>It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too.

This!

The soon people realized these facts the better. The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes.

Exactly twenty years ago I was doing a novel research on GaN characterization, and my supervisors made a lot money with consulations around the world, and succesfully founded govt funded start-up company around the technology. Together with SiC, these are the two game changing power devices with wideband semiconductor technology that only maturing recently.

Heck, even the Nobel price winning blue LED discovery was only made feasible by GaN. Watch the excellent video made by Veritasium for this back story [1].

[1] Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED:

https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M

the internet really needs to stfu about tesla and get over that oatmeal comic that spawned a billion internet myths. dude was a decent inventor but suffered from chronic mental health issues and, in his lifetime, wasted so much time/energy/money and burned so many bridges with his horrible attitude. there's a reason most people didnt like him in his day, he was a depressed asshole who alienated everyone around him, and yes I know he was likely gay in a time when that wasn't cool. the fact still remains; his inventions are massively overblown by internet nerds.

the podcaster Sebastian Major from "Our Fake History" did a looonnngg patreon episode on tesla and debunked most of the weird myths around tesla. Sebastian doesn't have a vendetta or anything, it's just amazing how much of the Tesla stuff is just nonsense or is viewed through a very weird bias nowadays. Major also briefly touches on the weird Edison stuff and how the internet has twisted Edison into a villain.

Also, if anything would have been Edison's revenge it would have been HVDC, where they're sending power long distances with DC. (But as you said, even there it wouldn't make a ton of sense, since they were arguing in a different era).

Yeah this isnt an argument. It was far simpler to wrap some copper wire around a chunk of metal than it was to fire up a mosfet fabrication plant in the 1800's.

You can have the best idea in the world, but if you cant manufacture it you're SOL.

It's just a fun title, you are overthinking it

Title is clickbait. Edison is not mentioned anywhere else in article. I am okay with it.

sure, and also Montezuma didn't actually plan on diarrhea ruining people's vacations, but vernacular usage being what it is we have the phrase Montezuma's revenge.

I only found Edison in the headline, I didn't find it anywhere in the body, nor did I find Tesla. Glancing through the article it almost seems like someone tried to make a catchy headline to get clicks.

Agreed, for the IEEE to go down this route is more than a little weird.

But there was an equivalent: a mechanical switch. Or an electromechanical relay. Or a spinning wheel with electrical contacts.

It was Westinghouse who pushed the AC grid against his rival Edison's DC approach. Tesla was a minor figure working for both of them for a bit.

Agree, clickbait.

yes, this! thank you good post

Tesla also design the modern induction motor which needs ac. Though these days we often run them on a phase generator which has a dc step.

> If there was anything like a high power transistor back then he would have used that.

Mercury arc rectifiers were used long before his death.