Throughline - The Electrical Grid

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Today, electricity in the U.S. is a utility we notice only when it's suddenly unavailable. But over a hundred years ago, electricity in the homes of every American was a wild idea and the subject of a bitter fight over who would power, and profit from, the national grid. This week, the battle that electrified our world and the extreme measures that were taken to get there.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, it's Ramteen. We get a ton of episode ideas from you guys, and we love that. Recently, a lot of you have been asking about the same thing, the Kurds. Including this guy.

Hello, this is Schwan. Oh, hey, Schwan. How are you guys? Schwan Zuri's pitch actually inspired our Kurd episode. And now that it's out, I'm wondering, did you have a chance to listen to the episode? I did. I had to listen to it numerous times. It was fantastic. Schwan also wanted to know how we made the episode. So here we go. All right. After we got Schwan's email, we read and read and read and then interviewed one of our colleagues at NPR.

I'm just going to brush up on the facts here for a second. We also wanted to interview a Kurdish person, which led us to Ayub Nuri. But you could say Kurdish journalist and author. Then we started writing and digging for archival tape. Once we had a script, we went fact-checking mode, which caused a flurry of rewrites. And then Ramtin and I went into the studio to track. And on this episode, the Kurds. Sorry, can you do it again?

Then we combined our narration. The bites from the interviews. And the archival. I scored it. Polished it off with some final mixing. Held our breath. And put it out into the interviews. And the archival. I scored it. Pulsed it off with some final mixing. Held our breath. And put it out into the world. History has often been unkind to the Kurds,

a cycle of repeated betrayals. It was very touching, because I wrote the email back in April, and it was kind of like a shot in the dark, because I felt like no one was really talking about the Kurds. You basically outlined an episode for us. Yeah, exactly. We're going to keep responding to what's happening in the news

and to your ideas. Now, you can support our show by supporting your local NPR station. Just go to donate.npr.org slash ThruLine to find your local station and make a gift. Is KQED your local NPR station? Is that what you listen to?

I do, yeah. We gave Schwan a healthy nudge to donate, and now we're asking you. Head to donate.npr.org slash throughline. And thanks. We are surrounded by thousands upon thousands upon millions of electrical wires that are transmitting electricity nearly everywhere. Most of the time, we hardly notice them.

But sometimes... When it's hot, the electrical line actually sags downward. So if you get the conditions right, if there's a tree that sort of bends over in the wind, the tree can touch the electrical line and... There can be this moment at which the electricity in the line kind of goes wild. And then the line goes out.

On a hot day in August of 2003, that's exactly what happened in Akron, Ohio. Because there are a lot of people using their air conditioners, the lines are super saggy. So this bolt of lightning essentially shot out of the electrical line, hit a tree, and caused the dishwasher of the house, which was just underneath the wire to explode. There was an 18-year-old man, boy, man there, Adam Mucha.

He'd just come home from school and he was puttering around the house and he heard this giant bang and a flash. And then the outlet started to smoke inside the house. So of course he goes running outside. And there's a tree trimming crew actually for the utility. The utility is called First Energy. They're completely freaked out because they're up in the trees too. Different trees.

Hey, get out of the way! And they just yell at him to get out of the way. Get out of the way! One fried dishwasher. One scared teenager. One power line down. And they'd just yell at him to get out of the way. Get out of the way! One fried dishwasher, one scared teenager, one power line down. And like a river that's just hit a dam, the electricity in that line flowed to the nearest open channel, another power line close by. And this is fine. It happens all the time. The problem was the trees were too tall.

The utility company, First Energy, had a policy to trim trees every three years. And they decided and said to do it every five years. So across the state, more sagging lines and tall trees and... Bang. It happened again. And then it happened a third time. All of this in Ohio. It turns out foliage is one of the biggest problems for the electrical grid.

But that day in Ohio, a few down lines wouldn't have been too big a deal if... If everything was working well in the control room of the utility. I wonder what's going on here. Something strange is happening. But everything was not working well that day. There was a very simple bug that had been introduced into their software system. No information was getting through. There's normally also an alarm that goes off, and none of these systems were working.

So literally the people in the control room had no idea that there was any problem. The electricity from the downed lines began to pile up on other lines. And the power grid began to get overwhelmed. So line after line shut down. Self-protectively. 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15. And they started to get phone calls. You guys have anything going on here?

