Quick, what’s the connection between Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and AC electric motor repair?
Well, it’s a tenuous one, at least where AC motor repairs are engaged, but not completely unrelated.
Back in the late 1880s, Edison and Tesla were engaged in what became known as the War of the Currents over their positions on AC and DC power.
Maybe the outcome was preordained, as AC power is clearly superior, but during the time, when electricity itself had just been harnessed, the dispute between the rivals was prolonged and even brought Westinghouse Electric around bankruptcy!
And so simply what does any of that have to do with AC electric motor repair?
Well, not much, and only tangentially so, in as much as there would be no AC motors were Tesla not to have won the War of the Currents – though, as just noted, it was perhaps inevitable that his superior technology might win in time.
In those days, you see, the United States was one hundred percently DC, or direct current, territory.
Edison’s DC technology was the standard for electricity generation and distribution throughout the country.
But Tesla, his former assistant, came up with a system for the similar use of AC power, alternating current.
Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas while the latter was still his assistant, and came eventually to regret not having adopted them himself.
Tesla, for his component, broke with Edison over being cheated out of promised compensation for all his work and went into partnership with Westinghouse Electric.
Edison then mounted an intensely bitter publicity campaign against AC power that wound up including macabre demonstrations of electrocution of animals and even a person, a prisoner on death row, to verify his point about the careless dangers posed by alternating current technology.
And you thought AC electric motor repair was a simple straight-forward matter!
