Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm a senior writer with
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, and of course this is
Speaker 1: the podcast where we talk about all things technological and
Speaker 1: technical in nature and how they affect us and how
Speaker 1: they've changed over time and kind of give you some
Speaker 1: context and understanding of this technology stuff. And today we're
Speaker 1: going to continue our series about the history of electricity.
Speaker 1: We're going to conclude it today, although we're concluding it
Speaker 1: right when electric power grids were starting to become a
Speaker 1: real thing. But since that point, a lot of the
Speaker 1: changes are more in electricity generation and less in electricity transmission.
Speaker 1: And I really wanted to get to the point where
Speaker 1: we talked about transmitting electricity. Maybe in a future episode
Speaker 1: I will continue this and revisit the topic and give
Speaker 1: more context from the early power grids up to modern day,
Speaker 1: and also talk about some of the other various projects
Speaker 1: that haven't really materialized, stuff like test Lea's suggestion of
Speaker 1: broadcasting power over the air as opposed to over transmission lines,
Speaker 1: and what would that take and would it be a
Speaker 1: good idea, but that's for another episode. In our last episode,
Speaker 1: we explored how scientists, philosophers, inventors, and crazy people began
Speaker 1: to suss out the basics of electricity, largely through a
Speaker 1: lot of experimentation and a few happy accidents. Now, the
Speaker 1: story is one of those that really reinforces the fact
Speaker 1: that discoveries are rarely attributable to a single person. We
Speaker 1: like those stories. We like to say this one person
Speaker 1: was responsible for X, and this other person was responsible
Speaker 1: for why. But the truth is way more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: Usually people are building upon the work of others that
Speaker 1: came before them, and they might be refining things and
Speaker 1: innovating in that space. But if it weren't for those
Speaker 1: who were earlier working on the same sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: you might not have ever seen those those innovations happen. So,
Speaker 1: you know, we talk about stuff like Edison invent the lightbulb,
Speaker 1: or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but we really
Speaker 1: would have to acknowledge some of the other people whose
Speaker 1: work made all of that possible. First of all, Edison
Speaker 1: didn't invent the light bulb, but he did improve it greatly. Um,
Speaker 1: but we would need to talk about all that stuff.
Speaker 1: And this is not to take away from those inventors
Speaker 1: and engineers who really did make incredible contributions to technology
Speaker 1: and too our way of life. They are remarkable human
Speaker 1: beings and so I don't want to take anything away
Speaker 1: from them. But at the same time, I don't want
Speaker 1: to ignore those who also made other contributions that made
Speaker 1: all of this possible. It's a disservice to them to
Speaker 1: gloss over it. So it would be also very difficult
Speaker 1: to make an hour long podcast if in fact most
Speaker 1: inventions were due to a single person's moment of ingenuity, right,
Speaker 1: if the story were as simple as thomass and invented
Speaker 1: the lightbulb. I don't know that I can make an
Speaker 1: hour out of that, probably about forty minutes, but I
Speaker 1: don't know if I could stretch it to a full hour. Now.
Speaker 1: By the end of the last episode, I talked about
Speaker 1: an early alternating current generator and how by using what
Speaker 1: was called a split ring commutator, early inventors could change
Speaker 1: that alternating current that was being created in the generator
Speaker 1: into direct current. Not just so you remember alternating current,
Speaker 1: the direction of current reverses multiple times per second. Their cycles,
Speaker 1: and we describe them in freak and sees. So, for example,
Speaker 1: here in the United States, we have a sixty hurts
Speaker 1: frequency for our electricity, for our alternating current. That means
Speaker 1: sixty times per second that direction of current changes. So
Speaker 1: if you're looking at a wire stretching from left to right,
Speaker 1: that means that current would be flowing left or right
Speaker 1: and then right to left, and it would keep changing
Speaker 1: sixty times every second, whereas in Europe it would be
Speaker 1: fifty times. They're on a fifty hurts system sixty hurt system.
Speaker 1: More on that in a little bit. Direct current, however,
Speaker 1: goes in a single direction. It does not change. So
Speaker 1: it goes from left to right or right to left,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't change throughout the It doesn't have cycles.
Speaker 1: It just continues until you shut the power off, in
Speaker 1: which case current ceases to flow. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: continue the timeline we talked about UH in that last episode,
Speaker 1: talk more about how electricity moved out of the laboratory
Speaker 1: and into the real world. But in order to do that,
Speaker 1: I also have to backtrack just a bit from the
Speaker 1: end of the last episode where I was talking about generators,
Speaker 1: because as there are some people who were working in
Speaker 1: electricity that I didn't really mentioned too much in the
Speaker 1: last episode, and I kind of need to in order
Speaker 1: to understand more about building upon those ideas. So one
Speaker 1: of those people was Humphrey Davy. I mentioned him briefly
Speaker 1: in the last episode. He was one of the first
Speaker 1: people to make a practical use of electricity outside of
Speaker 1: direct experimentation. So remember in the early eighteenth century, well
Speaker 1: not early the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, you
Speaker 1: had inventors and engineers who were experimenting with electricity, but
Speaker 1: they didn't really have any practical use for it. Humphrey
Speaker 1: Davy was the first person to create something that could
Speaker 1: be practically used with electricity. He created the first arc
Speaker 1: lamp and the first incandescent lamp way back in the
Speaker 1: first decade of the eighteen hundreds. Uh the Davy lamp
Speaker 1: became a famous invention. Now, neither of those were meant
Speaker 1: for commercial use or manufacturing. They weren't made to light
Speaker 1: people's homes. It was more of a use case to
Speaker 1: prove that electricity could have some practical application beyond just
Speaker 1: understanding a fundamental element of the universe or fundamental element
Speaker 1: of of life on Earth. At least so uh it
Speaker 1: would be many more decades before anyone could make a
Speaker 1: commercially viable lightbulb or lamp, but Davy's work showed that
Speaker 1: it was in fact possible. Also in that last episode,
Speaker 1: I mentioned Ampierre, whose last name is used as a
Speaker 1: unit of measurement within the electrical engineering world. Anyway, I
Speaker 1: mentioned that Empire was studying the nature of electricity and magnets,
Speaker 1: but he was building on the work of others. One
Speaker 1: of those others was Hans Christian Airstead, who was a
Speaker 1: Danish philosopher and scientist and discovered something that I mentioned
Speaker 1: in the previous episode, What what which was electro magnetism.
Speaker 1: Airstead heard of Alessandro Volta's experiments with batteries, so Volta
Speaker 1: made the voltaic pile, the predecessor to the modern battery,
Speaker 1: and air Stead had heard about it, and by eight
Speaker 1: o one Airstead started doing his own experiments, making his
Speaker 1: own batteries, and air Stead proposed that there might be
Speaker 1: a way of measuring the amount of current passing through
Speaker 1: a wire by putting the wire into water and allowing
Speaker 1: the electricity to separate the molecular bonds of hydrogen and
Speaker 1: oxygen in order otherwise to create electrolysis. Uh. And that
Speaker 1: if you measured the amount of gas given off by
Speaker 1: the water, then you could use that to infer how
Speaker 1: much current was passing through the wire. It was kind
Speaker 1: of an indirect way of establishing how much current was
Speaker 1: passing through the wire at any given moment. Now in air,
Speaker 1: Stead performed an experiment in which he passed an electric
Speaker 1: current through a wire and then brought the wire near
Speaker 1: a magnetized compass needle, and this caused the compass needle
Speaker 1: to swing out of alignment. It was no longer lined
Speaker 1: up with the Earth's magnetic polls. And you know this
Speaker 1: will happen when you bring a magnet close to a compass.
Speaker 1: The Earth's magnetic field is powerful, but if you bring
Speaker 1: a small, less powerful magnet in close proximity to the
Speaker 1: compass needle, you will overpower the Earth's magnetic field. The
Speaker 1: compass needle will move towards the magnet um because again,
Speaker 1: the strength of a magnetic field is somewhat dependent upon
Speaker 1: its distance to a magnetic material. Well, he said, the
Speaker 1: shows that an electric current passing through a wire creates
Speaker 1: its own magnetic field. It's obviously affecting these compass needles.
Speaker 1: So he continue to experiment to better understand the nature
Speaker 1: of electricity and magnetism, and he came to realize that
Speaker 1: an electric current creates a circular magnetic field around it.