You know, you hear the people in the control room at First Energy being like, what? What? No, there's nothing wrong. No, everything's fine. Then five minutes later, like, I called you guys like 10 minutes ago, and I thought you were figuring out what was going on there. Well, we're trying to. Our computer is not happy. It's not cooperating either. And then five minutes later, like, shut up. Shut up. We have no clue. Our computer's giving us fits too. I'm hanging up the phone. I have to deal with this problem right

now, you know? The time kind of rolls through these telephone calls and you can see them becoming aware of the degree of the problem. They frantically tried to fix the problem, but it was already too late. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Then, everything went dark. Back to basics today. The sun providing the light, feet, the transportation. Ohio's grid was down, and all of the electricity that had been flowing through it doesn't have anywhere to go. So it begins to look for routes out of Ohio. And because of the way the power grid is set up,

the electricity had a few possible destinations. There are three major grids in this country, in the east, in the west, and a separate one that serves Texas. Texas, because they wanted to be able to leave the union infrastructurally on their own. Ohio is part of the East Coast grid, and during the blackout, there were too few lines in Ohio to handle the electricity. Other places in the Eastern grid misread this as Ohio needing more electricity and began sending huge amounts of it towards the state. But all that electricity bounced back,

sort of like a massive tidal wave. An absolute wave. It's a huge wave. People in the control rooms of neighboring states started to get nervous. They knew the wave could cause serious problems. So in some places on the East Coast, like New York, operators decided to manually shut down the system. And so the regulators start to shut stuff down, but the system also starts to shut itself down self-protectively because they don't want to melt, essentially. If we want to totally anthropomorphize them, like they don't want to die., they don't want to die.

The wires don't want to die. So they turn themselves off. Creating a domino effect as circuit after circuit goes offline. And the problem just gets worse and worse. Good evening from our NBC News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, where we are in the midst of what appears to be a colossal and history-making blackout. And encompassed parts of at least six states and Canada, impacting tens of millions of people.

Thousands believed to be stranded underground in the dark or in... Up to that point, it was the third largest blackout in the world. Eight states and 50 million people for two days. This is Gretchen Bakke. I'm a professor of anthropology currently at Humboldt University in Berlin. And she wrote a book. The book is called The Grid, The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. We are cruising for a bruising that we have a system that is becoming increasingly fragile. An interlocking system is fragile. Little problems can actually kind of multiply on the system and you get cascading failures.

And the 2003 blackout wasn't the last time the system would fail. Over the past decade, more and more questions about its effectiveness have come up. So what we start to see since 2010 or so is that as the climate begins to change in minor and in sometimes major ways, you get weather or you get conditions in certain places that the grid in that place was not built for. Most recently in California, the utility company PG&E has been struggling to keep up with all the wildfires that have led to widespread blackouts. They have a system that was made for conditions that were not so hot or so dry or so windy as what they're confronted with today. This convoluted system, which we have not only in the U.S. but around the world, has developed and expanded over the past 130 years, shaped by market forces and fierce

competition that often don't benefit us, the consumers. So how did we end up with this system in the first place? To answer that question, we're going back to the starting point. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randabd El-Fattah. And on this episode, the battle to electrify our world. Hi, this is Taha Soman from East Brunswick, New Jersey, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate

with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. On our brand new season of the StoryCorps podcast from NPR, you'll hear challenging conversations between friends, family members, and sometimes people who could have easily been enemies as they bridge divides and build connections where you'd least expect it. Episodes are available every Tuesday. Electricity is not like anything else.

It's not a solid or a liquid or a gas. It isn't quite like light or heat. It doesn't move like the wind or the tides. It doesn't combust like oil or burn like wood. For most of human history, the electricity that the world knew best was lightning, the wildest and deadliest electricity of all. The idea of taming or harnessing that power was lightning, the wildest and deadliest electricity of all. The idea of taming or harnessing that power was outrageous. But like most dangerous things, what convinced the average person to open their mind was magic, specifically the magic of new technology. Each bent the idea

of time and space, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph. All these technologies allowed information, sounds, and even the voices of people no longer alive to travel vast distances. Suddenly, the idea of lightning in the walls, power made in one place and instantly available in another, maybe it wasn't the craziest idea. Thomas Edison would become used to this cycle. Wild ideas made possible and then finally ordinary. I think the word genius is overused, but in Edison's case, I think it fits. Because not only was he one of the most fertile scientific minds, but he was a brilliant businessman, and he was a serial inventor.

