Episode 1018: Greatest American Inventions — The Electrical Power System

Every invention in this series—the phone, the internet, the smartphone—depends on one foundational breakthrough. Newt unpacks the electrical power system's tangled origin story: Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station, Nikola Tesla's alternating current, and George Westinghouse's bet that AC was the future. Their rivalry erupted into the "War of Currents," settled dramatically at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. From there, electrification swept rural America, transforming domestic labor and daily life. It's the story of how competition and infrastructure investment built the invisible foundation on which the entire modern world now runs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.