Speaker 1: So if you're looking at a straight copper wire and
Speaker 1: you turn it so that you're looking at it from
Speaker 1: the end on, so you're looking down the length of
Speaker 1: an electric copper wire, and you're able to run current
Speaker 1: through that copper wire, and if you were able to
Speaker 1: visualize the magnetic field, you would see the magnetic field
Speaker 1: appear as a circle, and the copper wire would essentially
Speaker 1: be the center of the circle, or at least circulure.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be necessarily a perfect circle, but it would
Speaker 1: be a circular field around the core, which would be
Speaker 1: the the wire itself. Also, although this was not understood
Speaker 1: by Rstad at the time, if you ran an alternating
Speaker 1: current through that that wire, you would see the direction
Speaker 1: of that magnetic field reverse. So when the current flows
Speaker 1: in one direction, you would see it flowing in a
Speaker 1: clockwise direction, and if you reverse the current, you would
Speaker 1: see it flow in a counterclockwise direction. This would become
Speaker 1: really important later on when we talk about alternating currents
Speaker 1: and transformers, transformers being the type of of gadget that
Speaker 1: you use to step up or step down electric voltage,
Speaker 1: not robots that are more than meets the eye. That's
Speaker 1: a different type of transformer. So air Stond makes this
Speaker 1: observation about copper wire with a current flowing through it
Speaker 1: becoming a magnetic uh force for emitting a magnetic force,
Speaker 1: and Empire made a similar discovery with electric wires attracting
Speaker 1: one another whenever electricity would flow through them. So this
Speaker 1: was the earliest observations of electro magnetism that are recorded.
Speaker 1: In four William Sturgeon experimented with electromagnetism by rap wrapping
Speaker 1: a bear wire of copper around an iron core. So
Speaker 1: imagine you've got like a just an iron nail, and
Speaker 1: you've got some bear copper wire, and you bend the
Speaker 1: copper wire so it coils around this iron core several times.
Speaker 1: He found that if he passed a current through the wire,
Speaker 1: it would turn the whole thing into a agnet briefly,
Speaker 1: but then the effect wouldn't disappear. So why was the
Speaker 1: effect disappearing, Well, the current was moving from the copper
Speaker 1: wire into the iron core of the structure. It wasn't
Speaker 1: maintaining a current through entirely. It was it was shorting
Speaker 1: out essentially. And uh William Sturgeon also couldn't do a
Speaker 1: multi layer wrap of the wire because the copper wire
Speaker 1: is conductive. If it made contact with itself, then current
Speaker 1: is flowing in the most efficient pathway. It's not going
Speaker 1: down the length of the copper wire necessarily, it could
Speaker 1: pass through as coils touched each other. So uh, he
Speaker 1: wasn't able to make a very strong magnetic effect. This
Speaker 1: way you you create you increase the magnetic effect by
Speaker 1: making more coils. So if you're able to coil a
Speaker 1: conductive wire more times around a core, like in this case,
Speaker 1: an iron core, you create a more powerful magnetic field
Speaker 1: as you passed the current through that conductor. In eight
Speaker 1: twenty seven, a man named Joseph Henry found a solution
Speaker 1: to this problem. He wrapped his copper wires in silk,
Speaker 1: which insulated them, so now he could have the copper
Speaker 1: wires laying against an iron core and laying against itself
Speaker 1: without the current bleeding through because the wires were insulated,
Speaker 1: and that allowed him to wrap the wires around the
Speaker 1: iron core several more times than Sturgeon was able to,
Speaker 1: and that meant the charge could not disappear into the
Speaker 1: iron and the electromagnetic effect would remain as long as
Speaker 1: a current was passing through the wire. So this discovering
Speaker 1: electromagnetism would become incredibly important for future applications of electricity. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Michael Faraday had been working with moving copper near a
Speaker 1: stationary magnet, which would induce current to flow through the copper.
Speaker 1: This is the basis of generators. Whether you are moving
Speaker 1: a conductor through the magnetic fields of some stationary magnets,
Speaker 1: or you're moving the magnets around a conductor so that
Speaker 1: the magnetic field is fluctuating around the conductor. Whenever you
Speaker 1: introduce a conductor through a fluctuating magnetic field, you're going
Speaker 1: to induce current to flow through that metal conductor or
Speaker 1: really I should just say conductor doesn't. That's the important part,
Speaker 1: not whether or not it's metal. Also important is that
Speaker 1: it has to be that fluctuating magnetic field, otherwise you
Speaker 1: will induce current to flow. But as soon as the
Speaker 1: magnetic field stops to fluctuate, current will no longer flow.
Speaker 1: So you would typically do this by putting two permanent
Speaker 1: magnets end to end with the north pole facing the
Speaker 1: south pole of another one, and in between them, you
Speaker 1: would have your conductor on a rotatable system. So imagine
Speaker 1: that you've got a square of copper wire. You formed
Speaker 1: it to be an empty square, and it's rotatable between
Speaker 1: these two permanent magnets. As you rotate the squid air,
Speaker 1: it passes through the magnetic fields. This is similar to
Speaker 1: having magnetic flux introduced to the copper wire that induces
Speaker 1: current to flow, and that's where you get alternating current generators.
Speaker 1: So uh. He also discovered something interesting. Henry's work involved
Speaker 1: moving current through a wire which would create a magnetic field.
Speaker 1: Faraday's work involved moving a current a copper wire through
Speaker 1: a magnetic field in order to generate a current. So
Speaker 1: with Henry's work, they discovered that the magnetic field generated
Speaker 1: by one electro magnet could induce current to flow in
Speaker 1: a second electro magnet that wasn't hooked up to the
Speaker 1: first circuit. This became the basis for an important innovation,
Speaker 1: that being the A C transformer I mentioned earlier that
Speaker 1: steps up or steps down voltage. Now, remember voltage is
Speaker 1: akin to pressure. If you were looking at a water
Speaker 1: based system, voltage would be the water pressure. It's the
Speaker 1: push behind a current. And while this early work created
Speaker 1: the foundation for the transformer, it would take half a
Speaker 1: century for someone to build a practical, commercially reliable transformer.
Speaker 1: That person was William Stanley, and we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: him in just a little bit, But first we have
Speaker 1: to talk about another invention that relied on electricity and
Speaker 1: was very important for the adoption of electricity, and that
Speaker 1: is the telegraph. The telegraph was a means of communication
Speaker 1: that took advantage of electro magnetism. So once people figured
Speaker 1: out the nature between electricity and magnetism, they started coming
Speaker 1: up with some practical applications of this. The telegraph was
Speaker 1: one of those early ones, and it was incredible. It
Speaker 1: transformed communication, particularly here in the United States, but all
Speaker 1: over the world as well. So lots of people were
Speaker 1: exploring the scientific and practical applications of electricity and magnetism,
Speaker 1: but two groups were specifically looking at it in terms
Speaker 1: of communication systems. So over in jolly old England you
Speaker 1: had Sir William Cook and Sir Charles Charles Wheatstone who
Speaker 1: were exploring this possibility, and here in the United States
Speaker 1: you had Samuel Morse, Alfred Vale, and Leonard Gail working
Speaker 1: on this. Now, both sets of researchers realized that using
Speaker 1: electricity to manipulate magnetized pieces of metal could allow for
Speaker 1: a communication system. The Cook and Wheatstone system was an
Speaker 1: experiment that began in the eighteen thirties. With magnetic needles.
Speaker 1: There were positions so they could point at various letters
Speaker 1: and numbers. So imagine that you've got a needle on
Speaker 1: a that can rotate horizontally. It's it's on a horizontal plane,
Speaker 1: it can rotate around and around on a balance, and
Speaker 1: you've got letters that are arranged around the needle. And
Speaker 1: by running an electric current through a circuit, you can
Speaker 1: create a magnetic field that attracts the needle, so it
Speaker 1: looks like it's pointing at a specific letter. It's actually
Speaker 1: pointing in the direction of whatever the magnetic field is,
Speaker 1: but it looks like it's pointing specifically at the letter.
Speaker 1: So using several of these needles, I think they had
Speaker 1: five set up in a panel with a bunch of
Speaker 1: letters and numbers, they could communicate. You could just choose
Speaker 1: which circuit you're activating to magnetize a specific point around
Speaker 1: those needles. The needles would start to point in those
Speaker 1: directions and you could spell out various messages. These ended
Speaker 1: up being used in the British railroad signaling service. Now
Speaker 1: over in the United States, Morse, Veil and Gale began
Speaker 1: work on a single circuit telegraph system and it involved
Speaker 1: a sending station where you had an operating key and
Speaker 1: this would complete an electric circuit whenever you pressed it.