He could not stop inventing. I'm Tom McNichol, author of ACDC. With a genius for both invention and business, Edison's gift was to see farther into the future than most. Inventing the phonograph or the the first practical light bulb, was just the start. Edison would sell the bulb, then he'd sell the electric motor to make the electricity, the technology to distribute it, the wires to carry it, and the socket to screw the bulb into. End to end, Edison had you.

Thomas Edison opens the first central power plant in downtown Manhattan in 1882. Before that, there really was no system of electricity. The key word there is system. Edison didn't invent electricity. He invented all the elements of the system, the one you could have seen in action in lower Manhattan. And if you were some kind of rich industrialist, you could actually order one like a kit. That system was powered by direct current, or DC. He was a small-town boy growing up in Ohio and Michigan, and I think his small-town roots

later would have some effect on the kind of electrical standard that he chose. The thing to know about that standard is in D.C., the electrons flow steadily in a single direction, forward. Worked beautifully. There were just a few problems, two really. And the first one may have had something to do with Edison's upbringing in small-town America. After about a mile's worth of transmitting DC, you started to get a power loss. Which meant that he imagined many generating systems within cities, each powering maybe a small part of that town. He never imagined getting electricity or power from Niagara Falls and sending it

hundreds of miles to New York City. This is another way of saying that Edison's system wasn't a grid that covered dense urban areas and remote sparsely populated rural ones equally. It was a spiderweb of many little grids, which brings us to... The second problem. DC power had to be made at the same voltage it was used. So if it was just light bulbs for a mile, no problem. But a block where some people wanted to light a light bulb and someone else wanted to light an electric stove or a streetcar, that would take three different lines, one for each use. Even a small part of this web was likely to have many, many

strands. If you look at some photographs of that era, late 1880s, early 1890s, you see these incredible poles filled with maybe 300, 400 wires because they didn't have a single standard and they didn't have high voltage step down to individual homes. So almost everyone who had electricity had a dedicated wire up on the electrical pole. So you see these just crazy looking things in New York, especially where their poles are groaning under the weight of hundreds and hundreds of wires. And it was pretty clear that that kind of system was not going to last long. And I lied.

There's another problem, or let's call it an issue. Electricity was and is dangerous. Even with the magic of electric light, getting past that was going to be a test in PR and in taking every safety precaution. The first owners of light bulbs didn't even want to change their own bulbs when they burned out. Brave specialists on bikes were hired to come and replace them. How much Edison was willing to see these flaws, we don't know for sure. He was known as a man of vision who most clearly saw his own strengths.

What we do know is that for a brief time in the mid-1880s, Thomas Edison employed a young immigrant, an engineer and inventor. Nikola Tesla, like Edison, got the technology bug early on and worked as an engineer in Europe in Continental Edison, which was Thomas Edison's European electrical company. So he was very familiar with the DC standard. He emigrates to America in 1884, and he actually briefly works for the Edison company for the machine works in New York City. Nobody knew who Tesla was. Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. But Tesla had his own kind of genius. And seeing the limitations of Edison's system, he pioneered another model. Rather than send current in one direction, Tesla's alternating current, or AC, sent electrons back and forth rapidly. AC meant...

That you could produce it at a certain voltage and then you could step it up, as it's called, to a higher voltage. And at that higher voltage, you could send it for much farther distances, at which point you could step it down to a lower voltage. That's Mark Essek. AC solved two problems at once. You could change the amount of voltage easily, and you could produce power where it was most plentiful or convenient. Niagara Falls has a ton of hydropower, so you could send high voltage to where it was needed the most, say New York City. Sounds perfect, right? Well, not for everyone. Edison hated it. There's no evidence that Tesla ever made his pitch to Edison directly. But Edison certainly rejected Tesla's idea. And in short order, Tesla left.

Maybe you're thinking, so what? Let the best model win. But in addition to Edison being world famous and Tesla being a nobody, Tesla was a nobody who was... Kind of a dreamer. He's a science guy who doesn't know much about business and doesn't really care and lives to invent but doesn't really know how to implement it. Very eccentric.

