I'm very late coming to this thread, but I'll attempt a partial answer to Mr. Twigsnapper's question:
Indeed Andrew and Paul. There is a question to consider. What WOULD THE WORLD HAVE BEEN LIKE if we could call your power agency Southern California Tesla? I imagine your entire life would be different. Ah, paths not taken.
Its a good discussion though. What WOULD the world have been like if we had not seen Edison take over? Twigsnapper
We would likely have, at the least, wireless reception of usable electrical power as a regional if not global system. Assuming some sort of commercial arrangement to support that future was found, because it's hard to put a "meter" on broadcast power. I could further extrapolate less air pollution because we might be driving all electric vehicles that received their motivating power wirelessly. But I'll stop there.
To learn more I highly recommend you please read a recent and extremely thorough biography of Tesla entitled _Wizard_. Based on 10 years of painstaking research, it is a very readable psychological portrait of Tesla and his times, with less emphasis on the technical side. Come to think of it, it has more than a few parallels to another such biography currently in progress, including elements of interpersonal passion.
Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla : Biography of a Genius (Citadel Press Book) (Paperback)
by Marc Seifer
This topic touches a realm I've spent much of the last two years exploring and personally validating in every moment I can that doesn't involve work & family, which is attributes and behavior of magnets, electricity and batteries that falls outside conventionally accepted EM theory.
But back to the question of Tesla: in the most brief terms (and this is not my analysis alone but a conglomeration of others) it appears that while Tesla was a truly brilliant and visionary inventor, he was not as successful an
innovator as Edison. Innovator here being defined as someone who can bring a "new way" to general public acceptance and everyday use.
So while Tesla seemed to come out with yet another revolutionary idea several times each year, Edison seemed to be good at taking advancements and bringing them to market. Tesla seemed far less interested than Edison in doing the work of bringing his inventions to their full market potential--he was always on to the next inevitable embodiment implied by his previous discovery, expecting that the obvious advantages of whatever he had invented would somehow by sheer power of their idea come into acceptance. He didn't count on the inertia inherent in the status quo, as a barrier to such acceptance.
For instance, after the wars between Tesla and Edison over DC versus alternating current, Tesla essentially won the contest. AC began to be accepted and institutionalized by many established business interests. This was a huge sea change, and took retooling, retraining and rewiring of almost all the existing infrastructure. Tesla had won, but Edison and others put their names on anything they possibly could of the new system. In his time, Tesla was a household name, but in terms of legacy he was systematically deemphasized by those who sought commercial and reputational gain often built on the foundation of Tesla's work.
Yet after winning the DC/AC battle, Tesla went on to explore further groundbreaking effects and inventions. What he found was yet another, in his opinion, far superior way to generate, distribute and use power than the previous market-shattering innovation of AC current. The wireless transmission of power.
Imagine if you were an industry baron who owned interests in concerns such as power distribution infrastructure, copper mines, etc. and had just set everything up so that power was being generated, distributed and utilized in an ever growing set of profit centers. Tearing all that down again to do yet another innovation? When everything's just now getting working and is great in every respect (including making money)? No question, no contest.
If you look at the photos of Tesla as an old man, he does not appear a defeated individual. I hope I don't read too much into his expression but it seems like a "I know something that you don't know" gleam in his eye.
The study of Tesla's Colorado Journals and his patents alongside those of TT Brown at the very least paint a picture that we don't currently make use of a majority of what these two men were on about.
R.