Speaker 1: So an operator key it looks like a little almost
Speaker 1: looks like a stapler. When you press it down, it
Speaker 1: would create a closed circuit and allow a signal to
Speaker 1: pass through to the other end. When you would lift
Speaker 1: it back up or remove pressure from it, it would
Speaker 1: break that circuit and electric current would cease to flow.
Speaker 1: So you had a battery that was providing power. Every
Speaker 1: time you would push down, it would complete this circuit
Speaker 1: and a signal would be sent to the receiving station.
Speaker 1: Uh the original station had an apparatus that would make
Speaker 1: marks on paper, and so Morse ended up developing the
Speaker 1: famous Morse code. Morse code is a way of encoding
Speaker 1: letters in a series of dots and dashes. You represent
Speaker 1: this on an operator key by the length of time
Speaker 1: you spend pressing the key downward. So for a dot
Speaker 1: you do a quick press, it's just a quick jolt
Speaker 1: of electricity through the circuit. For a dash, the press
Speaker 1: is a little bit longer, so that it's it comes across.
Speaker 1: And on the other end, you add a system that
Speaker 1: would essentially make marks on paper, so you could see
Speaker 1: dots or dashes. Morse was very clever in this way.
Speaker 1: He also made sure that the most commonly used letters
Speaker 1: had the simplest of encodings, so very a very common
Speaker 1: letter might have a single dot or a single dash.
Speaker 1: More rare letters like a Q might have more complicated
Speaker 1: encoding because you don't have to use it as frequently,
Speaker 1: so you save all the simple encoding for your most
Speaker 1: common letters. Now, they noticed something really interesting, which is
Speaker 1: that as operators began to get used to the system,
Speaker 1: they were able to start understanding messages without having to
Speaker 1: read the dots and dashes, because they would just hear
Speaker 1: what was coming out. They would hear the receiving station
Speaker 1: tapping out either the dots or dashes to market on
Speaker 1: the paper. And once they started getting used to this
Speaker 1: and understanding what those taps were meaning like the long
Speaker 1: taps versus the short taps. It became clear that you
Speaker 1: didn't need to have the paper at all. You could
Speaker 1: have a receiving station that would beep either short or
Speaker 1: longer beeps to let you know whether whether it was
Speaker 1: a daughter or a dash, and operators were able to
Speaker 1: just pick it up by hearing it because they became
Speaker 1: so used to it. And so future telegraph stations would
Speaker 1: get rid of the paper and just become the beeping receiver,
Speaker 1: so that an operator would transcribe whatever the message was
Speaker 1: and then deliver it to whomever was supposed to get it.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty three, Morse and Veil were able to
Speaker 1: secure funding for a telegraph system that was between Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. And Baltimore, Maryland. That's not terribly far in
Speaker 1: the grand scheme of things, but it was a big
Speaker 1: deal at the time. The first message sent on the
Speaker 1: news system went out on May fourth, eighteen forty four.
Speaker 1: It was sent from Samuel Morse to Veil and it
Speaker 1: read what hath God wrought? It's a little bit of
Speaker 1: drama in the first message. It's just like social media today. Really.
Speaker 1: Over the following decades, telegraph systems began to connect more
Speaker 1: cities together, even as inventors were trying to find other
Speaker 1: practical applications of electricity. So other people would make improvements
Speaker 1: to the telegraph and make it more user friendly and
Speaker 1: more useful. Uh some. Some of those people included Ezra Cornell,
Speaker 1: who created a means to insulate telegraph wires and make
Speaker 1: them more efficient. Cornell would go on to co found
Speaker 1: a college it's called Cornell and Thomas Edison, famous inventor
Speaker 1: and irascible gentleman, also made some improvements to the telegraph,
Speaker 1: including creating a system called the quadruplex, which, as the
Speaker 1: name might suggest, would allow up to four messages to
Speaker 1: transmit over the same wire simultaneously, to going in one
Speaker 1: direction and to coming through from the other direction. Now,
Speaker 1: one of Stanley's inspirations was another inventor named Charles Brush. Brush,
Speaker 1: in turn had been inspired by Humphrey Davy. So we
Speaker 1: see that there's a chain forming here. So Davy was
Speaker 1: the one who created that early arc light. Well, Brush
Speaker 1: thought the arc lights were super cool, and as a
Speaker 1: teenager he started to really tinker with stuff. He would
Speaker 1: start to neglect his chores in the family farm just
Speaker 1: so he could work on various projects in a workshop,
Speaker 1: and he built his first static electricity machine when he
Speaker 1: was just twelve years old. In high school, he built
Speaker 1: an arc light of his very own, so by high
Speaker 1: school age he was building stuff that Humphrey Davy had
Speaker 1: pioneered a few decades earlier. In college, he pursued a
Speaker 1: degree in mining engineering at the University of Michigan because
Speaker 1: there was no such thing as an electrical engineering degree
Speaker 1: at that time. And after working in the iron ore
Speaker 1: industry for a while, he began a big project to
Speaker 1: build a dynamo. Now, a dynamo is a direct current generator.
Speaker 1: It's like what I described at the end of the
Speaker 1: last episode. It's essentially an alternating current generator that has
Speaker 1: a commutator to convert alternating current to direct current. Brush
Speaker 1: also convinced the city of Cleveland to allow him to
Speaker 1: fit out Cleveland's public square, which at that time was
Speaker 1: called Monumental Park, with electrical arc lights, and up to
Speaker 1: that point the lights in the square had been gas lamps.
Speaker 1: So on April twenty eight, seventy nine, the city switched
Speaker 1: on the new arc lights. The public reaction was most
Speaker 1: sleep positive. There were only a few people who were
Speaker 1: saying stuff like it's not as brow as the sun,
Speaker 1: which tells us that some people were impossible to please
Speaker 1: even before they had Twitter to post public messages about it. Now,
Speaker 1: Brush's work advanced our understanding of the electromotive force, which
Speaker 1: is the force that causes electrons to push in a
Speaker 1: direction within a conductor, generating a current, and it was
Speaker 1: that understanding that William Stanley started to build upon. Stanley
Speaker 1: wanted to work with alternating current, which at that time
Speaker 1: was mostly seen as interesting but not practical. Everyone was
Speaker 1: thinking direct current was probably the way to go, and
Speaker 1: Stanley wasn't entirely convinced. He thought alternating current might have
Speaker 1: its uses. In fact, at the time, Stanley wrote that
Speaker 1: the general thought on alternating current from his contemporaries was
Speaker 1: that it was a despised and rejected line of work.
Speaker 1: But Stanley was convinced there was something more to it.
Speaker 1: Now obviously, when we start looking at way to distribute electricity,
Speaker 1: it became clear that alternating current, at least initially was
Speaker 1: superior to direct current, and in Stanley began to work
Speaker 1: with George Westinghouse's company called Westinghouse. Westinghouse himself heard of
Speaker 1: Stanley's contributions and promoted him to chief engineer of the
Speaker 1: Westinghouse Pittsburgh facility. And Stanley then learned of Lucien Gallard
Speaker 1: and John Gibbs, who had built an alternating current transformer.
Speaker 1: The problem was that the transformer they had built wasn't
Speaker 1: really commercially viable, so Stanley wanted to take that same
Speaker 1: idea and design a transformer that would have real world applications. Now,
Speaker 1: what is a transformer and how does it actually work
Speaker 1: to change voltage? Will look at that in just a minute,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: All Right, So, what the heck is a transformer? I've
Speaker 1: talked and I said steps up and steps down voltage,
Speaker 1: but I haven't really explained it. Well. It all relies
Speaker 1: upon that electromotive force and fundamental electro magnetic forces. You
Speaker 1: remember that when you move a conductor through a magnetic field,
Speaker 1: the field induces electric current to flow through the conductor.