You know, he wasn't a good mixer in social situations. He's kind of this stereotypical, brilliant, technical person who doesn't really mix well. Edison was actually just the opposite. He was a, even though he was obviously a brilliant inventor, he was also very garrulous. That's why the newspapers loved him. They loved quoting him because the wizard of Menlo Park would show off his latest invention to the newspapermen. To put it mildly, Tesla. He didn't have the ability to do that. So he was smart enough to know that I have a promising standard, but I have no way to capitalize this. Therefore, I need somebody with money who's going to back this standard and really push it to have it compete with D.C.

That's where he hooks up with George Westinghouse. Tesla actually spent a couple of years desperately trying to find a place, any place, that would pay him enough for his AC motor. He even dug ditches for Edison's cables for a while. In Westinghouse, Tesla got what he wanted, and something he probably couldn't have dreamed of, a wealthy industrialist who wanted to make Tesla's invention, if not his name, the standard across the country. Westinghouse had made his fortune. In the 1860s and 70s, in the railroad industry, he developed really the first practical or the

first really effective railroad airbrake. Up until then, it had taken sometimes more than a mile to stop a freight train, if you can imagine that and the problems that would ensue from that. So that was a real game changer for the railroad industry, Westinghouse's air brake. So he was quite well capitalized and he lived and worked in Pittsburgh, which was at that time a thriving industrial area, soon to be a captain of steel. So he was kind of in the right place at the right time. And he would be, you know, one of the few industrialists with the money and the power and the connections to push a standard like this nationwide. The thing with standards is that there could only be one. Building out the grid, electrifying the nation,

it was winner-take-all. Edison and Westinghouse saw in the other true competition. In 1886, they began what became known as the Current War. Classic standards war ploy is that you try to get as much market share as quickly as you can and make the other system seem like the other one, the one that's not going to be as popular. Edison had been selling his system for a few years. But after a year in the business, Westinghouse had significantly eaten into Edison's share of the market. So you get to this point where one side seems so far ahead that the other side passed a fold.

Westinghouse focused on the huge number of rural and suburban areas that Edison couldn't serve as well. And if all else failed, he just made deals with local municipalities to say, hey, we can transmit and generate electricity cheaper than Edison can, which enticed a growing number of cities like New Orleans. Add this all up, and it didn't look good for Edison. But he had a bright idea. Convince the public that AC was more dangerous, more deadly than DC. Edison predicted, just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. Coming up, Edison plays dirty to win the current war. Hi, this is Malcolm Gerba.

I'm from Chicago, Illinois, and you're listening to ThruLine. As the current wars were heating up, electricity was becoming a part of American cities, and people were encountering its dangers in brutal ways. A lineman named John Feeks, he was working on the wires in Manhattan. At this point, the grid was more or less unregulated. So you would look up,

and there was just this amazing spiderweb of wires up there. And these were everything. These were fire signals. These were telegraph wires. These were electrical wires. And this was a lineman who was working on a low voltage telegraph wire. And as far as he knew, there was no danger there. But somewhere down the line, that telegraph wire had crossed with a high voltage electrical wire. And so when he grabbed the telegraph wire,

he got a tremendous surge of electricity through his body. And a crowd gathered and just watched him as he died from electrocution. And it really had a powerful effect. It was front page news in the many newspapers of Manhattan. It was illustrated, and it brought home to a lot of people that what had seemed so exciting, this new wonderful power that provided you with clean electric light inside your house, might pose dangers. There were stories in the newspapers about people who were ripping out their electrical wires.

There was, it became known as the electric wire panic. The gruesome death of John Feeks was a stark example of the potential hazards of electricity. But it wasn't the only incident. So as electricity spread across the country, people viewed it with excitement and some fear. Essentially, that worked to Edison's advantage because it supported his theories about why high voltage and particularly high voltage alternating current just should not be allowed above the streets of American cities. So it's not as if one standard was inherently safe

and the other was inherently unsafe. It was just, it was kind of the way you presented them. But it sounds like Edison understood the power of perception, right? And if people perceived that AC was more dangerous, maybe they would, by default, trend towards DC. Yes. While fears about AC power were growing, electricity became embroiled in a controversial question. How to humanely deliver the death penalty? There was a dentist by the name of Alfred Southwick who became sort of a hobbyist in

