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To: Doug Meetmer who wrote (3641)	1/10/1999 10:56:00 AM
From: Islander	Respond to of 19700

When Westinghouse bought Tesla's AC, Gates bought MS-DOS (for $50,000 from a now unknown tech guy in Seattle, refined it and sold it to IBM, you know the rest of that story) and when we bought the Net (way back when in 1999) see below (of course, all credit to thestreet.com): The Net Analogies Around Us By James J. Cramer 1/7/99 7:27 AM ET How big can the Net be? I must spend hours each day trying to think of analogies that come close to conveying the potential for the darn thing. Then, periodically, I stumble onto something that captures it perfectly, and it explains the unlimited upside to me. This time, I found it in paid-up subscriber David Owen's unbelievably good book The Walls Around Us -- an unlikely place because it's the story of how a house is put together. (It is available via this link to Amazon.com (AMZN:Nasdaq), and it's worth buying.) Owen writes eloquently of a dispute between Thomas Edison, of whom everybody knows, and some guy named Nikola Tesla, of whom nobody knows but who apparently invented everything Edison didn't invent plus a few more gadgets -- and died penniless for a bunch of reasons worth reading about. Anyway, Edison and Tesla invented competing electrical systems. Edison's ran on direct current, while Tesla's used alternating current. I know, who cares, but think of this: Edison's plan was to build a coal-fired power plant on virtually every street corner in the country! That would have been necessary because DC loses voltage rapidly as it travels over wires, and thus can't be transmitted over long distances. A hundred years ago, no one would have complained about the smoke and noise from Edison's power plants because they would have replaced an even bigger nuisance: unreliable gas lamps that smelled bad, gave off soot, made people sick and burned down houses. But Tesla's idea was better by an order of magnitude. For complicated reasons that I can't begin to understand, AC power, unlike DC, can be transmitted over very long distances. Tesla's system, in other words, eliminated the need for all those nasty power plants, thus cutting out a horrendous middleman. With Tesla's AC system, you could build one gigantic power plant right at the coal mine and ship electrons instead of coal. In 1888, Tesla sold the rights to his system (for $1 million) to George Westinghouse, who used Tesla's patents to build the world's first centralized generating station at Niagara Falls. Edison's DC sytem, Owen writes, "rapidly proved to be the evolutionary dead end that Tesla had always said it was." Edison, who hated Tesla and had tried for years to discredit AC, ended up having to license Tesla's technology from Westinghouse. Back to the Internet: No one I know is smart enough to distinguish the Edisons from the Teslas from the Westinghouses at this early stage of the evolution of this amazing and rapidly changing new technology. (Read: the AOLs (AOL:NYSE) from the Amazons from the eBays (EBAY:Nasdaq)). But here are a few points to ponder: Tesla got rich, but he sold out cheap (the electrical system we use today is exactly the same one he invented); Westinghouse didn't invent the AC motor -- the key to the whole revolution -- but he made a lot more money from it than Tesla did; Edison despised Tesla and tried to ruin his career, but Tesla's system increased the value of Edison's most famous invention, the incandescent light bulb, by many millions of dollars; and the key to all the really big money was distribution. Most important of all, there are certain kinds of technological change that, once set in motion, are unstoppable. The great Thomas Edison couldn't stop alternating current. And not even Nikola Tesla could have stopped electricity. Or do you know anyone still in the coal-distribution business?