The War of Currents: who would you side?

[Gungalley]

Imagine this is the 1880s. 2 great scientists with several rich businessmen are competing against each other over which type of current is superior. With smear campaigns and propaganda everywhere, which side would you side, and why?

[Mar77]

AC current, I mean have you seen what DC power lines looked like in New York around that time? It wasn't very efficient:

[Baron von Sky Hat]

It would be worth siding with alternating purely to support Tesla. Since he was many kinds of awesome. Admittedly he was also supposed to be a good few kinds of crazy as well, but mainly awesome.
In addition I've never been much of a fan of Edison. I mean, he gets a lot of bad press for not actually having invented the light bulb, when he's widely credited as having done so. However, that's not really his fault, he made genuine improvements to the design, and made them commercially viable. So I certainly think he was extremely clever, but possibly not quite as genuinely innovatively intelligent as he gets credit for, and more through commercial smarts made himself successful.
Which is an achievement in its own right, to be fair, but I have more respect for Tesla, who seems to have had a much larger and deeper interest in technology, inventing and changing the world.
Possibly I just prefer the fact that Tesla seemed more concerned with the ideas themselves, and less with their business potential. In addition, Tesla was more of an actual scientist, attempting to fully understand the various aspects of electricity, rather than just pure experimentation as with Edison. That may be quite unfair on Edison, really, however 'tis just my own opinion on my understanding of their personalities and actions. Nevertheless, regardless of opinions on Edison as a person, I still think Tesla was more interesting and amazing a person, if you look just at the sheer scale of some of his ideas, and how much he changed the face of understanding of electricity.

That's without considering that, for the time, AC was simply vastly superior for the purposes that the competition was over, as history has shown us. DC simply can't be transmitted at the efficiencies or over the distances that AC can. With a basically centralised power generation system, AC really was the only plausible option. Whilst it's possible that we're now heading down a route of de-centralised power generation, with many renewable sources scattered all over the place, rather than fewer but larger power stations, which could arguably mean that DC as a method of local distribution could potentially make a comeback, since a very highly distributed system is the only system for which DC is plausible. Although, even with distributed power like that, the transmission distances would still likely be such that AC would still be more effective.

As to what someone might have actually thought at the time, with the more limited general understanding of the science involved, as well as the propaganda and rhetoric flying around from both sides, Edison's and Westinghouse's companies, I'm not sure what opinion might have been. From the picture Mar77 posted, I could imagine people wanting a system that might lead to a slightly less elaborate and extensive system of wiring though....

[Ter]

AC clearly, the power loss in DC was horrendous. Though Sky Hat's point about the possibilities of small scale use in the future is interesting.

As far as the personalities go, I've never really got the great interest in Tesla - this area of physics isn't really my thing. However I do like that Edison wanted to use the phrase "to westinghouse" to mean "to kill using electricity".