fbpx

What happened when Thomas Edison decided to ruin Nikola Tesla’s reputation (ROBERT GREENE & JOOST ELFFERS)

What happened when Thomas Edison decided to ruin Nikola Tesla’s reputation (ROBERT GREENE & JOOST ELFFERS)

Thomas Edison, considered the inventor who harnessed electricity, believed that a workable system would have to be based on direct cur rent DC). When the Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla appeared to have suc ceeded in creating a system based on alternating current (AC), Edison was furious. He determined to ruin Tesla’s reputation, by making the public be lieve that the AC system was inherently unsafe, and Tesla irresponsible in promoting it.

 

To this end he captured all kinds of household pets and electrocuted them to death with an AC current. When this wasn’t enough, in 1820 he gor New York State prison authorities to organize the world’s first execution by electrocution, using an AC current. But Edison’s electrocution experiments had all been with small creatures; the charge was too weak, and the man was only half killed.. It was an awful spectacle.

 

Although, in the long run, it is Edison’s name that has survived, at the time his campaign damaged his own reputation more than Tesla’s. He backed off. The mighty lion toys with the mouse that crosses his path any other reaction would mar his fearsome reputation.

 

 

 

48 laws of power

ROBERT GREENE & JOOST ELFFERS

 

 



Facebook

Instagram

Follow Me on Instagram