Speaker 1: But to do this, you have to keep moving the
Speaker 1: conductor through the field, unless you move the field instead
Speaker 1: of the conductor and you keep the conductor in place. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the ways you could do that is you
Speaker 1: could create an electro magnet using alternating current, and that
Speaker 1: would give you the same effect of moving a magnetic
Speaker 1: field around a conductor. Because remember I mentioned earlier, when
Speaker 1: the inventors were looking at how electric current generates a
Speaker 1: magnetic field, they thought of it as as current travels
Speaker 1: down a wire, a magnetic field is generated as a
Speaker 1: circle around that wire, with the wire being the or
Speaker 1: or hub of that circle, if you think of it
Speaker 1: that way. While if electricity reverses, then the magnetic field
Speaker 1: changes direction. That creates magnetic flux because it's the same
Speaker 1: thing as moving a conductor through a stationary magnetic field
Speaker 1: back and forth. Like if you took a piece of
Speaker 1: metal conductive metal and you waved it through a magnetic
Speaker 1: field repeatedly, you could induce electricity to flow through the conductor.
Speaker 1: The same thing is true if you have this alternating
Speaker 1: current electro magnet. And remember that alternating current switches voltages
Speaker 1: on either end of the conductor several times a second,
Speaker 1: So that's what's making the electricity flow in different directions,
Speaker 1: one direction at one point, the other direction at the
Speaker 1: other point. If you're looking at your traditional alternating current generator,
Speaker 1: it's when the conductor breaks that uh, perpendicular plane or
Speaker 1: really no, I'm sorry, the parallel plane to the magnetic
Speaker 1: field and starts to move, so that the side that
Speaker 1: was going up with a relation to a magnetic field
Speaker 1: is now moving down. That's what ends up creating this
Speaker 1: alternating current. So every time you change that current direction,
Speaker 1: the magnetic field also changes. If you were to introduce
Speaker 1: a second conductive material within range of that alternating magnetic field,
Speaker 1: that would induce a similar alternating current in the secondary conductor.
Speaker 1: So let's say you've got an electro magnet and it
Speaker 1: consists of an iron core, and around this iron core
Speaker 1: you've wrapped insulated copper wire twenty times. So let's say
Speaker 1: you've got an iron nail, and you've got some copper
Speaker 1: wire of a fairly small gage, and you do twenty
Speaker 1: coils around this iron nail. This is your electromagnet. If
Speaker 1: you are to hook this up to a battery, it
Speaker 1: would create a direct current through the uh, the the wire,
Speaker 1: and you would have an electromagnet. But that's just a
Speaker 1: simple electromagnet. Let's say that you hooked it up to
Speaker 1: an alternating current. Now the current is moving down from
Speaker 1: the top of the nail to the bottom of the nail,
Speaker 1: and then from the bottom of the nail to the
Speaker 1: top of the nail, more over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: several times a second. That creates a fluctuating magnetic field. Now,
Speaker 1: let's say you get a second nail with a second
Speaker 1: length of copper wire wrapped around it. This one is
Speaker 1: not attached to a battery or a power system. You
Speaker 1: bring that one close to the first one, which will
Speaker 1: be your primary electromagnet. You bring this secondary electromagnet close
Speaker 1: to it. Once it's within that fluctuating magnetic field, it's
Speaker 1: going to induce current to flow through the second electro magnet.
Speaker 1: Even though it's not hooked up to a power source,
Speaker 1: it will start to have electric current induced in it. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is the basis for the transformer. But by itself,
Speaker 1: it's not that useful because you're not you're not changing
Speaker 1: the voltage at all. You're just inducing electric current to
Speaker 1: flow through a secondary coil. But if your second electromagnet
Speaker 1: has a different number of coils from the first one,
Speaker 1: as in you've wrapped the copper wire more times or
Speaker 1: fewer times than the one you have on your primary electromagnet,
Speaker 1: the second electromagnet will have a different voltage than the first.
Speaker 1: So again, let's say you've got that iron nail and
Speaker 1: you've wrapped copper coil around it twenty times, and your
Speaker 1: secondary one, your iron nail, you've only wrapped it ten
Speaker 1: times around. Well, this will step the voltage down by half.
Speaker 1: The voltage in your new your secondary electromagnet will be
Speaker 1: half of what it is in the primary one. But
Speaker 1: if you are primary one has twenty coils and your
Speaker 1: secondary one has forty coils, this will step up the
Speaker 1: voltage by twice the original amount. So whatever the voltage
Speaker 1: was in your original circuit, it will be twice as
Speaker 1: powerful in your secondary one because you have twice the
Speaker 1: number of coils. The number of coils in your secondary
Speaker 1: circuit is going to determine whether the voltage is stepped
Speaker 1: up or stepped down. Stanley Builder prototype transformer for high
Speaker 1: voltage transmission and demonstrated it on March six. He then
Speaker 1: got wrapped up in some serious drama in the electrical
Speaker 1: utility industry, which I'll talk about a bit later. But
Speaker 1: holy cal If you think Hollywood and politics are all
Speaker 1: about backstabbing and scandal, wait till we get to the
Speaker 1: Shenanigans during the current wars because people got messed up.
Speaker 1: There were all sorts of back, backstage dealings and just
Speaker 1: shady practices, people not getting paid, people getting forced out
Speaker 1: of the business. It was really cut throat in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen than early twentieth centuries. Now remember sense voltage
Speaker 1: is the force or pressure that pushes electric current through
Speaker 1: when you use a transformer. Can come in mighty handy
Speaker 1: if you want to distribute power across the system, because,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, to transmit power efficiently, you need
Speaker 1: to have high voltage. You've got to have a lot
Speaker 1: of pressure to transmit power over significant distances. If you
Speaker 1: don't have high pressure, you can only transmit power a
Speaker 1: short distance before the efficiency drops to nothing. So you've
Speaker 1: got to have a lot of force. Now this again,
Speaker 1: if you think of it in terms of a water system,
Speaker 1: this makes sense. If you have very low water pressure,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be hard to get a shower on the
Speaker 1: top floor of a hotel, for example, to have much
Speaker 1: of anything happened. Uh, if you have very very high
Speaker 1: water pressure, it may be that on the first floor
Speaker 1: you might feel like the shower is gonna push you
Speaker 1: through the back wall. So you need that high foltage
Speaker 1: because you need that high pressure to transmit electricity great distances.
Speaker 1: That's really what Stanley was looking at. So using transformers,
Speaker 1: you can step up or step down the voltage as
Speaker 1: needed for distribution purposes. So at the power generation site,
Speaker 1: you might generate power at a specific voltage and then
Speaker 1: you want to transmit it fifty miles away, so you
Speaker 1: use a transformer to step up that voltage to make
Speaker 1: it a high voltage signal so that it will transmit
Speaker 1: efficiently across the power lines. You've you've you've strung between
Speaker 1: your generation point and your destination. Once it reaches the destination,
Speaker 1: you go through a second type of transformer to step
Speaker 1: the voltage back down. So it's appropriate for whatever you
Speaker 1: want to use it for. So when you see transformers
Speaker 1: on utility polls around cities and on houses, they're they're
Speaker 1: usually small. Transform was attached to those as well. The
Speaker 1: purpose of that is so that it can either step
Speaker 1: up the voltage so it can transmit it, or step
Speaker 1: down the voltage so I can deliver that electricity to home.
Speaker 1: These are also the things that when they get overloaded,
Speaker 1: they explode in a ton of sparks, they get shorted out,
Speaker 1: they get they get too much electricity pushed through it
Speaker 1: one time. This can happen if you have like a
Speaker 1: really serious electrical storm. And if you've ever heard of
Speaker 1: transformer go off, it is unforgettable. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: shotgun and sparks fly everywhere. The first time I ever
Speaker 1: saw one do that, I was a kid in the
Speaker 1: back seat of my parents cars. We were driving through
Speaker 1: downtown Atlanta, and I grew up in rural Georgia, so
Speaker 1: I'm from backwoods country up in Georgia and wasn't used
Speaker 1: to seeing explosions go off right outside the car window
Speaker 1: in a city. It gave me a very specific and
Speaker 1: as it turns out, not entirely accurate, accurate view of
Speaker 1: what city life must be like. It was a special circumstance.
