Long before there is VHS versus Betamax, Home windows versus Macintosh, or Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, the first and nastiest standards battle was fought between alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC).

AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison wager incorrect in the fierce war between followers of alternating current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical fight can hardly become dreamed today. The showdown between AC and DC started as a rather straightforward conflict between about AC/DC: The Savage Tale from the First Requirements War technical specifications, a battle of competing solutions to deliver fundamentally the same item, electricity. However the skirmish soon metastasized into something larger and darker. In the AC/DC fight, the worst aspects of human being nature in some way got caught up in the wires: a silent, deadly circulation of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path of least level of resistance, the war of currents quickly settled round the most primal of individual emotions: fear.

AC/DC acts as an object lesson in bad business technique and poor decision making. Edison’s inability to see his mistake was a key factor in his loss of control over the “operating system” for his future inventions-not to say the company he founded, which would later become General Electric.

The battle over whether alternating or direct current would be the standard for transmitting electricity all over the world changed the lives of billions of people, shaped the modern technological age, and set the stage for those standards wars to follow. Today’s Digital Age group wizards may take lessons from Edison’s brutal fight: control an invention’s technical standard and also you control the market.