Daily Curiosities: Nikola Tesla Made Modern Electricity Possible
POSTED by: on 10/05/2009
Thomas Edison may have invented the first commercially practical light bulb and popularized the usage of electricity, but Nikola Tesla made our modern electrical infrastructure possible.
In the late 1800′s Thomas Edison founded the Edison Illumination Company, which provided electricity to a small number of customers in Manhattan. The electricity was transmitted as 110 volts of DC current and thus could only be transmitted about two miles. Tesla introduced a new system, called alternating current, which allowed the power to be transmitted over longer distances by stepping up the voltage of the electricity with transformers. Without this new system, it would not have been economical to run national power grids because there would have to be a generating station every few miles.
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