10 Awesome True Stories That Still Need The Hollywood Treatment
8. The War of the Currents
The Prestige kind of / sort of touched on this subject, but who cares, it deserves its own movie. If nothing else, there needs to be a major pop cultural push to make people realize what a villain Thomas Edison was, and direct all the admiration he gets towards the much more deserving Nikola Tesla. The War of the Currents was fought throughout the 1880's and 90's over how electricity would be distributed to the masses. It was Edison's inefficient direct current system versus Tesla's vastly superior alternating current.
While Tesla was smarter, Edison was richer and willing to play dirty. He set up exhibitions in which animals were electrocuted to death in order to prove how "unsafe" AC supposedly was. He threw his considerable lobbying weight against political support for AC. He even indirectly helped create the electric chair in the process, so desperate was he to discredit Tesla's work. This is as perfect a real-life underdog story as you can get (although Tesla admittedly had the powerful George Westinghouse pushing for his system).