Speaker 1: Now we're at the dawn of the electrical age. So
Speaker 1: you had Brush's arc lighting system that showed electricity did
Speaker 1: have practical uses outside the laboratory. You had worked with
Speaker 1: d C and a C generators. That was progressing. And
Speaker 1: now it's time to talk about some of the big
Speaker 1: names I haven't really talked about extensively yet. Namely Tom
Speaker 1: Thomas Yison and Nicola Tesla. So, first of all, a
Speaker 1: lot of people when they talk about Tesla seemed to
Speaker 1: think that he invented alternating current. He did not. There
Speaker 1: were inventors who were working with alternating current before Tesla
Speaker 1: was even born. They didn't really know what it would
Speaker 1: be good for. But alternating current existed before Tesla came along,
Speaker 1: and transformers existed before Tesla came along. He didn't even
Speaker 1: invent the alternating current transformer. He did, however, make significant
Speaker 1: improvements to transformer technology so that it became a much
Speaker 1: more commercially viable tech, and he made some great strides
Speaker 1: in that field. So I don't want to take anything
Speaker 1: away from Tesla. I don't want to say that he
Speaker 1: didn't make any significant contributions or that he was just
Speaker 1: whackadoodle crazy. That's not that's someone I'm saying at all.
Speaker 1: First of all, we don't know if he was crazy.
Speaker 1: He was certainly eccentric. And second of all, he made
Speaker 1: very significant contributions to our understanding of and use of electricity.
Speaker 1: But again, if we ignore the contributions of other people
Speaker 1: were doing them a disservice. So that's why I'm bringing
Speaker 1: this up. I should also mention Tesla, as eccentric as
Speaker 1: he got and as grandiose as his ego was, he
Speaker 1: definitely did not deserve the mistreatment he was subjected to
Speaker 1: towards the end of his life. He was not prepared
Speaker 1: for the drama that would unfold as he got older.
Speaker 1: Thomas says in Meanwhile, tends to be portrayed as one
Speaker 1: of two things. It depends on whether you're pro Edison
Speaker 1: or anti Edison. You're there are two versions of Edison
Speaker 1: that tend to be presented to people. He's either a
Speaker 1: brilliant inventor and he's a guy who just held more
Speaker 1: patents than anyone else and was incredibly uh uh ingenious,
Speaker 1: or he was a manipulative, vindictive businessman who was mostly disliked, standoffish.
Speaker 1: Only a few people really took to him, and he
Speaker 1: would take credit for things they had very little to
Speaker 1: no involvement in. In other words, he would have engineers
Speaker 1: working for him that would invent stuff, and he would
Speaker 1: just append his name to the patents. Thus, his name
Speaker 1: was attached to more patents than anyone else. But if
Speaker 1: you were to look into it, you might say, well,
Speaker 1: Edison didn't really have much to do with this invention. Now,
Speaker 1: the truth is between those two extremes. So you've got
Speaker 1: the pro Edison people saying he was a brilliant man
Speaker 1: and businessman, invented a ton of stuff that we I
Speaker 1: think that's the very foundation of electronics today. And then
Speaker 1: you have the other people saying, no, he was kind
Speaker 1: of a manipulative businessman who who really uh took advantage
Speaker 1: of other people. And the truth is not either of
Speaker 1: those extremes. He was a person like any other person,
Speaker 1: with with faults and with virtues. So I will try
Speaker 1: my best not to paint him too far in either direction.
Speaker 1: But like brush, Edison was born in Ohio. Ohio boasts
Speaker 1: two of the most prolific engineers who worked in the
Speaker 1: field of electricity, and as a child he was intelligent,
Speaker 1: but he was easily distracted. He also had difficulty hearing,
Speaker 1: initially because of about with scarlet fever. He also had
Speaker 1: a few incidents that probably depleted his hearing further, including
Speaker 1: getting cuffed on the side of the head by an
Speaker 1: engineer Once upon a time. In the mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: Edison found work as a telegraph operator, and he was
Speaker 1: still a teenager at the time. He did so because
Speaker 1: he rescued a the son of a telegraph engineer, from
Speaker 1: being run down by a train, and as a reward,
Speaker 1: he was given a position as a telegraph operator. He
Speaker 1: continued tinkering with gadgets as he was growing older, and
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty nine he invented stuff like the universal
Speaker 1: stock printer, which made him a ton of money like
Speaker 1: forty dollars, which in the late nineteenth century was an
Speaker 1: enormous sum and allowed him to set up business for himself.
Speaker 1: By the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, he had found
Speaker 1: much success working with giant companies like Western Union, and
Speaker 1: he operated a laboratory and employed other machinists and inventors
Speaker 1: to work with him. First they had a lab in Newark,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and then later in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty who Edison opened the Pearl Street Generating
Speaker 1: Station in Lower Manhattan. It provided a hundred ten volts
Speaker 1: of electrical power to just fifty nine customers, so at
Speaker 1: this time it was the first central power station in
Speaker 1: the United States, and as a central power station, it
Speaker 1: could only deliver power to areas that were close to
Speaker 1: the to the generation station. This was using direct current,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't high voltage direct current, so it couldn't
Speaker 1: go very far before the efficiency dropped to nothing. It
Speaker 1: also meant that it limited the number of customers that
Speaker 1: you could have. Not many people had any use for electricity.
Speaker 1: Only a few places had outfitted their buildings with electric lighting,
Speaker 1: for example, so you might find a hotel like a
Speaker 1: Posh Hotel might have upgrade to electric lights. Some of
Speaker 1: the mansions like Westinghouse's mansion, had electric lights, but most
Speaker 1: people did not have any need for electricity yet. However,
Speaker 1: it was an early generating station in the US. It
Speaker 1: didn't exactly usher in a whirlwind of electric systems though,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that again goes to that transmission efficiency.
Speaker 1: You needed that high voltage in order to send electricity
Speaker 1: a great distance. If you want to use direct current
Speaker 1: and you weren't able to generate a high voltage direct current,
Speaker 1: then what you would do is build a lot of
Speaker 1: power stations close to where you needed them. That's not
Speaker 1: very practical, especially as areas get larger, and if you
Speaker 1: want to deliver electricity to people who are not in
Speaker 1: an urban setting, it becomes extremely problematic. It would be
Speaker 1: better if you could use high voltage because then you
Speaker 1: could send it out from a central station to much
Speaker 1: further distances. But at the time there wasn't a practical
Speaker 1: way of doing high voltage direct current, so alternating current
Speaker 1: had a different approach. Remember, direct current does not work
Speaker 1: with transformers. You have to have that magnetic flux. You
Speaker 1: have to have that alternating magnetic field, so direct current
Speaker 1: only generates a steady magnetic field. That's why you can't
Speaker 1: do a transformer using direct current. You have to have
Speaker 1: alternating current for transformers to work. So if I wanted
Speaker 1: to transmit power a far distance, I would probably want
Speaker 1: to use an alternating current power generator. Use transformers to
Speaker 1: do what I had mentioned earlier, step up that voltage
Speaker 1: for transmission, send it hundreds of miles to wherever I
Speaker 1: need to use other transformers to step down the voltage
Speaker 1: and then deliver it to my customers. Otherwise I would
Speaker 1: need to build DC power stations near all the places
Speaker 1: that required electricity. Now, given time and resources, Edison and
Speaker 1: some of his fellow direct current advocates probably would have
Speaker 1: designed a very compelling high voltage direct current system, and
Speaker 1: the neat thing is, if you have a high voltage
Speaker 1: direct current system, it can actually be more efficient than
Speaker 1: alternating current, but at the time they didn't really have
Speaker 1: a way of doing that, and alternating current had it
Speaker 1: in the form of the transformers. So alternating current had
Speaker 1: the initial advantage, which meant that people were more likely
Speaker 1: to adopt it um. So we just had to figure
Speaker 1: out the kinks and converting high voltage alternating current to
Speaker 1: direct current in order to really make high voltage direct
Speaker 1: current a more viable alternative. That initially started to happen
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. Of course, by the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: the electric power grids were already becoming standardized, so it
Speaker 1: was it was like you you were trying to fight
Speaker 1: against inertia and momentum. You couldn't really change things because
Speaker 1: there had been so much investment and the alternating current
Speaker 1: system that high voltage directed current didn't have much of
Speaker 1: a chance in that time. But in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: they used something called mercury arc valves in order to
Speaker 1: do this con version of high voltage a C to
Speaker 1: high voltage d C and then back again from d
Speaker 1: C to a C. Uh So one place you would
Speaker 1: want to do this because it just makes more sense
Speaker 1: from an efficiency standpoint is for very long underwater cables.
