--- title: Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle | TIME description: Believing direct current to be superior to and alternating one, Thomas Edison went to great lengths – even electrocuting elephants – to prove his point canonical: https://time.com/video/sAl3scYg/ og:title: Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle og:description: Believing direct current to be superior to and alternating one, Thomas Edison went to great lengths – even electrocuting elephants – to prove his point og:url: https://time.com/video/sAl3scYg/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/sAl3scYg/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle twitter:description: Believing direct current to be superior to and alternating one, Thomas Edison went to great lengths – even electrocuting elephants – to prove his point twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/sAl3scYg/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle [Watch (HLS stream): Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/sAl3scYg.m3u8) (4:00)  _Published 2010-06-30. Believing direct current to be superior to and alternating one, Thomas Edison went to great lengths – even electrocuting elephants – to prove his point_ --- Jul 27, 2023 2:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Exclusive Clip: Edison'](/video/aZxLMFko/) ### Exclusive Clip: Edison' [Thomas Edison: Movie \(and Talkie\!\) Pioneer](/video/NgmTtjP2/) ### Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer [Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine](/video/e3W59g0F/) ### Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine --- ## Transcript >> The Battle of Currents was basically a war between Edison's direct current and alternating current, which was Edison's great competitor in the hands of George Westinghouse and other companies. Direct current is a lower- voltage current. In Edison's day, it could only travel, however, over short distance in about a mile, a mile and a half. Meaning that you'd have to have many dynamos in any given city in order to light up the whole city. Alternating current is a much higher voltage current, but able to travel over much larger distances then when it reaches its destination. The voltage is stepped down by a transformer so that it's at a low enough current that it can light small things like appliances and electrical bulbs. Edison was dedicated to direct current initially, convinced himself that alternating current was more dangerous, set out on a tremendous public relations campaign to convince the rest of America that alternating current was more dangerous. George Westinghouse was an inventor and he first became famous for inventing the railway air break, but he started to take an interest in electricity at about the same time that Edison did. The single most important episode in what they called the Battle of the Electrical Currents or the War of the Electrical Currents between AC and DC was the first execution by electric chair. Around the late 1880s, there was a search in America for " a more humane" form of execution. Up until then, most executions were hanging. The electric chair hadn't quite been invented yet, but the idea that electrical current could be used to kill somebody was already clear because many people had been accidentally electrocuted in various ways. Because Edison was the most prominent electrical inventor in America, the commission sought his opinion. He realized that this might be a great opportunity to publicize further his view that alternating current was so much more dangerous. So, he wrote back to the commission and ensured them that, yes, it was possible to execute criminals this way, but only if you use an alternating current dynamo manufactured by George Westinghouse. Soon after that, a gentleman in New York named Harold Brown, who was a self- taught electrical engineer, wrote a letter to a New York newspaper condemning alternating current as being terrifically dangerous and even condemning the Westinghouse Company by name. Brown then allied himself with Edison. Edison brought Brown back to his laboratories and allowed him to do things like execute animals there. As late as 1903, he was still doing things like electrocuting elephants in public to scare the public into thinking that alternating current was the kind of thing that could kill even an elephant, so imagine what it could do to you. Brown was asked by the State of New York to design and build the first electric chair when New York decided that electricity would be its means of execution. And of course, he decided to use alternating current. The first man to die in the electric chair, a killer named William Kemmler, was executed in 1890. And the next day, the newspapers had headlines saying, Kemmler Westinghoused, a word that Edison had wanted to put out there in American language as a means of cementing his view that Westinghouse had a deadly current, the executioner's current as they called it. Despite all this, cities were interested in building generators every couple of blocks because direct current could only travel for a mile. Westinghouse just had a superior product, the product that was gonna win this war. By the early decades of the 20th century, alternating current had pretty much completely overtaken direct current. In United States today, all households draw a universal alternating current system of about 110 volts. 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