Are tech bros the new Victorians? I’m sure they wouldn’t think so. In fact, I’m sure they’d be deeply insulted by the notion. The Victorians of our imagination are staid fuddy-duddies—and the captains of Silicon Valley are the cutting edge of the future.

But the Victorians, too, thought of themselves as masters of invention, just as tech bros do now. As we contemplate the role of new technology, and the men who dominate it, in everything from financial markets to climate change, the Victorians offer a cautionary tale and a glimpse of how we got to the place we’re in. By creating and perpetuating the myth that futures are built on the backs of heroic, self-made individuals, Victorians shaped today’s misbegotten sense that it’s lone genius mavericks—and not collaborative efforts—that shape our tomorrows.

Victorian innovators, like their contemporary counterparts, saw themselves surfing a wave of invention into a new technological century. Invention after invention transformed the Victorian world—steam locomotion, the electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, animated photographs, and of course, electricity: The list could go on.

So, who was responsible for this Victorian future? Who made it, and owned it?

In fact, progress was usually collaborative. The effort to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, linking two continents in practically instantaneous communication, for example, required the collective labor of hundreds. But Victorian popular culture celebrated men of science and inventors as the future’s authors: Individuals who had the discipline, determination, and sheer grit needed to remake the world in their own image.

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, a popular inspirational book published in 1859, treated readers to glowing biographies of men like these, including Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning frame, and steam entrepreneur James Watt. Smiles urged readers to regard the biographies of determined men as gospel—a truly shocking thing to say at the time.

“Watt was one of the most industrious of men,” wrote Smiles, “and the story of his life proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the highest results, but he who employs his power with the greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill.” Inventors were special men, the thinking went (and it goes without saying that, just like tech bros, they were men).

The American icon of industrious, self-made inventor-entrepreneurship was Thomas Alva Edison, who famously said that successful invention was 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration and often played on his image as the self-made, all-American, plain-speaking and plain-working man of action. No fancy theory for him. The future was going to be the property of the plain man made good. When, in 1898, pulp fiction author Garrett P. Serviss wrote a quasi-sequel to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, it was a fictionalized Edison, captain of industry, who led the avenging fleet of electrically powered spaceships to Mars.

The flamboyant inventor and self-promoter Nikola Tesla—who competed with Edison and carefully cultivated his own image as a reclusive iconoclast and rule-breaker—provided a different, but related, model for Victorian invention. Tomorrow belonged to people like him (well, actually, only him, in Tesla’s opinion). “Nikola Tesla says Men of the Future may become as Gods,” screamed a New York Herald headline in 1900. The “great magician of electricity” pronounced that “war would be abolished,” thanks to his inventions, and that he would “work a revolution of the politics of the whole world.”

Tesla worked hard to hone his outsider-hero image, and kept on working at it until his death in 1943. A series of biographies polishing his reputation began rolling out soon after, with John Joseph O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius of 1944, and in recent years he’s been namechecked by everything from Doctor Who and The Big Bang Theory to the Disney cartoon Gravity Falls. That image of the inventor as iconoclast, operating outside the rules, is clearly a very seductive one.

There’s little question which of the conflicting Victorian images of invention Silicon Valley’s tech bros prefer; that car wasn’t called Tesla by accident. But channeling the iconoclast makes aspiring tech entrepreneurs very Victorian indeed. Despite the hype, Tesla really was a man of his own time.

His is the Victorian vision that works for now. You succeed through provoking difference, not by excelling at what’s here already. It’s the cult of individual iconoclasm taken to its extreme. Tesla promised that men might become as gods, but only if they bought into his vision of the future. It’s that seductive vision that makes the values of disruption seem so attractive now, too. Disruption seems to offer a road to power—and that’s apparently true for many politicians, as well as tech entrepreneurs.

But in reality, disruption was a Victorian fantasy, rather than actuality. Tesla died penniless, his innovations abandoned for other technologies, and it had nothing to do with the excuses he promoted. Edison didn’t steal his ideas, and unscrupulous capitalists weren’t terrified by his inventions. Tesla died penniless because he made the mistake of believing his own publicity. He really did think he could single-handedly forge the future through disruption. But his example suggests the opposite.

In the end, the Victorians show us that futures are best made collectively—when we build them to address what communities genuinely need now, instead of offering castles in the sky.

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The war that erupted between Edison and Westinghouse would go down in history as the “battle of the currents.” It’s the story behind two of America’s industrial giants (General Electric and Westinghouse) and the choice that defined America’s future: electricity traveling across vast networks of cables and wires and poles, powering a nation. Integrating technology into our lives is now so routine that it’s difficult to imagine the high emotional pitch of the battle of the currents—or just how it came to involve electrocuting animals in public.

