Nature’s electric lightshow
Thomas Alva Edison
Alberta Legislature Building decorated with lights, 1912

    Clovis phase spear points used in present-day Alberta.

    Source: Historical Resources Management Branch, Archaeological Survey



    Source: Courtesy of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump


    Bow and arrow technology reaches present-day Alberta.

    Source: Courtesy of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump


    The ‘Horse Revolution’ begins in present-day Alberta.

    Source: Royal Alberta Museum


    Rocky Mountains National Park is established by the Canadian government.



    The Calgary Water Power Company opens Alberta’s first hydroelectric plant.

    Source: Glenbow Archives, NA-4477-44


    The City of Edmonton purchases the Edmonton Electric Lighting Company.

    Source: Glenbow Archives, NC-6-271


    The Calgary Power Company is formed.

    Source: Photo courtesy of TransAlta


    Alberta’s First hydroelectric dam opens at Horseshoe Falls.

    Source: Glenbow Archives NA-3544-28


    The Ghost Hydroelectric Dam begins operations

    Source: Glenbow Archives, NA-5663-44



    Source: Glenbow Archives, NA-4160-20





    Cowley Ridge Wind Farm begins operations near Pincher Creek.

    Source: Photo courtesy of TransAlta


    Drake Landing Solar Community opens near Okotoks, Alberta.

    Source: Wikimedia Commons/CA-BY-SA-3.0



    Source: Photo Courtesy of Enerkem

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The “Current Wars”

In the late nineteenth century, a nasty, vicious publicity war took place between advocates of two different types of electricity distribution—alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC). The DC system was simple and generally safer than the AC system, as it transmitted lower voltages of electricity across its power lines. The huge (and ultimately) fatal drawback of the DC system was its inability to transmit electricity over significant distances. Too much power was simply lost by the transmission of DC electricity over the power lines. Thus, DC power plants could provide electricity only to customers over a relatively short distance (less than a mile). By contrast, AC systems retained much more of their power when transmitting over greater distances, greatly increasing the service range of an AC power plant. In addition, AC plants could expand their capacity with relative ease, something that could not be done with DC plants. The biggest drawback of the AC system was safety; the system transmitted its electricity at much higher voltages across its power lines. Though hardly a daily occurrence, instances of electrocution caught the attention of the news media and generated terrible publicity.

It was this issue of public safety that drove the public relations campaign during the “current wars,” and the man who led the attack on AC power was the internationally renowned inventor Thomas Edison. Throughout the process of developing the incandescent light bulb, Edison was determined to focus not just on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, but also on safety. Edison was extremely concerned about the potential safety risk posed by high-voltage electrical wires hanging over city streets. Thus, he built his first power plant in 1882 to provide relatively low-voltage DC electricity. At the time of Edison’s invention, AC power was in relative infancy, but by 1884, AC systems were being tested for street lighting in Europe. This technology caught the attention of George Westinghouse, a wealthy businessman from Pittsburgh who believed that AC power had tremendous potential for electricity distribution in the United States. In 1886, Westinghouse opened a commercial power plant in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the first of its kind in the United States to use the AC system. This was a direct challenge to the supremacy of Edison’s DC system, and the “current wars” were underway.

Edison focused his anti-AC campaign on the issue of safety, partly out of sincere conviction, but also because he knew that this issue stood the best chance of resonating with the public. He was correct, but the result was one of the most disturbing publicity campaigns in history. In order to buttress his attacks on AC power, Edison secretly hired a man named Harold Brown to hold demonstrations and publicize the dangers of AC power. Brown’s most notorious series of demonstrations involved the killing of stray animals: to prove that DC power was safer than AC power, the animal would be administered a shock using the first system, and fatally electrocuted using the second. This campaign was taken one gruesome step further in the late 1880s when Edison was consulted by the State of New York regarding how to execute criminals more humanely. Though an opponent of capital punishment in principle, Edison recognized an opportunity to further

discredit his opponent, and he advised the construction of an electric chair running on AC power. Edison hoped that the use of the electric chair would further anchor the association between AC power and danger in the public mind; indeed, he went so far as to try and introduce the term “Westinghoused” into common usage to describe executions using the electric chair.

Edison, however, was fighting a losing battle. Refinements in the AC system, particularly the use of transformers to regulate the flow of electricity over its power lines, made the system safer, and the DC system simply could not compete with the higher overall efficiency of the AC system. Because the AC system could transmit power over great distances with little power loss, plants could be built far away from customers, paving the way for new sources of power (such as hydro) to generate electricity. By the early twentieth century, the AC system was completely dominant.
