13
And
rival the American upstart's, the British aristocrat was forced to import his
alternators from the German firm of Siemens. Siemens, in fact, had a good
deal of the generating equipment market sewn up. British electric railways,
for example, depended on Siemens' machines.
Meanwhile, Britain's Faraday had long since discovered the principle
of the alternating-current transformer, but hadn't bothered to turn it into
anything of practical value. The man who championed ac's development
was an American named Westinghouse. Faraday had also shown the
principle of an ac electric motor in 1821. But it took a scientist working with
Westinghouse in America to make the ac motor a practical product 67 years
later.
To top it all off, Faraday's experiments inspired a Massachusetts
painter to figure out a use for electrical power that would dramatically
shrink the world--communication. In 1835, the Yankee portrait artist, Samuel
Finley Breese Morse, built the first telegraph.17
Even the French got into the act. They went whole hog for outdoor
electric-arc illumination. Paris became the city of light while London--the
beacon of western civilization--was still in the dark.18
One consequence: in 1873, Britain went into an economic nosedive.
The British called it "The Great Depression."19 Wrote English businessman
H.L. Beales, "Everywhere there is a stagnation and a negation of hope.... This
is not a period like those which followed ordinary panics. It is more likely
the beginning of a new era for ourselves and the world." Beales was right.
A new era was beginning. And the British wouldn't like it.20
What was the Great Depression of the 1870s all about? Steam
technology was petering out. Most of the countries interested in buying a
railroad from Britain already had one. Most of the factories that could use a
British steam engine had already installed a gaggle of them.
when the Englishman Sir Coutts Lindsay erected a power station to
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