Nikola Tesla's The Men Who Built America

The third episode of The Men Who Built America focused on the fierce competition among the industries, especially the electrical companies. As Carnegie Steel was imploding among itself due to Frick being a liability, a man who dominated banking and financing in America, J.P. Morgan, was trying to make a name for himself. Despite his father’s warnings, Morgan decided to invest in a new invention of Thomas Edison. Electricity. Edison and Morgan worked together and designed a power grid that powered New York. While the two worked tirelessly to popularize the use of electricity among the public, they ran into competition. Nikola Tesla, a former apprentice to Edison, began his own company revolving around an alternative type of electricity. While Morgan and Edison …show more content…
He wrote several pieces in the papers painting the horrors of electricity and how deadly it truly was. He told false stories of deaths caused by the use of electricity in private homes. Rockefeller’s pieces began making the public weary of the use of electrical lighting. To try and make the public distrust AC electricity, Edison invented the electric chair for New York State Penitentiary and used Tesla’s AC generators. This backfired and caused the public to associate Edison with the death of the inmate and hurt Morgan’s business. To try to run Morgan out of business, Tesla and his partner Westinghouse underbid Morgan on the Chicago fair that had 27 million people in attendance. This is the likely cause of why Westinghouse received the large and prestigious contract to power the Niagara grid that supplied power to most of the eastern United States. Morgan made a last minute power play and gave Westinghouse the choice between a large lawsuit that would result in his bankruptcy or the turning over of Tesla’s AC patents. Morgan received the patents and dropped Edison from his company and changed the name to General