From Sampler to Sower

June 6, 1884 a 28 year old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City after a long journey from France.  The brilliant young physicist had spent the previous year working for the Continental Edison Company, where he came to know Charles Batchelor.  Batchelor, close friend of Edison and the manager of Edison’s power company in Paris had written a letter of recommendation, introducing Tesla to the great inventor.

It was the start of a very ugly relationship.

It started with promise.  Edison quickly recognized Tesla’s brilliance. Tesla bent his mind to improving Edison’s motors and generators.  But a dispute about promised payment for the work soon had the two inventors at odds.  Tesla would resign when Edison did not only refuse to pay the bonus he had promised, but also declined to give him a raise.  And the relationship only went down hill from there.

Before long they were pursuing competing visions of the electric future.  Edison had built an electric empire around direct current. It was more versatile – at the time no one had yet invented a motor that could run on alternating current. But transmission of direct current was problematic and when by the time it reached homes the lamps it lit glowed only dimly.

Tesla argued Edison was behind the times.

Edison argued Tesla’s ideas were splendid but impractical.

It was all fun and games until an elephant got hurt.

In an attempt to prove that Tesla’s AC current was too dangerous to be trusted, Edison arranged to electrocute a Coney Island Elephant named Topsy which had reportedly killed three handlers in three years.  When the idea of hanging the homicidal pachyderm proved impractical (I’m not kidding, they really did suggest hanging the poor beast), someone suggested death by electrocution.  Edison’s technicians hooked the animal up to 6,600 volts of electricity and the deed was done.

At least some reports suggest Edison took to calling death by electrocution being “westinghoused” appropriating the name of Tesla’s financial backer and the entrepreneur who was building appliances to run on Tesla’s AC power.

Like I said, an ugly relationship.

Fast forward to 1915, December 18 to be exact.  The Literary Digest published an announcement that the Nobel Prize committee had awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics to the two pioneers of electricity, Edison and Tesla.  There was just one problem. Despite the announcement, the prize went to William and William Bragg, a father-son team who had used X-rays to study crystalline formations.

What happened to Tesla and Edison?

No one really knows, though rumors abound. Many people remember Topsy, and everything else each had done in their campaign to discredit the other.  Some people say each declined the prize, refusing the very idea of sharing the prize with the other. What’s more, some suggest that each claimed they would never accept a prize if the other received it first.  Apparently, unable to make the two happy, the prize committee abandoned them altogether.

Crazy stuff, isn’t it?

But what more could you have accomplished for the Kingdom if distrust, competitiveness and petty jealousies hadn’t gotten in the way?