Speaker 1: Alternating current on an underwater cable has some other issues
Speaker 1: with capacitance and some other things that are a little
Speaker 1: too technical to get into here, but it's not as
Speaker 1: efficient as high voltage direct current. So while it wasn't
Speaker 1: terribly practical to switch from a C systems to d
Speaker 1: C systems, once we were able to come up with
Speaker 1: this high voltage DC strategy, it did make sense for
Speaker 1: these very very long cables that would connect something like
Speaker 1: an an offshore island to the mainland, so that you
Speaker 1: could send power out to the island without having to
Speaker 1: build a power station on the island at self. Then
Speaker 1: it made more sense to use high voltage DC current.
Speaker 1: But way back in the day it did not. It
Speaker 1: did not exist. Today, we can also use d C
Speaker 1: to connect two different alternating current power grids together, which
Speaker 1: is non trivial because you remember I said alternating current
Speaker 1: involves current moving back and forth across the circuit many
Speaker 1: times per second. In the United States, it's sixty times
Speaker 1: per second, and sixty hurts. The reason that we chose
Speaker 1: sixty hurts in the first place. That's because of Westinghouse.
Speaker 1: Westinghouse was the company that was really pushing alternating current.
Speaker 1: The company that was really pushing direct current was General Electric.
Speaker 1: So Westinghouse said, hey, sixty hurts. That frequency works best
Speaker 1: with the lamps that we're producing today. If we do
Speaker 1: a different frequency, the lamps tend to flicker. To get nice,
Speaker 1: steady light, we needed an alternating current of sixty hurts.
Speaker 1: If you went with fifty or twenty five, which were
Speaker 1: other rates that people were considering, the lamps would flicker.
Speaker 1: So sixty hurts was arrived at as the standard here
Speaker 1: in the United States. Over in Europe it was fifty hurts,
Speaker 1: largely because of monopolies that were rising up in the
Speaker 1: electrical utility industry. But if you want to connect to
Speaker 1: alternating current power systems together, you need to have there too. Uh,
Speaker 1: there're two frequencies SYNCD up. So if you think of
Speaker 1: this as two different cables, which is drastically oversimplifying things,
Speaker 1: but think of it as two different cables, you would
Speaker 1: want the signals to be moving left to right in
Speaker 1: perfect synchronization. If they were out of phase with one another,
Speaker 1: you couldn't really transmit power. But using high voltage DC,
Speaker 1: you could convert alternating current from one system into direct current,
Speaker 1: send the electricity via direct current to the secondary power grid,
Speaker 1: where it would then be converted back into alternating current
Speaker 1: in sync with the second power grid. So you can
Speaker 1: have two alternating current power grids that are out of
Speaker 1: sync with each other, link them with a direct current
Speaker 1: connection and allow them to share power. This is important
Speaker 1: when you start having massive power grids that need to
Speaker 1: connect with one another. Otherwise you have a bunch of
Speaker 1: power grids that are acting like independent little island nations
Speaker 1: instead of an interconnected system. So, uh, direct current definitely
Speaker 1: has its place even today, even though alternating current one
Speaker 1: out um And I think it's kind of cool that
Speaker 1: it ultimately comes down to the reason we have a
Speaker 1: sixty hurts standard here in the United States because Westinghouse
Speaker 1: wanted the lamps to be nice and steady. But it
Speaker 1: took a long time for all of that to shake out.
Speaker 1: It's not like we just immediately switched over to alternating current.
Speaker 1: Like people didn't just look at the two different standards
Speaker 1: and say alternating current is clearly superior. It was a
Speaker 1: long battle, publicly fought with press releases and and press stunts.
Speaker 1: Media stunts were performed by both sides. You probably have
Speaker 1: heard the story of Topsy, the elephant that was electrocuted
Speaker 1: to death with alternating current to show the dangers of
Speaker 1: high voltage high voltage alternating current killing an elephant was
Speaker 1: meant to show, hey, this, this type of electricity is dangerous.
Speaker 1: You could die as a result of it, and people
Speaker 1: did die as they were working on things like transformers.
Speaker 1: So neither side was shying away from publicly addressing the
Speaker 1: benefits of their own method while saying the other method,
Speaker 1: whether it was direct current or alternating current, was quite
Speaker 1: literally the worst thing to ever happen to human beings
Speaker 1: in the history forever. At least that's how it seemed
Speaker 1: like during these, uh these press events. Now, some early
Speaker 1: victories gave alternating current a real advantage, and the first
Speaker 1: of those probably was the Chicago World's Fair in eight three.
Speaker 1: And this was a really big deal. The World's Fair
Speaker 1: was falling on the same year as the four hundredth
Speaker 1: anniversary of Columbus arriving in the New World, which in
Speaker 1: the United States was seen as a really important milestone.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to dive into the historical boondoggle that
Speaker 1: was the Columbus expeditions. Other than to say, there are
Speaker 1: better heroes to hold up than Christopher Columbus not a
Speaker 1: great hero, as it turns out, unless you are uh,
Speaker 1: completely ignoring the plights of people that Columbus also completely ignored.
Speaker 1: I recommend you do not do that, because it's a
Speaker 1: terrible thing to do. But it was seen at the
Speaker 1: time as a really big deal for the United States
Speaker 1: to celebrate this four hundredth anniversary, and the World's Fair
Speaker 1: was an opportunity for the United States to show off
Speaker 1: the direction of the country, and so for much of
Speaker 1: the expedition um or exhibition i should say, rather or
Speaker 1: not expedition. Much of the exhibition was dedicated to showing
Speaker 1: off what the future of the United States was going
Speaker 1: to be about, and that included future technologies and the
Speaker 1: use of electricity, which at that point was still pretty
Speaker 1: limited in the US. Only a few places were using it.
Speaker 1: But this was seen as the stuff of the future.
Speaker 1: So the fair was going to be lit up at
Speaker 1: night by electric lamps rather than gas lamps. But how
Speaker 1: would the power be delivered to the fair? We'll tell
Speaker 1: that story in just a second. But first, let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, So
Speaker 1: you have Edison working along with General Electric with the
Speaker 1: backing of JP Morgan, and that's one of the different
Speaker 1: parties that are really pushing to be the deliverer of
Speaker 1: electricity to the Chicago World's Fair, UH, and they're pushing
Speaker 1: direct current. They're all about d C. Then you have Westinghouse,
Speaker 1: George Westinghouse's company, and by extension, you have Nicola Tesla
Speaker 1: who was working with Westinghouse as the other major party,
Speaker 1: and they're pushing alternating current. Now, the General Electric Company
Speaker 1: asked for one point eight million dollars to light the fair.
Speaker 1: That was their bill. That's what they said to the organizers.
Speaker 1: They said, we we can provide the electricity you need
Speaker 1: to turn this into a sparkling wonderland and it will
Speaker 1: only cost you, um easily one point eight million dollars.
Speaker 1: The fair organizers said, no, that's a that's like a
Speaker 1: lot of money, and we'd rather not spend one point
Speaker 1: eight million dollars, And so the offer was rejected. The
Speaker 1: two of them, Edison and UH JP Morgan, went back
Speaker 1: to the drawing board decided they would make a second offer.
Speaker 1: A lower offer and said, oh, you know what, we
Speaker 1: could probably do it for five fifty four thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: so less than half of what we asked for before.
Speaker 1: We all us for nearly two million earlier, but we
Speaker 1: think we can get down to five thousand dollars. However,
Speaker 1: Westinghouse undercut that offer with a proposal to light the
Speaker 1: fair for the princely sum of three hundred nine thousand
Speaker 1: dollars using alternating current instead of direct current, and that's
Speaker 1: what the fair organizers want to hear. Three dollars is
Speaker 1: still significantly less than five four thousand dollars. So the
Speaker 1: fair organizers said, Westinghouse, you get the contract. And it
Speaker 1: all really came down to a price tag when you
Speaker 1: get down to it. It wasn't that they were specifically
Speaker 1: saying alternating current is superior to direct current. That's not
Speaker 1: what the World's Fair organizers were really saying. They were saying,
Speaker 1: we can afford alternating current, and direct current is prohibitively
Speaker 1: expensive for this project. So alternating current got the deal.
Speaker 1: And because the Chicago World's Fair was such a big
Speaker 1: deal in world's attention was on Chicago at the time,
Speaker 1: the display of the fair lit up at Night was
Speaker 1: incredibly impressive and powerful, and it was a great advertising
Speaker 1: campaign for Westinghouse and alternating current, honestly because it was
Speaker 1: such an effective display of what alternating current could do.
Speaker 1: A lot of different cities and companies were interested in
Speaker 1: pursuing getting their various areas wired for electricity using alternating current.
