Oh, it wasn’t just elephants. He did it with dogs, monkeys, etc. This wasn’t a one-time thing, he provided this “demonstration” on a variety of occasions.
All because he wanted the world to adopt his standard for electrical transmission, direct current (DC) instead of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC).
Tesla was a brilliant engineer and inventor. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing (though later he did get a little nutty). Edison just yelled at engineers he hired to do work for him.
I am so sad that Tesla’s name has been ruined. He was wildly intelligent and though he was a prominent figure in his prime, he died broke. It’s not bad enough that he went out like that, now we have a fucking clown pissing on his grave by using his name to sell his bullshit nazimobiles.
echodot@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
He was trying to prove that electricity was dangerous. Even at the time though a lot of people pointed out that the voltage used was not the voltage used in mains electrics so it was basically a pointless thing to do and people quite upset about the elephant. He did receive a fair amount of bad press for it.
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
He wanted to show that AC lines with their heigh voltages are dangerous, as he sold low voltage DC power.
piccolo@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Edison’s electricity was the same 110volts. But it it was 110v from generators to peoples homes and thus suffered greatly from resistance losses.
Telsa’s AC however used high voltages for distribution and step down to 110v at the final destination, so the resistance losses were much lower. Edison’s propaganda conveniently glosses over that fact.