the death penalty. He had read newspaper accounts of a man who had gone to a power generating station. The public would just tour these stations and there weren't a lot of, there weren't many safety protocols in place. And so this one guy had reached out and just grasped a dynamo and he got the business end of it. And according to the newspaper reports, he died instantaneously. This piqued the interest of Alfred Southwick, who decided to start doing some experiments about whether electricity might be the answer to the problems of capital punishment. What were the problems with capital punishment? Well, sparing the gory details, by the late 1800s,

many activists and other people were calling for an end to the brutal methods used to kill death row inmates, mainly hanging or firing squad. And Southwick was one of these people. He thought the most humane way of killing a person would be with electricity. So in 1887, he wrote to Edison, Do you think electricity could be a good method of executing condemned prisoners? And Edison wrote back and said, no. And he said that he was opposed to capital punishment. He believed it had no place in a civilized country. And so he essentially told Southwick to go away.

And then Southwick wrote back and said, Your personal views on the matter don't really pertain because while it is the law of the land, we have a responsibility to do it as humanely as possible. This argument seemed to convince Edison. But what's weird is that he says in his response to Southwick, yes, electricity could be a humane method of capital punishment, but to do so, you had to use the alternating current. He specified in the letter that alternating current systems were primarily sold in the U.S. by George Westinghouse. His rival.

There's little reason to doubt that Edison remained genuinely opposed to the death penalty and that he truly believed electrocution would be a more humane method of executing prisoners. But when you mix that sincerity and Edison's burning desire to beat Westinghouse, then you get a very cynical marketing strategy. Essentially, his belief was he could use the electric chair as an issue to say,

look, when we want to kill people, we're using alternating current. And that was his way of convincing people that they should not bring alternating current into their houses, that if they brought alternating current into their homes where their children were, then they were posing a deadly risk to themselves. Edison was willing to go to any length to discredit AC power. Here are these two standards, one of which, according to a world-famous inventor, is very dangerous. So I could see that being a very compelling argument for a lot of people. And Edison wasn't just making an argument. He began publicly supporting this position.

First, he wrote a letter that was presented to the newly formed New York State Commission. It was tasked with investigating the viability of death by electrocution. Ultimately, that commission recommended electrocution as a better way of executing prisoners. And at some point in 1888, Edison's company, according to their own documents, began to support experiments that would help develop the electric chair.

He sort of took a step back. He did not play a primary role in the experimentation. But what he did allow was kind of a shadowy figure named Harold Brown, an electrical engineer by trade. He allowed this man to use Edison's laboratory for his experiments. And what those experiments consisted of was using Edison's electrical equipment to kill dogs. In order to test what the difference was between AC and DC electrocution. So he does many, many dozens of experiments and records them faithfully in his logbook. You can find in the Edison Laboratory notebooks records of these experiments. He collected these dogs and he would attach wires to their legs,

run current through those wires until the dogs were dead to try to come up with some notion of how much voltage and amperage was required to kill dogs of various sizes. They even executed a calf at one point to try to get a better idea of what would be needed to execute a larger creature such as a human being. Can you imagine if something happened like this today and there would be primarily horror at the torture

that was being inflicted upon these animals? Nobody seemed to be terribly concerned about the welfare of these dogs that were being killed. The whole attempt is to create this sort of scientific veneer that will convince people that D.C. is safe and A.C. is dangerous. It's important to remember, Edison was a big deal. He was seen as the most important inventor in the country and almost like a magician to most people. So when he spoke on an issue, people listened. I think you can really say that without Edison's participation,

there would not have been an electric chair. The first prisoner who was to be executed was William Kemmler. Who was just a poor peddler who lived in Buffalo, New York, who had killed his wife. And this is when Westinghouse decided to get involved, to play defense. Because Westinghouse knew that if Edison succeeded and AC became associated with the electric chair, then his business might be in trouble. Westinghouse would pay for Kemmler's legal defense. They appealed, claiming that electrocution qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, which would make the AC-powered electric chair unconstitutional and prevent

it from being used for capital punishment. It was a clever way to stop Edison, but ultimately, the appeals failed. William Kemmler's execution date was set for August 6, 1890, at Auburn State Prison in upstate New York. On the day of the execution, people filled the room to witness it. Reporters, state officials, and the dentist who started it all, Alfred Southwick. I mean, this guy was basically an experiment, not just an execution. First, Kemmler was strapped into the chair.

