We should also not forget that it was Nikola Tesla that discovered/invented AC (alternating current)which made it possible to send electricity over long distances.
Without the use of AC, power stations would not work. Edison was against the idea of AC and even threw Tesla out of his lab since he thought AC was too dangerous.
Does that have anything to do with the mandate to ban the incandescent light bulb? No.
A couple of amplifications.
Tesla didn’t actually discover AC. He had a vision (literally!) of a synchronous motor being driven from a polyphase AC distribution system.
George Westinghouse invested heavily from his train airbrake fortune into AC generation/transmission/distribution, having received a report from a lieutenant about a pioneering system in Hungary.
He employed Tesla to engineer this into a polyphase system. Westinghouse’s biggest boost came when he secured the prime lighting contract for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Tesla was there, demonstrating his first-gen 2-phase system (soon to be increased to 3 phases, as it has been ever since). He gave a talk attended by perhaps half of the world’s great scientific minds at the time.
Now, the reason Edison thought (and shouted from the rooftops) that AC was dangerous because of the high voltages that AC employed. Not in the household, of course; there, the AC promoters would provide 110 VAC (RMS), to give DC equivalent performance to lights, heaters, and the soon-to-be-invented induction motor. So the danger lay in the high voltages outside, in the distribution system.
Many of us here have read of the grisly electrocutions that Edison staged in his battle against the AC interests; demonstrations that had no technical or scientific merit whatsoever.
And the irony of it is that this supposed defect of dangerously high voltages was the very aspect of AC to win, inexorably, over DC: the enablement of economical transmission of large amounts of power, allowing economy of both scale and location in the building of power plants.
And Edison knew it. He knew that all the copper available in the world would not allow to him build a single DC power plant that could serve all of New York City. In his late years, he privately admitted that AC was the only possible way for the electric age to develop.
Not only that, Edison demonstrated the “lack of safety” of alternating current by electrocuting a large circus elephant named Topsy, at Coney Island’s Luna Park, and filming all this to distribute to municipalities to show how much safer DC electricity was. Poor Topsy had killed some trainers, the last one of whom fed him a lit cigarette. So banning incandescent bulbs would be right in line with major company’s interests, just like frying a poor damned elephant.
This law should be repealed and Upton has NO business being head of that committee.