novel, The Last Days of Night, is a historical fiction piece set during the bitter real-life rivalry between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison over the electrification of America.

Okay, let's just pause on that for a second.

Sure.

Mm-hmm.

I had no idea who George Westinghouse was before I started researching this, so that was a, a fun extra character that I got to spend time with.

Excellent.

So are you starting on a new book?

This is an episode, the kind of an episode that we like to do where we take a movie, which could be a documentary, a popular film, Hollywood film, whatever, and run it through an organizational lens.

This time we have decided to choose a rather lesser known film called The Current War, which which was a 2017 film that basically tells the story, a somewhat historical fictional story about the War of the Currents that was fought between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse back in the late 19th century.

So the movie and the real story behind it is that Edison and Westinghouse found themselves as competitors and opponents on the institution of electricity or the availability of electricity countrywide.

Edison was favoring the direct current model.

George Westinghouse was favoring the alternating current model.

And in the course of the episode, the real life episode and the movie itself, it sort of chronicles how those two perspectives turned into a fierce and rather nasty competition between the two individuals and then ultimately led to Westinghouse winning out.

alternating current becoming the de facto standard.

We also read two papers from Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Tushman and Philip Anderson's Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments from nineteen eighty-six, and Benjamin Cole and David Chandler's A Model of Competitive Impression Management: Edison versus Westinghouse in the War of the Currents from twenty nineteen.

The War of the Currents was a real competition between two important industrial figures, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, over which type of power would become the dominant standard for distributing electricity across the United States.

Edison was the initial combatant and championed direct current, or DC, in which electricity would flow in one direction as batteries do.

Westinghouse favored alternating current, or AC, in which the electricity reversed its flow in regular periods.

Edison built his system on direct current.

His competitor, George Westinghouse, was developing AC, which could transmit electricity economically over much greater distances than Edison's low voltage DC.

Edison's system required generating capacity relatively close to customers.

AC could be stepped up for transmission and stepped down near where it was used.

licensing, testing mandates, and the regulatory machinery surrounding them impose cost.

Established AI companies can absorb many of those costs.

Smaller competitors may not be able to.

More consequential is the problem of the competitor who doesn't yet exist.

But over in Europe, a rival system, alternating current, or AC, is being developed, and it proves to be very efficient for long-distance transmission.

A man named George Westinghouse imports AC to America and hires Edison's former employee, Nikola Tesla, to help make improvements.

By 1888, AC is posing a serious threat to Edison's business, but he does not take it sitting down.

He identifies all the weaknesses he can with the rival system, claiming it is of inferior design and infringes various of his patents.

This is a genuine concern for Edison, who knows that electricity needs to win the trust of wary consumers.

He feeds a press frenzy on the back of several fatalities caused by contact with high-voltage AC power lines Telegraph and telephone repairmen find themselves at particular risk as pole-mounted AC lines often cross with theirs.

Edison secretly colludes with other players in the electrical market to chip away at Westinghouse's reputation.

There are a series of unseemly public experiments, for instance, where an array of animals, including dogs, calves, and horses, are electrocuted using AC current, ostensibly to show the dangers.

Carlson argues that Tesla, quote, "...resorted to illusions to convince ordinary people of the value of his creations." Tesla came to believe that along with identifying the ideal for an invention, he also had to create the right illusion about the exciting and revolutionary changes his invention would bring about for society.

Tesla sought to capture the imagination of the public as well as entrepreneurs who would purchase and develop his inventions.

In the end, Carlson believes that Tesla became too focused on the creation of this public illusion, and this kept him from creating working machines later in his career.

In other words, Tesla became overwhelmed by his own myth, which Carlson thinks may have contributed to the decline in his mental health around the turn of the century.