# Tesla Electric Company is organised in New York to develop alternating-current motors

Date: 1887

## The fact

In 1887 [Tesla](/people/nikola-tesla), with backers Alfred S. Brown and Charles F. Peck, organised the Tesla Electric Company in New York and set up a laboratory to develop alternating-current motors and distribution apparatus. It is a corporate instrument, not a finished grid.

## Context

He had left Edison Machine Works. Arc-lamp work at Rahway had already failed as a separate company. This 1887 firm is the organisation that produced the 1888 patent suite. Galileo Ferraris’s independent rotating-field work in Turin is contemporaneous and is not erased by a New York letterhead.

Nikola Tesla is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

IEEE/ETHW’s Tesla biography and Britannica independently date the 1887 company and laboratory. Wikipedia is not used as a source.

Official or archival record: Engineering and Technology History Wiki — Nikola Tesla (https://ethw.org/Nikola_Tesla; IEEE / ETHW).

## Significance

Industrial-policy path: a named AC shop. High confidence on the organisation.

A company is not a kilowatt-hour series. Keep Ferraris on the independent record.

## What is established and what is not

Established: Tesla Electric Company and a New York laboratory from 1887. Not established: that the firm already supplied a city, or that it uniquely invented the rotating magnetic field against Ferraris.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Nikola Tesla: https://factrail.ai/people/nikola-tesla

## Drivers

- Industrial-Policy Activism: https://factrail.ai/drivers/industrial-policy-activism

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikola-Tesla
- https://ethw.org/Nikola_Tesla

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/us-tesla-electric-company-1887