Long ago,there was no electricity. A man called Thomas Alva Edison made an electric station. His electricity was delivered by a direct current, or DC. But a DC system loses a lot of energy as heat. A young Croatian engineer called Nikola Tesla told Edison he had made a new current. It was the alternating current, or AC. It did not lose any energy. Edison did not want to hear Tesla's AC stuff. He offered Tesla $50,000 to improve the company's DC generaters. When Tesla came to collect his money, Edison told him the $50,000 had been a joke. Tesla was so angry he quit the job & never spoke to Edison again. Still, Tesla belived AC was the future electricity. In 1888, George Westinghouse, an inventer and businessman, gave Tesla $70,000 for the plans of the AC motor. When Edison found out Westinghouse was giving cheap AC to customers, he quickly started a campaign to bad-mouth AC. But in the end, AC still won. All of what Edison did couldn't hide the fact that AC was better to deliver electricity than DC.
