EDISON’S FILAMENT WENT LIMP

Let’s get one thing straight: the War of the Currents wasn’t about AC versus DC. It was a battle between a man with titanic, clanging brass balls—George Westinghouse—and a whiny little bitch named Thomas Edison who got famous for inventing a slightly-better candle. While Edison, that dildo-humping moralist, was busy running around zapping puppies to “prove” alternating current was dangerous, Westinghouse looked at Niagara Falls and didn’t just see a fuck-ton of water. He saw a cosmic, hydro-powered glory hole churning out pure, unadulterated POWER.

Edison wanted to use this new electrical jizz to power his sad little glass baubles, barely bright enough to illuminate your secret collection of hand-carved Dutch pornography. Pathetic. Westinghouse, a man whose personal magnetism could reportedly curdle milk three counties away, had a better idea. A bigger idea. He used Niagara’s limitless juice to birth a new god: the *Westinghouse Aerophibian*, a glorious, continent-spanning cargo dirigible that made trains look like children’s toys.

These weren’t your flimsy, flammable Hindenburg-style party favors. These were behemoths, floating cathedrals of commerce with ballrooms, brothels, and cigar lounges, all powered by the relentless electrical throb of Niagara Falls, beamed wirelessly into their magnificent gasbags. We have accounts from *The Tarrytown Tattler* (a famously unreliable gossip rag) claiming the maiden voyage of the *Stallion of the Mists* involved three hundred pounds of cocaine, the entire 1895 Vassar graduating class, and one very confused but game Archbishop. They hauled steel from Pittsburgh, bourbon from Kentucky, and, for a brief, glorious period, specially bred “aero-gophers” for a sport of high-altitude pest control that never quite caught on.

And what of Thomas “Beta Male” Edison? Oh, he lost his goddamn mind. First, he tried to get everyone scared of “death rays from the sky,” which, of course, just made the dirigibles sound cooler. Then he staged a disastrous press conference to unveil the “Edison Personal Ornithopter,” a terrifying contraption of canvas, wood, and a frankly irresponsible number of steam pistons that immediately broke the pilot's legs before catching fire. He spent the rest of his life a bitter recluse in his Menlo Park laboratory, surrounded by mountains of unsold lightbulbs, reportedly spending his days writing incredibly horny—and mechanically unfeasible—letters to Queen Victoria.

The Age of the Airship left the world… weird. Cities got taller not to house people, but to provide better mooring masts for the sky-barges. With no electrical grid for lighting, most homes remained stubbornly dark, creating a permanent gothic-romance vibe that did wonders for the scandalous-intrigue industry. People just adjusted to bumping uglies in the gloom, I guess.