Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [118]
Alfred Tate reported that only once did Edison reveal his bitterness about the merger. "I've come to the conclusion that I never did know anything about [electricity]," Edison told Tate. "I'm going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I've ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with 269 anything electrical."11
Such forgetting was unlikely, but Edison did turn to other ventures.
In 1888 he had prepared a patent application for a "kinetoscope," which he described as "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion." In 1892 Edison and his assistant William Dickson created prototypes for the kinetograph (a camera) and kinetoscope (a peephole motion picture viewer). In 1894 "Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze" became the first motion picture to receive copyright protection, and in the following years Edison emerged as the pioneer of the American motion picture business.12
Another project proved less successful. Forsaking the delicate consumer goods that had made his reputation and his fortune—the phonograph, the lightbulb—Edison began to devote his time and his passion to the crude work of hard rock mining. Newspaper men dutifully trekked to Edison's sprawling mine complex in the mountains of northern New Jersey where the wizard told them about his grand plans to revolutionize the iron ore industry The scheme was doomed. In the coming years he sold off most of his General Electric stock and poured the money down a mine.13
He never expressed any regret over the failure. Perhaps he saw the loss of his electricity fortune as a ritual purging, the severing of ties with the industry that he had created, only to have it escape his control.14
THE TWO COMPANIES that formed General Electric complemented each other perfectly, with Edison General's strengths in direct current balancing Thomson-Houston's experience in alternating current and arc lighting. Both firms had lucrative lines in electric railways. Boasting solid patents and expertise in the full range of electrical equipment, General Electric was well positioned to slug it out with its lone rival, Westinghouse Electric.
The biggest battleground was the market for alternating equipment, both lighting systems and motors. Despite his strong patents, Nikola Tesla failed to produce a practical alternating-current motor while on the Westinghouse payroll in 1888 and 1889. The idea, though, was too important to be abandoned. Inspired by Testa's patents, other inventors continued to experiment. Their results were unveiled in spectacular fashion at an 1891 electrical exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany. A German and a Swiss company pulled off the greatest feat of electrical transmission to date, sending 15,000 volts of alternating current along more than 100 miles of cable, from a hydroelectric plant in the Alps to the exhibition building in Frankfurt. As impressive as the transmission itself was, it was matched by the machinery it drove in Frankfurt: a 100-horsepower alternating motor. Both the transmission system and the motors were far more efficient than anyone expected them to be. At long last, direct current had a rival in the field of electrical power.15
The Frankfurt display caught the attention of electricians worldwide, but none were more interested than those working on a project in upstate New York. Niagara Falls was the Holy Grail of power engineering. Draining one Great Lake into another, the falls offered one of the heaviest, steadiest sources of hydraulic power in the world, but no one knew how to harness it. Financiers, J. P. Morgan among them, created the Cataract Construction Company in 1889. To make the enormous project pay, the company needed