Tom McNichol 
AC/DC 
The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison
wrongly bet in the fierce war between supporters of alternating
current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical battle
can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC began
as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a
battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same
product, electricity. But the skirmish soon metastasized into
something bigger and darker. In the AC/DC battle, the worst aspects
of human nature somehow got caught up in the wires; a silent,
deadly flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path
of least resistance, the war of currents soon settled around that
most primal of human emotions: fear. AC/DC serves as an
object lesson in bad business strategy and poor decision making.
Edison’s inability to see his mistake was a key factor in his loss
of control over the ?operating system? for his future
inventions?not to mention the company he founded, General Electric.

Table of Content

Prologue Negative and Positive 1

1 First Sparks 5

2 Lightning in a Bottle 13

3 Enter the Wizard 25

4 Let There Be Light 41

5 Electrifying the Big Apple 55

6 Tesla 69

7 The Animal Experiments 87

8 Old Sparky 107

9 Pulse of the World 129

10 Killing an Elephant 143

11 Twilight by Battery Power 155

12 DC’s Revenge 173

Epilogue Standards Wars: Past, Present, and Future 181

Further Readings in Electricity 187

The Author 191

Index 193

About the author

TOM MCNICHOL is a contributing editor for Wired magazine. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Washington Post, and the Guardian. His radio commentaries and satires have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Marketplace. He’s the author of Barking at Prozac (Crown Publishing, 1997), and his work appears in the anthology Afterwords: Stories and Reports from 9/11 and Beyond (Washington Square Press, 2002).