War of the currents

139, our occasional movie episode where we discuss a film through an organizational lens.

This episode is about the famous War of the Currents from the late 19th century.

The film we watched is from 2017, The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rayton and distributed by 101 Studios.

We also read two papers from Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Tushman and Philip Anderson's Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments from 1986, and Benjamin Cole and David Chandler's A Model of Competitive Impression Management, Edison vs. Westinghouse in The War of the Currents from 2019.

To learn more about the film and these texts, please go to our website at www.talkingaboutorganizations.com.

This is Freddie Wagner calling from Düsseldorf in Germany.

And welcome to our occasional movie episode.

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 is a supplement to episode one thirty-nine, our occasional movie episode where we discuss a film through an organizational lens.

This episode is about the famous War of the Currents from the late nineteenth century.

The film we watched is from twenty seventeen, The Current War, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and distributed by One O One Studios.

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.

So-called competence enhancing discontinuities would emerge from existing firms and result in less turbulence in the environment, while competence destroying ones would come about from new firms and create more turbulence.

safety and self-interest didn't have to compete for space in his head.

The spectacle of artificial intelligence executives traveling to Washington to warn government about the technology they're building belongs to the same tradition as the so-called War of the Currents.

Some of the fears are probably justified, and we should assume that the executives calling for government action believe what they say.

That concession gets us nowhere in determining the value of their recommendations.

Then, when Tesla struck out on his own and started developing AC motors and other devices, Edison went on a personal crusade to ruin him.

This vendetta became known as the War of the Currents, where Edison championed his DC current and led a smear campaign against AC current.

This eventually culminated in Thomas Edison electrocuting an elephant to help make his point.

The myth goes that Edison's smear campaign was instrumental in keeping Tesla from truly becoming the greatest inventor of his age.

Now, I actually love Drunk History.

But we should always remember that the stories being told on that show are historical tales that are being misremembered by drunk people.

So one of the first episodes of Drunk History, while it was still just an internet show on Funny or Die, was about Edison, Tesla, and the War of the Currents.

Hilariously, Crispin Glover played Edison, and John C. Reilly played Tesla.

Thomas Edison championed direct current, and when the AC system backed by George Westinghouse, using Tesla's patents, started competing with Edison's DC system in the late 1880s, it became one of the most dramatic technical battles in history.

It was called the War of Currents.

The War of Currents.

History has such good names for things.

Edison's company ran an active campaign, arguing AC was dangerous.

There is actually so much history behind an electrical car.

Nikola Tesla did not invent alternating current, but he developed crucial inventions that helped make AC practical on a huge scale, especially his polyphase system and induction motor.

Also, during the War of Currents, AC competed with the DC system, championed by Thomas Edison, and AC eventually became the basis of large-scale electrical grids.

Just give them the high points of the other examples where the technology was faced with doomers and then proved to be wrong just to make them laugh.

Well, Thomas Edison, right? So there was something called the War of the Currents, as in electric currents.

People were afraid of electricity.

Okay, there's a good one.

Convinced that Tesla's groundbreaking invention could power America, Westinghouse purchased all 40 of Tesla's trailblazing patents pertaining to the generators, motors, and transformers necessary to construct a polyphase alternating current circuit and recruited Tesla as an advisor to serve for 12 months at the Westinghouse plant in Philadelphia where some of the first commercially available AC devices would be produced.

The release of the first AC machine in 1886 was the harbinger of a bitter conflict that erupted between Westinghouse and Edison known as the War of the Currents, which pitted AC against DC from 1888 to 1892.

During the dispute, Edison would try to use his resources to sway public opinion in his favor, and despite the evidence clearly showing that AC was safe and more effective over long distances, he issued a number of articles in the biggest publications warning of the dangers of the alternating current.

Edison was unable, however, to convince his largest benefactor of the superiority of DC, and Wall Street wolf John Pierpont Morgan, who in 1892 merged Edison General Electric with the AC-focused Thomas Houston Company, removed Edison's name to create General Electric and switched entirely to alternating current instruments.

With Edison sidelined, the alternating current emerged as the undisputed victor of the War of the Currents, as Westinghouse increased his annual turnover from $800,000 in 1887 to $4.2 million in 1890, while Tesla was paid around $105,000 in royalties by the end of 1891, a period that also witnessed several other personal and professional triumphs for Tesla, who officially became a U.S. citizen in July 1891, at the same time as he established two personal laboratories in New York, situated at South Fifth Avenue and East Houston Street.

On the other hand, Tesla's dividend checks would come to an abrupt end after Westinghouse's finances were left in disarray, their plans to expand the company by borrowing heavily falling through in November 1890 after the collapse of the Baring Brothers brokerage firm compelled panicked creditors to call in their loans.

To cover his losses, Tesla continued to focus his attention on high-frequency AC experiments, inventing a lamp that required only one wire, an oscillating transformer, and a high-frequency alternator, which he exhibited at a lecture in spring 1891 at Columbia College in New York on behalf of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to a flabbergasted crowd who were amazed at the ways that AC could be implemented into modern lighting circuits.