Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is known to be among the most active persons on Twitter. Given his strong following of 48.6 million, almost every single tweet of his sparks a debate. On Monday, the billionaire entrepreneur put up a post on the microblogging platform that made netizens sit up, take notice and get into a discussion.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1368693859203436548

In the tweet, he put up a picture, one half of which showed Nikola Tesla, famous for his AC or Alternate Current, and the other half with Thomas Alva Edison, known for Direct Current. He wrote that it was “too bad” that they “broke up”. Through that, he intended to point to the competition between the two great inventors. However, Musk used the logo of the very famous Australian rock band AC/DC to suggest that the world could have witnessed some more technologically advanced breakthroughs had the duo come together. For the uninitiated, the letters in the name of the Australian rock band refers to “Alternating Current/Direct Current” only.

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were embroiled in what was known as the ‘War of the Currents’ in the late 1880s. The former developed direct current (DC), which runs continually in a single direction, like in the case of a battery or fuel cell. For several years, that remained the standard in the United States. However, the only problem was that DC could not be converted easily to the higher or lower voltage.

Nikola Tesla, on the other hand, came up with alternating current (AC) as the solution since it reverses the direction a certain number of times per second (60 in the US) and it was possible to be converted to varying voltages through a transformer. So, when the requirement for switching to a lower or higher voltage arose, AC was considered a better option. Apart from this, AC was cheaper to generate and suffered fewer energy losses while being transmitted over long distances.

When Tesla came to New York, he worked with Edison as an engineer for a year after which he created his own path as the scientific approaches of the duo were distinct.

(Edited by : Aditi Gautam)