Our awareness of electricity goes back to the cavemen watching lightning dart across the prehistoric sky. The ancient Greeks stumbled on the fact that when amber (fossilized tree resin) is rubbed with fur, the two begin to attract each other.
It was centuries before Italian scientists Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta (from whose names we derived the words “galvanize” and “voltage”, respectively) began experimenting with electricity, right around the time Ben Franklin was flying his famous kite.
Galvani, a physician, was dissecting a frog with an assistant one day when the assistant supposedly touched the frog’s leg with a scalpel that had a static charge on it. The frog’s leg twitched, and that led to a series of experiments in which Galvani further investigated what he called “animal electricity”.
Stimulated by Galvani’s work, Volta made discoveries that led to his invention of the first battery. He replaced the frog’s leg with paper soaked in salt, which acted as a conductor between electrodes made of copper and silver (later zinc). His “voltaic piles”, as they were called, became a sensation among scientists worldwide. They produced “direct current”, or DC. Some researchers built voltaic piles that were so large they took up the better part of a room and could, and did, produce a current strong enough to knock people over.
Then, in 1820, a Dane named Orsted noticed that when the juice from his voltaic pile, or battery, was turned on and off, a nearby compass needle deflected back and forth. His discovery linked magnetism with electricity. Englishman Michael Faraday capitalized on Orsted’s work and subsequently made very important breakthroughs.
One thing Faraday did was simply move a magnet in and out of the center of a coil of copper wire. Every time he did this, it caused current to flow in the wire, first in one direction and then the other, corresponding to the motion of the magnet. Faraday had discovered electromagnetic induction, and its result, “alternating current”, or AC.
As the 19th century progressed and commercial applications of electricity gradually came into being, a competitive rift developed between two camps of scientists and industrialists: those who advocated for a world run on AC electricity, and those who promoted DC. The battle was personified by two titans of the era – Thomas Edison on the DC side and George Westinghouse for AC. Edison famously electrocuted horses and other animals in public exhibitions to show how dangerous he thought AC was, and hired professional PR people in an attempt to coin a new word in the American language for electrocution. He tried to persuade the newspapers to say that convicted murderers had been “Westinghoused”.
Of course, today, AC is what powers our homes and factories and DC, our flashlights. A major reason AC won out is that a young immigrant from Croatia by the name of Nikola Tesla came to work for Westinghouse. Tesla had previously obtained patents for his revolutionary AC electric power generators and their complement, the AC electric induction motor, and he licensed them to Westinghouse.
In 1889, a group connected to financier J.P. Morgan purchased the rights to a tunnel at Niagara Falls with an eye towards producing hydroelectricity, and a partner in a New York City banking firm connected with Morgan by the name of Edward Dean Adams was named president of the Niagara Falls Power Company. By this time, certain limitations of DC power for transmission purposes had become evident. The project was to utilize Westinghouse AC current, based on the inventions of Nikola Tesla.
Construction of the Edward Dean Adams Power Plant began on Buffalo Avenue in the city of Niagara Falls, and on November 15, 1896, accompanied by festivities and a 21-gun salute, 11,000 volts produced by Tesla’s generators at the Adams plant were sent to Buffalo to power the public trolley system. Although that initial power was sent to Buffalo, within years, most of it was soon being used right here in Niagara Falls to power new and expanding industry.
Engineers and Industrialists from all over the world came here to Niagara Falls to see for themselves Tesla’s masterpiece.
At a banquet in his honor celebrating his great achievement, Nikola Tesla gave a speech in which he declared, “In the great enterprise at Niagara we see not only a bold engineering and commercial feat, but far more – a giant stride in the right direction… Its success is a signal for the utilization of water powers all over the world, and its influence on industrial development is incalculable…”
[by Joan Elizabeth Johnson]
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