Speaker 1: In Westinghouse one another important battle in the US by
Speaker 1: landing a contract for the Niagara Falls Power Station. The
Speaker 1: generator would be an alternating current system instead of direct current.
Speaker 1: Edison in General Electric had pursued this as well, but
Speaker 1: they failed. And here's where it comes in handy to
Speaker 1: talk about how these generators tend to work. And you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of different ways of generating electricity, right
Speaker 1: like you've got hydro power, you've got wind power, you
Speaker 1: got coal power, you've got nuclear power. Now they all
Speaker 1: ultimately work on a very similar principle. All of those
Speaker 1: tend to work the same way ultimately when you get
Speaker 1: down to the very basics of what is happening, and
Speaker 1: that is they all involve some sort of mechanical system
Speaker 1: where a conductor is moving through a magnetic field so
Speaker 1: that it's it's experiencing magnetic flux and generating a current
Speaker 1: or current is induced to flow through the conductor, is
Speaker 1: a better way of putting it. In other words, these
Speaker 1: are all very large systems that are following those same
Speaker 1: basic experiments that were happening at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century when people were just starting to move conductors,
Speaker 1: When Faraday was moving a conductive disc through a magnetic
Speaker 1: field and observing the fact that electric current was flowing
Speaker 1: through the disc. That's what all these systems ultimately do.
Speaker 1: It's just on a much, much, much larger scale. It's
Speaker 1: nothing as modest as the fairy Day's approach. Now, with
Speaker 1: a coal or a nuclear power plant, you're using heat
Speaker 1: to convert water into steam. So you've got a boiler essentially,
Speaker 1: and the boilers filled with water, and the heat is
Speaker 1: provided either through nuclear radiation or through a coal furnace,
Speaker 1: so you're burning coal. Essentially, the heat up water, convert
Speaker 1: the water to steam. The steam then turns a turbine,
Speaker 1: and the turbine is connected to a system that moves
Speaker 1: the combination of magnets and conductors so that you generate
Speaker 1: the alternating current. Now, with coal plants, the heat is
Speaker 1: coming from that massive furnace and you're burning coal, so
Speaker 1: obviously there's a downside here. You're emitting a lot of
Speaker 1: greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide. So it's a very powerful
Speaker 1: way to generate electricity, but it it's very it creates
Speaker 1: a lot of pollution as a result, which is why
Speaker 1: when people talk about electricity being cleaner than fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: it really just it just means that you have to
Speaker 1: look a step further, where is the electricity coming from.
Speaker 1: If the electricity is coming from a coal power plant,
Speaker 1: you still have a problem there because you have the
Speaker 1: power plant emitting carbon into the atmosphere as well as
Speaker 1: other greenhouse gases and other types of pollution. So even
Speaker 1: though the electric utensil, or vehicle or whatever itself may
Speaker 1: not emit any carbon emissions, the source of its electricity
Speaker 1: might be emitting a lot of carbon emissions. So coal
Speaker 1: power plants are not clean right. You're not getting clean
Speaker 1: electricity that way. Nuclear power plants also have a problem
Speaker 1: with generating nuclear waste. Now we're getting better and better
Speaker 1: about finding ways to maximize nuclear material and minimize nuclear
Speaker 1: waste so that that doesn't become as big an issue
Speaker 1: as was feared. Because, of course, the worry is where
Speaker 1: do you put the nuclear waste which will maintain a
Speaker 1: nuclear dangerous level of nuclear radiation thousands of years after
Speaker 1: you gather it. How do you where do you put
Speaker 1: that stuff? And no one wants it near them, right,
Speaker 1: You don't want to have a nuclear waste holding facility
Speaker 1: anywhere close to where you live. It's a scary thought.
Speaker 1: But nuclear power plants to a very similar thing to
Speaker 1: carbon coal power plants, and that you use nuclear radiation
Speaker 1: to heat water converted into steam and turn a turbine.
Speaker 1: Both in coal plants and in nuclear power plants, the
Speaker 1: goal is to create essentially a closed system for the water,
Speaker 1: so the water evaporates, turns into steam, turns the turbine.
Speaker 1: Once the pressure builds up, turbine ends up generating electricity.
Speaker 1: The steam continues through the system until it starts to
Speaker 1: cool down, condense back into water, and go back into
Speaker 1: the boiler tank so that it can be turned into
Speaker 1: steam again. That way, you can just keep using that
Speaker 1: same water over and over again and is separated from
Speaker 1: the source of heat, so you're not getting pollution from
Speaker 1: the coal furnace or rate, or you're not getting any
Speaker 1: radioactive material from the the new source of nuclear radiation.
Speaker 1: The two are separate systems. It's just that the water
Speaker 1: in one system is heated by the output of the
Speaker 1: other system. UH. Very clever design because it means that
Speaker 1: you're not having to constantly replenish the water in your
Speaker 1: UH in your closed system. You do have to occasionally
Speaker 1: do it because you're no system is completely perfect. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have some sort of loss somewhere on there, so
Speaker 1: you do have to top it off occasionally. But keeping
Speaker 1: them separate limits the amount of pollution that you have. UH.
Speaker 1: That being said, you know, there are alternatives to coal
Speaker 1: plants and nuclear power plants that don't emit any carbon
Speaker 1: radiation or a carbon pollution or any radioactive material either.
Speaker 1: So hydropower is a great example of that. When power
Speaker 1: also they eliminate the need to heat up water entirely.
Speaker 1: But you're still talking about the mechanical energy of turning
Speaker 1: one of these generators so that it induces electricity to
Speaker 1: flow through a conductor. So with hydropower, you engineer a
Speaker 1: system in which water turns the turbine as it typically
Speaker 1: moves from an area of higher elevation to lower elevation.
Speaker 1: Hydropower dams do this. So if you've ever seen a
Speaker 1: hydropower dam where there's this enormous dam stretching across the
Speaker 1: body of water, and you see water pouring out of
Speaker 1: the base of the dam from the higher section into
Speaker 1: the lower section. So it's it's just shooting out of
Speaker 1: that lower area. That's where the water is turning turbines,
Speaker 1: So you've got turbines inside the dam. Water pressure on
Speaker 1: the back end of the dam is forcing water through
Speaker 1: some channels. Those channels have the turbines in them. The
Speaker 1: force of the water hitting the turbines turns the turbines.
Speaker 1: The water continues on and pours out the other side. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you generate electricity um wind power. Same thing, except you're
Speaker 1: using wind to turn turbines that have blades on them.
Speaker 1: So wind blows the blades. This causes rotational force with
Speaker 1: the turbines, which then ends up turning a generator, just
Speaker 1: as we've talked about before, and again inducing electricity to
Speaker 1: flow by creating a difference in voltage. Solar power is
Speaker 1: different uh or at least it tends to be different. Typically,
Speaker 1: it relies on converting energy from photons striking photo cells
Speaker 1: into electricity, so it is a different means of generating
Speaker 1: electricity than these other methods. But there are also some
Speaker 1: systems that use solar energy to heat water, for example,
Speaker 1: or some other liquid to turn it into steam and
Speaker 1: turn turbines. So this would make it more like coal
Speaker 1: plants or nuclear power plants, except of course you're talking
Speaker 1: about sunlight and water, so you're not emitting any uh
Speaker 1: greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. You could emit water vapor
Speaker 1: if it's not a closed system, and water vapor is
Speaker 1: technically a greenhouse gas. It just doesn't last very long
Speaker 1: in the environment, but it is a very um effective
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas for its lifespan. It doesn't last very long
Speaker 1: in the environment, but it is a very absorbed, absorptive
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas. All right, back to the drama of the
Speaker 1: current war, so you had Westinghouse in general Electric battling
Speaker 1: it out big time. GE had some good points. Most
Speaker 1: of our electronics that we plug into sockets run direct current,
Speaker 1: which means if you want to use alternating current to
Speaker 1: get the electricity to those devices, you then have to
Speaker 1: convert a C into d C for it to actually
Speaker 1: work in the thing that you're using. So like a
Speaker 1: refrigerator for example. I mean that's a modern example, but
Speaker 1: a refrigerator, you need it to convert a C to
Speaker 1: d C to run the technology of a refrigerator. So
Speaker 1: if you had DC generation and DC transmission, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to You wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: convert anything. It would cut down on the elements would
Speaker 1: need inside the materials themselves. However, you still had the
Speaker 1: issue of how do you transmit the power from the
Speaker 1: generating station to where it needs to go, And before
Speaker 1: the era of high voltage DC, there wasn't really an
Speaker 1: answer to that question. Um So Edison and Westinghouse were
Speaker 1: both making some decisions around this time that were rubbing
Speaker 1: people the wrong way. Tesla originally worked for Edison. He
Speaker 1: worked for Edison in Europe for a while, then he
Speaker 1: moved to New York and worked with Edison for a
Speaker 1: while as a contractor, but they had a falling out
Speaker 1: and then Tesla would end up working over with Westinghouse. However,
Speaker 1: even at Westinghouse, Tesla found it frustrating. So one of
Speaker 1: the problems was Tesla was not very ferocious when it
Speaker 1: came to protecting his work, and he had really little
Speaker 1: interest in asserting his authority and demanding what he was
Speaker 1: worth and protecting his intellectual property and his patents, and
Speaker 1: if you don't protect patents, people can all call over you.
