Who is the father of alternating current

Anthony, director of the electrical engineering program at Cornell. Tesla was subsequently feted by the science academies of London and Paris. Three phase customer connections were not common until the s; acceptance delayed by an inability to balance single phase customer loads on three phase AC lines. Only after the work of Charles Fortescu at Westinghouse and also that of Edith Clark at GE in the period were standardized equations available for the engineering of three phase distribution.

As for other AC pioneers there are many - Frank Sprague , usually associated with railways, was an early proponent of AC research. Having the mathematical skills to devise the practical formulae to adapt the British Hopkinson 3 wire system to Edison lighting applications, he went on to develop practical industrial motors which made small utility companies financially viable with the establishment of a daytime motor load.

As consultant to the Edison company in NY he recommended the use of AC in a large central plant to be distributed through "receiving" stations in which a transformer would step down the voltage and apply it to a "receiving motor" reversed alternator to drive DC generators. That report in September ,, but a few months after the first Stanley installation in Great Barrington , shows how universal was the thinking toward large scale AC generation. In that sense, the conversion substation could be said to have been invented by Sprague.

Thus the story has many participants, most of whom replicated another's work, sometimes simultaneously, often with no knowledge of the other. Even the standard power converter of the day had multiple fathers.

Benjamin Lamme who led development of AC at Westinghouse described his rotary converter as the overlaying of a DC generator on a synchronous motor and believed it unique until he discovered that Charles Bradley Bradley Electric was later acquired by of GE had applied for a patent as well and there are indications that others had the same idea.

Sebastian Zinni DeFerrante , a leader in British arc lighting while still in his mid teens, had installed underground 10, volt lines in London as early as Moreover, in an era prior to the refined understanding of inductance, capacitance and reactive power issues, and prior to the development of steel with magnetic characteristics ideal for alternating fields, the issue of the best frequency was another major concern.

Joseph Cunningham has contributed information for television programs and technical publications. See more of his articles on the IEEE website. IEEE membership may be required to view some material. Also join us on Facebook to give us feedback. Schaghticoke Power Station and Steinmetz's monocyclic power experiment. Great Barrington The first AC power distribution system using transformers. Early AC Power. Louis Bell Almirian Decker Shallenberger - William Stanley designs an improved version of the Siemens single phase alternator - Fall - Elihu Thomson's AC power system is rejected by the patent office.

Ernst F. Alexanderson - pioneer in wireless and TV transmission. Ernst Julius Berg - developed two way wireless audio communication. Worked on AC power.

Charles F. Brush - pioneered Generators, lamps, trolleys and an early profitable industry. Mikhail O. Dolivo-Dobrovolsky - pioneer of 3 phase AC power systems. Galileo Ferraris - Early AC power pioneer.

Inventor of the polyphase AC motor. Edwin W. Rice, Jr - AC power systems pioneer. Leader of the electrical industry. William Stanley - inventor of the first modern transformer, heart of the AC power system. Charles P. Steinmetz - pioneer of AC power systems, first person to understand AC power mathematically.

Nikola Tesla - improved upon many technologies, most notably AC power. George Westinghouse - innovator in many technologies, business leader. Article by M. Editor's Note: This article was first published in and updated for Tesla's th birthday. Tia is the assistant managing editor and was previously a senior writer for Live Science.

Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired. She holds a master's in bioengineering from the University of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Tia was part of a team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that published the Empty Cradles series on preterm births, which won multiple awards, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Live Science. Tia Ghose. See all comments 5. I inspired by Edison no doubt. Check here. Edison may have more patents but he was not a visionary re. AC current and he cruelly envisioned the electric chair.

Tesla triumphs. Edison had underlings doing his grunt work and was adversarial re. Tesla The of inventions is not the metric of success. The effect of your work is Financially supported by J. Pierpont Morgan, he built the Wardenclyffe laboratory and its famous transmitting tower in Shoreham, Long Island between and , feet high and capped by a foot dome. It was intended to be the first broadcast system, transmitting both signals and power without wires to any point on the globe.

The magnifying transmitter—the largest Tesla coil ever built—was capable of generating , watts of power and reportedly could produce a bolt of lightning feet long. But Tesla fell out with Morgan before the tower was completed, and the unfinished structure was demolished in Among Tesla's other discoveries were the fluorescent light, the bladeless turbine, wireless communications, wireless transmission of electrical energy, and remote control.

Yet even today, most history books credit Guglielmo Marconi with invention of the radio, and many electric utilities are still referred to as the "Edison Company", even though they use the Tesla—Westinghouse alternating current system—omissions that have caused some Tesla advocates to dub him the "forgotten father of technology.

The future, for which I really worked, is mine. For all his sung and unsung accomplishments, Tesla was a bona fide eccentric, and his odd habits became more apparent as he aged. He always wore white gloves and rarely shook hands because of progressive germ phobia. He never stayed in a hotel room or floor whose number was divisible by three, feared pearl earrings worn by women, and insisted on large numbers of napkins at meals, which he used to meticulously polish his silverware.

At the end of his life he made strange claims about death rays that could make entire armies vanish in seconds and communication with other planets. He died virtually penniless on January 7, , in the Hotel New Yorker where he lived for the last ten years of his life. APS News Archives.