Tesla v. Edison again

Tesla won the AC/DC wars and that was a good thing, because AC is much more useful for the long-range transmission of electrical power than is DC. Right?

Well, maybe it's more complicated than that.

I had accepted the above as gospel until quite recently, when I encountered a brief reference in W. Brian Arthur's nook, COMPLEXITY AND THE ECONOMY, suggesting there was more to it. Arthur is writing in very general algebraic terms about a lock-in of one technology by historical events, path inefficiency etc.

The usual example for this sort of thing is the QWERTY keyboard. I wasn't aware that the AC/DC thing gets on such lists also.

So I did a bit of googling and found this article from two years ago: Extreme Tech.

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