[Lx]

I looked but I couldn't find anything on either one. I know Tesla was paid well by Westinghouse and Westinghouse's A/C beat Edison's D/C so that might have been enough for Tesla but that's just conjecture.

Melies died broke, he expected to make is money off distributing his movie in America but since Edison beat him to it there went one source of money, however, WIKI has this: Le Manoir du diable (1896). A print of the film was acquired by Thomas Edison,

I've heard, seen and read in more than one place that the film he ripped off was, "A trip to the Moon".

Maybe WIKI needs better proofreaders or the story is so esoteric, few read it.

[Lexinom]

Aside: The funny thing is that HVDC is a lower-loss transmission method with losses of only ~3% per 600 miles. No need for step-up transformers, no parasitic capacitance problems. Of course, we’re talking voltage in the thousands of volts, versus Edison’s day.

[Moonman62]

What I'm wondering is whether what Edison's company was accused of doing was legal at the time.

I don't think there was a legal contract between Edison and Tesla either, and they later became business competitors, so who knows what accusations were made, and which ones were true.

Regardless, Tesla still got his big chance with Westinghouse and lost all the money. That's why I have doubts about Tesla being ripped off in the big scheme of things. It's too bad he didn't keep his focus on inventing, rather than competing with Edison in business. Tesla's bizarre behavior didn't help either.