Government
When Cities Went Electric
You might know about Tesla vs. Edison. In cities, it was Edison vs. Westinghouse.
This post is part of a CityLab series on power—the political kind, the stuff inside batteries and gas tanks, and the transformative might of mass movements.
The story of electric power is a story of urbanization. The major battlefield of the famed “War of Currents”—an electric arms-race and propagandized power struggle between Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—was Manhattan. But to set the scene, let’s start in Paris, the City of Light.