DC was not "financially viable" at all. DC was completely unworkable because you had to have a power plant on every city block! It was impossible to transmit

DC was not "financially viable" at all. DC was completely unworkable because you had to have a power plant on every city block! It was impossible to transmit DC power over any distance because the losses over the wire were too great. You could use a higher voltage to mitigate that, but then you have high voltage entering peoples' homes and a greater potential for fire, plus it's harder to make devices (light bulbs, household motors) which work reliably at higher voltages. The fundamental problem with DC is that, in 190x, there's no practical way to convert it from one voltage to another. That's why AC won the "current wars", plain and simple. Stupid Edison really thought it would make sense to have a power plant on every city block, but obviously that dream went nowhere, for good reason. With AC power, you use a "transformer" to step the voltage up to much higher levels for long-distance transmission, then another transformer to step it back down at the point-of-use. Higher voltage has much lower losses because the losses, according to Ohm's Law, are P=RI^2, where P is the power loss, R is the resistance (which we'll assume to be fixed for a given length of wire), and I is the current. Since P=VI (power = voltage current), stepping up the voltage means you have proportionately lower current, for the same amount of power, and as you can see from the first equation, the losses go up with the square of the current. This is why long-distance transmission lines use scarily-high voltages (some over 1 megavolts). These days, we have ways of converting DC to different voltages using modern electronics and transistors, but these did not exist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was simply no way back then to make an electric generation and transmission system of any scale without the AC devices invented by Nikola Tesla.