Post

This photograph was taken around 1890, when I was thirty-four years old and had just demonstrated the rotating magnetic field that would make alternating current practical for long-distance power transmission. My laboratory on South Fifth Avenue was full of motors, transformers, and oscillators. I was sleeping four hours a night.

Edison was still insisting that direct current was superior. He was executing animals with AC current in public demonstrations to prove it was dangerous. He called it 'Westinghousing.' This was the man I had worked for when I first arrived in New York — he told me he would pay me fifty thousand dollars to improve his DC motors. When I delivered the improvements, he told me I did not understand American humour.

I understood his humour perfectly. I simply chose not to find it amusing.