Restraints held his head back. A mask covered his eyes. He was supposed to die within seconds of the AC current being turned on. The current was turned on for 17 seconds at first, and then it was turned off. Alfred Southwick stood up and proclaimed, This is the culmination of ten years of work and study. We live in a higher civilization today. But right then, Kemmler began to gasp for air.

His chest heaved, his body convulsed. He was clearly suffering. And a doctor urged the warden to turn on the current once more. Do it again, do it again. And they weren't quite sure whether he was still alive. And then the warden had them turn on the current again. This time, the current would stay on for a few minutes. The room was so chaotic that no one recorded the official duration of that second current. Kemmler's flesh was burning and people were running out of the room and getting sick. It was a horrendous scene as all executions are, but this one particularly so. From the time Kemmler first got in the chair to the time the

current was finally shut off, it took eight minutes for Kemmler to die. Upon confirming his death, the doctor monitoring the execution said, there'll never be another electrocution. And people in the room that day told reporters, a hanging would have been much more merciful than this. When we come back, the aftermath of an electrocution gone very wrong. Hello, this is Natalie Karunaratne from San Diego, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

Love you guys. Bye. After the botched electrocution of William Kemmler, Westinghouse responded to the incident, which, remember, used his AC power, with shock. Meanwhile, Edison treated it merely as a bump in the road. He claimed future electrocutions with AC power would go much smoother, attempting to perpetuate the association between AC power and death. But it wasn't really working. That's the curious thing about this, this because although Edison succeeded in his plan to link his competitor's technology with killing, he ultimately failed to convince the public that alternating current therefore should not be used as the dominant system of electrifying the country. Because even as Kemmler was being executed,

direct current was losing out. Edison was losing business share. And the reason for this was simple. AC power was just cheaper. And ultimately it was a question of people deciding that the

risk was worth it. They came to accept that some accidental deaths from electric shocks just might be the price of progress. By this time, the standards war is all but lost. And yet, Edison can't let it go. He still wants to kind of defame AC as this dangerous standard. And by 1893, AC power from Westinghouse was used to electrify the World's Fair, one of the biggest events in the world at that time. The loss was so complete that everyone had to embrace AC power.

So within three years of the first execution by electricity in 1890, Edison's own company had thrown in the towel and embraced alternating current. And AC power's domination wasn't the only consequence of the current war. Even though the first death by electrocution was an absolute failure, the momentum didn't stop. People like Edison, who thought that they were serving the cause of humanity by making execution more humane, actually ensured the survival of the capital punishment in the U.S. because it gave people a way to say, look, it's modern, it's humane, we can keep doing this. Within a decade, AC power was being used to execute prisoners throughout the United States. In fact, the electric chair is

still used today in several states. And what happened to the main players in the standards war? Well, Edison eventually left his company, which would fall onto hard times before being bailed out by a merger. But this would be a temporary setback and loss of prestige for Edison. He would bounce back with success in other fields and would die as one of the most respected people in America. While Tesla, who arguably won the standards war, would continue to struggle financially, and partly because he's just no good at business and he's kind of a dreamer, he's a, you know,

he's a science guy who doesn't know much about business and doesn't really care and kind of lives to invent but doesn't really know how to implement it and died penniless in New York in the 40s. Westinghouse, the company, continued to grow, spread AC power throughout the U.S., and its namesake eventually lost control of the company but returned to his first love, invention, and died very wealthy. Today, the electrical grid that brings most of us electricity runs on Nikola Tesla's AC power.

It touches every part of our lives. But Thomas Edison's DC power is kind of making a comeback. It's the standard that runs power in things like batteries. In fact, if Edison were alive today, he'd see DC power, his creation, in the most curious place. Even the Tesla, the electric car, it runs on DC power. The motor's AC, but the battery pack, like every battery, delivers electricity as DC.

So I kind of like that. That brings it full circle. The car named after the guy who basically invented the AC standard runs on DC. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randabdur Fattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Jamie York. Lawrence Wu.

Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Lou Olkowski. Nigeri Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. Thanks for listening to the episode. This episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thank you to Rekia Aritomo, Devin Meller, San Juan Park, JC Howard,

and Steve Tyson for the voiceover work. Thanks also to Anya Grunin. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. If you like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. Thank you. would rise and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words

and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.