    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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