Speaker 1: Tesla believed that he shouldn't have to protect his stuff
Speaker 1: because it was clearly his and people should just behave better.
Speaker 1: But in the world we live in sometimes that's not enough,
Speaker 1: and some people were walking all over him. Uh. He
Speaker 1: would eventually see his finances drain away over time, so
Speaker 1: as he got older, he became more destitute. He was
Speaker 1: living for free in various hotels, and typically hotel would
Speaker 1: eventually get fed up with Tesla and a victim, and
Speaker 1: he would just essentially move further down the street and
Speaker 1: find another hotel that would be thrilled to have the
Speaker 1: brilliant Nicola Tesla because they thought of it as something
Speaker 1: that would elevate the hotel and attract more people to
Speaker 1: their hotel. If Nicola Tesla stays at their hotel, then
Speaker 1: obviously it's got to be a really awesome place. That
Speaker 1: was kind of the the approach. It's actually pretty sad
Speaker 1: towards the end of his life, and I've talked about
Speaker 1: in other episodes of Tech stuff. So I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: dwell on it here, but just to say that that
Speaker 1: the end of his I was a little tragic. Then
Speaker 1: there was William Stanley. That was the guy who made
Speaker 1: the first commercially viable transformer, the technology that Tesla would
Speaker 1: improve over time. Stanley also worked for Westinghouse, but Stanley
Speaker 1: and George Westinghouse had a fundamental disagreement about money. The
Speaker 1: disagreement was that Stanley felt he was owed money and
Speaker 1: Westinghouse said no. So Westinghouse's lawyer, Franklin Pope, actually urged
Speaker 1: George Westinghouse to drop Stanley's business entirely. That same lawyer,
Speaker 1: Franklin Pope, would later die in a terrible accident. He
Speaker 1: was checking on one of Stanley's transformers and was fatally electrocuted.
Speaker 1: That's redundant. Electrocuted is fatal. A lot of people use
Speaker 1: electrocute to mean you got shocked, but electrocute means you
Speaker 1: were You died as a result of electricity flowing through you.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that was some pretty nasty irony there that
Speaker 1: the lawyer who advised Westinghouse to get rid of William
Speaker 1: Stanley would ultimately die by being electrocuted by one of
Speaker 1: Stanley's transformers. Stanley himself set out to found his own company.
Speaker 1: He was hoping to rival General Electric and Westinghouse. He
Speaker 1: was hoping to become the third big player in that
Speaker 1: space in the United States. But he found it really
Speaker 1: frustrating because he had to constantly go to court to
Speaker 1: fight for his patents. He was kind of the opposite
Speaker 1: of Tesla. Whereas Tesla was sort of lackadaisical in protecting
Speaker 1: his intellectual property, Stanley was fierce, but he had to
Speaker 1: keep doing it over and over again. It's not like
Speaker 1: you can protect it once and you're fine. Every time
Speaker 1: there was a threat, he would have to go to court,
Speaker 1: and this really started to wear on him so much
Speaker 1: so that he didn't He wasn't able to keep control
Speaker 1: of his own company. It was kind of rested away
Speaker 1: from him. Eventually, Stanley's company would get swallowed up by
Speaker 1: General Electric. So he had worked for Westinghouse, left Westinghouse
Speaker 1: on bad terms, founded his own company, and then that
Speaker 1: company would get acquired by Westinghouse as big competitor. General Electric.
Speaker 1: Kind of ugly there too. He would ultimately decide to
Speaker 1: focus on other things besides electricity. He got completely disillusioned
Speaker 1: by all the politics and backstabbing, and so he started
Speaker 1: to go and work on other things. He eventually invented
Speaker 1: an improved thermis, for example. So he kept on working
Speaker 1: on things till the end of his life. But he
Speaker 1: wasn't he wasn't eager to work in electricity anymore. Edison
Speaker 1: himself became sort of a victim of his own success.
Speaker 1: So he built this laboratory in Menlo Park, and it
Speaker 1: was a place of great innovation, some of it driven
Speaker 1: largely by Edison himself, some of it by his employees.
Speaker 1: But the reason they had a place to work was
Speaker 1: because Edison had created that place. So, whether you want
Speaker 1: to think of it as a direct responsibility or indirect
Speaker 1: responsibility at US and played an enormous role in those
Speaker 1: early years of electricity. Buzz Lab kept growing, and as
Speaker 1: it grew, it became more complicated and difficult to manage,
Speaker 1: and Edison missed it when it was tiny and more intimate.
Speaker 1: He didn't like corporate structures, he didn't like academic structures.
Speaker 1: So he was feeling more and more out of place
Speaker 1: in his own laboratory, and eventually he decided to move
Speaker 1: away from it. He became more of a business manager
Speaker 1: than an engineer or inventor. He did go on to
Speaker 1: work on other things. He eventually would develop a car
Speaker 1: battery for his buddy Henry Ford for the Model T.
Speaker 1: And I'm pretty sure at some point I need to
Speaker 1: do an episode specifically about Henry Ford. Maybe I'll get
Speaker 1: Scott to come on Scott from Car Stuff and we
Speaker 1: can talk about Henry Ford, because I think that would
Speaker 1: be a fascinating episode to to talk about the guy.
Speaker 1: Another irascible businessman, Edison himself would die at the age
Speaker 1: of eighty four due to complications with diabetes. He was
Speaker 1: known as a brilliant but really grouchy dude. It was
Speaker 1: standoffs even to his own family. But his work, whether
Speaker 1: directly on projects or as someone who provided a place
Speaker 1: for innovation to happen, helped shape our world. And that's
Speaker 1: pretty much where we're going to leave off. This was
Speaker 1: the era where more and more companies were starting to
Speaker 1: put up power grids. Cities would contract with Westinghouse and
Speaker 1: other companies to design power grids and to deliver electricity
Speaker 1: to homes. We started seeing electric lights get adopted pretty
Speaker 1: rapidly and replace gas lamps. From that point, forward and
Speaker 1: uh alternating current one out at least initially because it
Speaker 1: was easier to accomplish than high voltage direct current. Today,
Speaker 1: we could technically switch to high voltage direct current if
Speaker 1: we wanted to. We have the technology to do it.
Speaker 1: But again, we already have an existing infrastructure, so that's
Speaker 1: hard to just ignore. You've got billions of dollars invested
Speaker 1: in those infrastructures, and to just scrap them and start
Speaker 1: over would be an enormous and expensive undertaking, so it's
Speaker 1: not likely to ever happen now. Maybe in the future
Speaker 1: I'll do another episode where I will follow up on
Speaker 1: some of this and talk about some of the other
Speaker 1: things that are involved, like why are the voltages different
Speaker 1: in the United States versus Europe. We've talked about the
Speaker 1: cycles a little bit, but what about the voltages? Why
Speaker 1: is that different? Maybe I'll do that in the future episode.
Speaker 1: But for now, we're going to wrap this up, and guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: please get in touch with me. Let me know what
Speaker 1: you think. The email address for tech Stuff is text
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for the show at both of those locations is text
Speaker 1: Stuff H s W. As always, if you want to
Speaker 1: watch me record this live, you can visit twitch dot
Speaker 1: tv slash tech Stuff that's got a live stream of
Speaker 1: me recording these shows. You can see as I stumble
Speaker 1: my way through notes, go back, correct myself, yell at Dylan,
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Speaker 1: happen on camera to get cut out of the final podcast.
Speaker 1: So if you want to check that out, go to
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