On July 30, 1888, in a lecture hall at Columbia College in New York City, electrician Howard P. Brown escorted a large black dog onto the stage in front of 700 electricians, government officials, and policymakers. After a short lecture explaining the difference between Edison’s direct current and Westinghouse’s alternating electrical current, Brown and his assistants fastened electrodes to the dog’s fore and hind legs.

Brown administered a range of intensities of DC. The first jolt caused the dog to leap into the air. The second jolt caused the dog to struggle. After a third shock, the dog ripped off his muzzle. Brown continued increasing the volts up to 1000, when the dog collapsed, breathing heavily. Brown then attached the wires to a generator, distributing Westinghouse-style AC current. At 330 volts, the charge immediately killed the creature, drawing gasps from the crowd.

“The duration of the current was only five seconds,” wrote a reporter for The Sun the next day, “but when it was cut off the troubles of the big black dog were over.”

Despite seeing the animal writhing in pain, Brown asserted that death by electricity was humane and painless. As he went to bring out a second animal, a representative from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ended the demonstration, handing him a $250 fine.

How did this torture of animals in the name of science and public safety come about? In the midst of the battle over adopting AC or DC, the New York State Legislature was also considering electricity as a new method for capital punishment. Brown, who had been secretly encouraged by Thomas Edison, held his series of public demonstrations to prove that alternating current could be lethal, and thus was ideal for use in executions. The effects of these gruesome performances on policymakers and the early public understanding of electricity reveal how new technology gets adopted and the many ways its reception can be manipulated—and influenced by freak accidents.

Photograph of a tangle of telephone, telegraph, and power lines over the streets of New York City after the Great Blizzard of 1888. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/The New York Historical Society.

The rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse had been brewing for years, but it came to a head a few months earlier in March 1888, when two feet of snow fell on New York and thick ice pulled telephone poles down. Telegraph and electric wires lay so tangled in places that poles needed to be sawed in half. After the deaths of line workers and even children, it became apparent that the canopy of overhead wires that had grown up over the past few years could be lethal.

With the blizzard, the battle of the currents came into public view. Before Westinghouse arrived in New York, there hadn’t been a problem with snow on the wires because Edison’s company buried its cables underground. Westinghouse, though, couldn’t get permits to dig because of Edison’s close ties with government officials. So Westinghouse was forced to hang wires overhead.

Telegraph, telephone, and electric companies shared the poles, but the political message became one of public safety, that alternating, high-voltage current was running through those wires. It was common knowledge that the blue-collar maintenance men who climbed poles to maintain the city’s vast network of wires had a dangerous job. But with live wires dangling free, their accidental deaths came to be seen as those of martyrs.

Anxiety about overhead wires coalesced in July with the publication of an impassioned letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post. Electrician Howard Brown took a stand against alternating current. Brown eulogized the “scores killed and maimed by the ‘pulsating’ current.” Brown’s letter called for political action and reform to make the city safe again.

Brown pointed his finger at the “damnable,” “alternating current” used by the arc lighting systems of Westinghouse’s company. “Among electric lighting men it is appropriately called ‘undertaker’s wire,’” he explained, “and the frequent fatalities it causes justify the name.” He went so far as to say that Westinghouse’s company provided electricity at a cheaper cost not because AC had superior efficiency but because they were cutting corners.

In case words weren’t enough to rally the public, Brown intended to put on a show. His public health campaign sought a neologism for death by electricity. Magazines advertised contests to coin this new word. Suggestions included various connections between electricity, death, and the body. The Sacramento Union provided a long list, from “electromort” and “electricide” to “joltacuss.” The term “electrocution” eventually won out, effectively making alternating current synonymous with death.

The discussion of death by electricity and its adoption as the method of capital punishment in New York state went hand in hand with Harold Brown’s electrocution demonstrations. Under the guise of determining an effective and humane standard for New York state’s proposed legislation, Brown continued to denounce Westinghouse’s alternating current as the best way to kill living creatures.

Early in the summer of 1888, Brown received an invitation to Edison’s new laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison encouraged Brown to take his advocacy campaign public in the form of demonstrations. They would prove, scientifically, that alternating current was lethal and direct current was not. And to do this, they would use a visceral and unforgettable display: electrocuting animals.

Four days after Brown’s Columbia demonstration was prematurely cut short, he returned to conduct a follow-up demonstration using three dogs. Public outrage erupted, and observers questioned the scientific legitimacy of Brown’s claims. In the ensuing debate, electricians claimed that the initial low-voltage DC shocks weakened the dogs, making the final high-voltage shock seem more lethal than it would have been in isolation.

