The world’s greatest inventor had a problem. Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulbs made electric light practical, and his generators made it possible for the first time to supply both light and electrical power to large numbers of people. But by the late 1880s, growing population and increasing demand for electricity exposed serious weaknesses in his direct current (DC) power system.
Direct current relied on a cumbersome network of wires carrying electricity from a power plant to each individual customer. Since this method was efficient only over short distances, every urban mile to be electrified required its own separate plant and wire network, creating monumental logistical, construction, and maintenance problems.
The answer, had Edison chosen to recognize it, was right under his nose. European immigrant Nikola Tesla, an Edison employee, suggested using alternating current (AC) power instead. With AC, a single plant can supply electricity to thousands of customers scattered over a large area. Small transformers located in each street or neighborhood send just the right amount of current from main trunk lines into each home or business.
Instead of embracing this brilliant innovation, Edison drove Tesla away and then launched an unbecoming and ultimately doomed campaign to discredit both the man and his idea. At one point Edison (though an opponent of capital punishment) even quietly supported construction and use of the first electric chair in hopes that the device’s AC generator would underscore the supposed deadliness of AC.
In her book Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World, author Jill Jonnes offers one explanation for this obstinacy: “Edison took enormous and justifiable pride in having invented—although often with the help of his subordinates—every aspect of his low-voltage [DC] electrical system.”
Edison’s name was, after all, synonymous with invention. In the end he had more that 1,000 U.S. patents to his name. What he clearly wanted was an improved version of his own system, not something radically new. Perhaps he had come to believe that the Edison way was the best way, simply for being Edison’s.
Tesla was not the only one who stood to suffer from Edison’s campaign. Had it succeeded, Americans would have had to make do with inferior technology, quite possibly letting the rest of the developed world catch up and take the lead. Fortunately, Pittsburgh industrialist George Westinghouse recognized an opportunity, and formed a partnership with Tesla that assured America a leadership position in AC power, which remains the world standard today.
What did we Americans learn from this classic lesson in technological hubris? If the telecommunications industry is any indication, not enough. Scottish-born American Alexander Graham Bell may have given the world the telephone, but when it comes to the most exciting area of phone technology today, mobile wireless broadband, “America is a Third World nation,” says Phil Burgess, president of The Annapolis Institute in Maryland.
While Americans take for granted mysterious dead spaces, conversations abruptly halted upon entering a tunnel or building, or aimless searches for a few extra bars of signal strength, mobile phone users in Western Europe, South Korean, Japan, and Australia take for granted the ability to converse clearly from elevators, underground parking garages, or speeding intercity trains, all without skipping a beat.
From 2005-2008, Burgess was a high-profile executive of Australian telecom giant Telstra Corp. The company launched the world’s largest and fastest mobile broadband network, now delivering up to 42 megabits per second (6 megabits per second is considered blazing speed in the U.S.).
The higher the speeds, the faster users can download videos and other complex data. An emergency medical team can send complex charts and scans. In other countries, phone users are already seamlessly making video calls and watching television from their handheld devices.
While the world leaps forward towards the age of fully mobile communications, the U.S. broadband system plods along on a patchwork quilt of separate systems cobbled together from city to city and region to region.
Like Edison, we as a nation are used to being the first, and the most innovative. We’ve given the world everything from the zipper to the digital computer, from the mousetrap and sunglasses to powered flight, from Xerox copies to the polio vaccine.
And, like Edison, we risk falling behind if we mistake our drive for technological preeminence with an assumption that preeminence is guaranteed. Any company launching a truly national system of wireless broadband (the latter day equivalent of going from DC to AC) will have to have the resolve to overcome any number of regulatory hurdles, the courage to commit the billions of dollars to build such a network, and the vision to understand that Americans don’t yet know what they’re missing.
The first crucial step involves shedding the assumption that being American automatically assures you the leadership position.
Richard S. Levick, Esq., is the president and chief executive officer of Levick Strategic Communications www.levick.com, a crisis and public affairs communications firm. He is the co-author of Stop the Presses: The Crisis & Litigation PR Desk Reference and writes for www.bulletproofblog.com. He was named to the 2009 NACD/Directorship list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the Boardroom.” Reach him at rlevick@levick.com.