Engineers working for the Westinghouse Electric and…
July 1888 CE
Westinghouse has looked into getting a patent on a similar commutator-less, rotating magnetic field-based induction motor developed in 1885 and presented in a paper in March 1888 by Italian physicist Galileo Ferraris, but has decided that Tesla's patent will probably control the market.
In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiate a licensing deal with George Westinghouse for Tesla's polyphase induction motor and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock and a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor.
Westinghouse also hires Tesla for one year for the large fee of $2,000 ($55,800 in today's dollars) per month to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs.
During this year, Tesla worked in Pittsburgh, helping to create an alternating current system to power the city's streetcars.
He finds it a frustrating period because of conflicts with the other Westinghouse engineers over how best to implement AC power.
Between them, they settle on a 60-cycle AC system that Tesla had proposed (to match the working frequency of Tesla's motor), but they soon find that it would not work for streetcars, since Tesla's induction motor can run only at a constant speed.
They end up using a DC traction motor instead.
Groups
Commodities
Regions
Northern North America
View →Subregions