On the eve of the adoption of electrocution for capital punishment in New York, with the standard still not set, Brown partnered with Edison at the latter’s West Orange laboratory. In December 1888, two calves and a horse were electrocuted, in order to better test the weight of the animal against the average size of a human subject. The electrocution of a 1,230-pound horse was particularly elaborate.

Westinghouse finally spoke out. In a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, Westinghouse debunked Brown‘s claims. Five days later, Brown responded with another letter to the editor, this time in The New York Times. Brown denied his affiliation with Edison, or at least any ties involving compensation. Brown challenged Westinghouse to a duel using the currents and offered to see who would survive. The duel never took place.

Westinghouse finally won back some credit in August 1889, when a burglary at Brown’s New York offices led to a massive exposé of Edison funding his efforts. But Westinghouse’s triumph didn’t last long.

The war of the currents came to a head in October 1889. Just after noon on a Friday, high up on the poles at the corner of Chambers and Center streets in lower Manhattan, Western Union line worker John Feeks stripped a tangled mess of dead wires. Feeks shivered, then bolted upright, paralyzed. A second later, he tumbled from his perch and was caught in the canopy of telegraph wires. The loose, live wires sent electricity pulsing through his body. Forty feet above the busy street, Feeks caught fire. It took an hour for emergency responders to arrive, extinguish the fire, and extricate his charred body.

Feeks’ death stood as a turning point in the battle of the currents for several reasons. It occurred in the harsh light of day before thousands of people. The story circulated both as a word-of-mouth tale that fed the rumor mill and a high-profile front-page newspaper story. Newspapers made an event out of Feeks’ death, covering his autopsy, funeral, and widow’s bereavement.

Like Brown’s campaign against AC, Feeks’ death stirred the city to the core. There was nothing rational or pragmatic about the subsequent crusade by New York mayor Hugh J. Grant to indict the electrical companies to suspend business. Feeks became a poster boy for the public to rally against AC, spurring Grant to convene committees and courts to push for legislation to clean up the overhead wires once and for all.

Yet the truly fateful decisions got made out of public view. In 1892, facing pressure to economize and upgrade, Edison’s two biggest investors—J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt—made the executive decision to switch to AC. The subsequent merger between the Edison Electric Lighting Company and Thompson-Houston electric formed the Edison General Electric Company (later General Electric).

In 1893, Westinghouse won the contract to supply electric to the much-anticipated Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That World’s Fair unveiled the Ferris wheel and the first motion picture machines and also solidified a promising future for cheap, safe, and efficient alternating current as the standard in America.

The battle of the currents was never really about determining which system was best. It was, instead, a rivalry between two industry giants, with helpless animals and line workers as collateral damage. In a sense, Edison’s strategy succeeded in popularizing the notion that electricity was dangerous, which was cemented with the execution of William Kemmler in an electric chair in 1890. But Westinghouse also “won” through his unflinching embrace of a more effective technology, which eventually became the industry standard. Exploiting ignorance and using fear to manipulate the public can have significant effects on perceptions, but isn’t always enough to influence adoption when it comes to new technologies.

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As curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, part of my job involves documenting and preserving the history of electric lighting so that future generations can study original objects and learn about that aspect of our everyday lives. The pace at which LEDs have come to dominate the market surprised everyone, both inside and outside the lighting profession. When we revamped our Lighting A Revolution exhibition in 2000, we left out LEDs because we lacked both gallery space and items to display. Little did we realize that most of the lighting technologies we explored in that exhibition, like tungsten halogen and compact fluorescent lamps, were about to become obsolete.

These days, electric lighting serves as a mostly invisible technology. But only a century ago, people accustomed to trimming candles, cleaning kerosene lamps, and smelling the odor of gas jets stood and gazed in awe at the steady glow of incandescent lamps developed by Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in the 1880s and 1890s. Clean, easily controllable, and simple to replace, incandescent lamps appeared in a host of applications, from deep sea diving to aviation. As electric power grids reached ever more people, lighting costs fell and reliability rose. Consumers adopted electric lighting to gain control over their interior–and ultimately exterior–environments. By the 1930s industrialized nations were awash in light. As one illumination engineer later noted, incandescent lamps were the perfect light source, except for one little problem: poor energy efficiency.

The constant search for improved energy efficiency has influenced the story of every lighting development since. During the 1930s, lamp makers introduced discharge lighting, which involved getting an enclosed gas or a vaporized metal such as mercury or sodium to produce usable amounts of light. Fluorescent tubes, introduced to the American public at the 1939 World’s Fair, were widely adopted by commercial and industrial users during World War II and quickly made their way into homes after the war. Engineers measure the amount of light output in lumens; fluorescent tubes could provide up to three times more lumens per watt than incandescent lamps, but many users objected to the artificial quality of the light. In most American homes in the 1960s, incandescents still reigned supreme.

The introduction of a new type of phosphor coating in the late 1970s addressed some of those concerns and allowed for the development of compact fluorescent lamps, which could be screwed into the same sockets as incandescent bulbs. By the early 2000s, steadily rising energy costs and a decrease in the cost of compact fluorescents created an incentive for replacement. Still, many users objected to the unfamiliar color and strange physical appearance of compact fluorescent lamps. Others were uneasy about the small amount of mercury present in compact fluorescents. There seemed little alternative for small, energy-efficient lamps until Akasaki and Amano’s, and especially Nakamura’s, breakthroughs in LEDs.

LEDs actually trace their history back to the invention of the transistor in 1947 and research on solid-state lasers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Historians are still sorting out exactly who contributed what and when, but the published literature shows that in 1962, Robert Rediker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated LEDs that glowed just below the spectrum of visible light in the infrared range, and Nick Holonyak at General Electric demonstrated red LEDs. Later that decade, GE’s miniature lamp department introduced a line of yellow-orange LEDs. Early LEDs were not very energy-efficient, and only a few colors could be reliably produced. Despite that, over the following 30 years, LEDs found a niche market as indicator lamps on circuit boards and for displays on digital clocks and pocket calculators. As more people adopted small electronic devices, producers gained more experience in the design and manufacture of LEDs.

Manipulating elements like gallium, phosphorus, arsenic, aluminum, and nitrogen on the molecular level in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in bright red and green LEDs. But white light requires a combination of red, green, and blue—and blue remained a problem. Building on work by Akasaki and Amano from the mid-1970s to late 1980s, Nakamura demonstrated the first bright blue LED in 1993. These breakthroughs have made LEDs near ubiquitous–now they appear in traffic signals, hallway exit signs, table lamps, computer and television screens, cell phone photo displays, and flashlights. Combined with digital controllers, LEDs can generate a spectrum of colors that actively changes in response to programmers’ needs. Most importantly, LEDs’ energy efficiency continues to rise while costs for manufacturing, materials, distribution, and design begin to fall.

Last month I attended a lighting trade show in Baltimore sponsored by the Illuminating Engineering Society where 30 or so vendors displayed a wide range of LED fixtures–for everything from accent lighting to large stage projectors. Similar to the way automotive engineers measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, lighting engineers have been looking for the maximum lumens per watt so they cost less to operate and are better for the environment. I learned that energy efficiency for LEDs has improved to around 140 lumens per watt and that experimental lamps giving 300 lumens per watt have been demonstrated in the lab. At best, incandescent lamps give about 30 lumens per watt and compact fluorescents about 90, while improved discharge lamps like metal halide and high-pressure sodium streetlights give around 130.

Unlike LEDs, incandescent lamps and discharge lamps are mature technologies without room for much improvement, so virtually no one, I learned, is now investing research and development money in them. Anyone who recalls the blackout during the 2013 Super Bowl will be pleased to learn that manufacturers are working on LED projectors suitable for use in large sports stadiums. The long interruption in the game came in part from the fact that the metal halide lamps being used to light the field had to cool off before they would relight. The issue with them reminds me of what Chief Engineer Scott once said to Captain Kirk on Star Trek: “I can’t change the laws of physics!” There are versions of these lamps that can restrike almost instantly, but they are very expensive and need special installations to operate. LEDs use a different physics. Because they cost much less per unit, they’re also much more economical for giant displays.

Of course there are problems still to be resolved. LEDs remain sensitive to ambient temperatures and don’t last as long when it’s hot out. Pilots and drivers alike complain about the sheer brightness of LEDs. The speed of innovation means that a given lighting product may only be available for about one year before being upgraded. Contractors on large installations that take a long time to complete may find that suppliers no longer stock a product they want by the time they go to install the lighting. Safety standards, design standards, and electrical codes governing the use of LED lights are still being developed; no one wants to lock something down today if that precludes something far better tomorrow.

Since Edison’s day, every time a novel light source was unveiled, commentators declared that the end of his incandescent lamp was at hand. This has never turned out to be the case in the past—but we may now actually witness that declaration coming to pass. I expect we’ll be seeing more and more applications for LEDs, especially since they’re already being integrated into smart environmental systems in buildings and homes. Long life spans, already 10 years and better, may mean that changing light bulbs becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience–or a job for an electrician. LEDs may make lighting technology even more invisible than it is already.

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