Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: tech are You.
Speaker 2: So it is Friday.
Speaker 1: It's time for a classic episode, which means we dive
Speaker 1: into the tech Stuff archive and pull out an episode
Speaker 1: from our past to listen to. This one, originally published
Speaker 1: on June thirty, twenty seventeen, is called The History of
Speaker 1: Electricity Part two. Let's have a listen. Today, we're going
Speaker 1: to continue our series about the history of electricity. We're
Speaker 1: going to conclude it today, although we're concluding it right
Speaker 1: when electric power grids were starting to become a real thing.
Speaker 1: But since that point, a lot of the changes are
Speaker 1: more in electricity generation and less in electricity transmission. And
Speaker 1: I really wanted to get to the point where we
Speaker 1: talked about transmitting electricity.
Speaker 2: 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 Tesla's suggestion of broadcasting
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: That's for another episode.
Speaker 1: In our last episode, we explored how scientists, philosophers, inventors,
Speaker 1: and crazy people began to suss out the basics of electricity,
Speaker 1: largely through a lot of experimentation and a few happy accidents. Now,
Speaker 1: this story is one of those that really reinforces the
Speaker 1: fact that discoveries are rarely attributable to a single person.
Speaker 2: We like those stories.
Speaker 1: We like to say this one person was responsible for X,
Speaker 1: and this other person and was responsible for why. But
Speaker 1: the truth is way more complicated than that. Usually people
Speaker 1: are building upon the work of others that came before them,
Speaker 1: and they might be refining things and innovating in that space.
Speaker 1: But if it weren't for those who were earlier working
Speaker 1: on the same sort of stuff, you might not have
Speaker 1: ever seen those innovations happen. So, you know, we talk
Speaker 1: about stuff like Edison invented the light bulb, or Alexander
Speaker 1: Graham Bell invented the telephone, but we really would have
Speaker 1: to acknowledge some of the other people whose work made
Speaker 1: all of that possible. First of all, Edison didn't invent
Speaker 1: the light bulb, but he did improve it greatly. But
Speaker 1: we would need to talk about all that stuff. And
Speaker 1: this is not to take away from those inventors and
Speaker 1: engineers who really did make incredible contributions to technology and
Speaker 1: to our way of life. They are remarkable human beings
Speaker 1: and so I don't want to take anything away from them.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I don't.
Speaker 1: Want to ignore those who also made other contributions that
Speaker 1: made all of this possible. It's a disservice to them
Speaker 1: to gloss over it. So it would be also very
Speaker 1: difficult to make an hour long podcast if in fact
Speaker 1: most inventions were due to a single person's moment of ingenuity, Right,
Speaker 1: if the story were as simple as Thomas s and
Speaker 1: invented the light bulb. I don't know that I can
Speaker 1: make an hour out of that. Probably about forty minutes,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if I could stretch it to
Speaker 1: a full hour. Now. By the end of the last episode,
Speaker 1: I talked about an early alternating current generator and how
Speaker 1: by using what was called a split ring commutator, early
Speaker 1: inventors could change that alternating current that was being created
Speaker 1: in the generator into direct current. Just so you remember
Speaker 1: alternating current, the direction of current revers it is multiple
Speaker 1: times per second. There're cycles, and we describe them in frequencies. So,
Speaker 1: for example, here in the United States, we have a
Speaker 1: sixty hertz frequency for our electricity for our alternating current.
Speaker 1: That means sixty times per second that direction of current changes.
Speaker 1: So if you're looking at a wire stretching from left
Speaker 1: to right, that means that current would be flowing left
Speaker 1: to right and then right to left, and it would
Speaker 1: keep changing sixty times every second, whereas in Europe it
Speaker 1: would be fifty times. They're on a fifty system and
Speaker 1: not a sixty hert system. More on that and a
Speaker 1: little bit. Direct current, however, goes in a single direction.
Speaker 1: It does not change. So it goes from left to
Speaker 1: right or right to left, but it doesn't change throughout
Speaker 1: the It doesn't have cycles. It just continues until you
Speaker 1: shut the power off, in which case the current ceases
Speaker 1: to flow. Now, I want to continue the timeline we
Speaker 1: talked about in that last episode, talk more about how
Speaker 1: electricity moved out of the laboratory and into the real world.
Speaker 2: But in order to do that, I.
Speaker 1: Also have to backtrack just a bit from the end
Speaker 1: of the last episode where I was talking about generators,
Speaker 1: because there are some people who were working in electricity
Speaker 1: that I didn't really mention too much in the last episode,
Speaker 1: and I kind of need to in order to understand
Speaker 1: more about building upon those ideas.
Speaker 2: So one of those.
Speaker 1: People was Humphrey Davy. I mentioned him briefly in the
Speaker 1: last episode. He was one of the first people to
Speaker 1: make a practical use of electricity outside of direct experimentation.
Speaker 1: So remember in the early eighteenth century, well not early
Speaker 1: the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, you had inventors
Speaker 1: and engineers who were experimenting with electricity, but they didn't
Speaker 1: really have any practical use for it. Humphrey Davy was
Speaker 1: the first person to create something that could be practically
Speaker 1: used with electricity. He created the first arc lamp and
Speaker 1: the first incandescent lamp way back in the first decade
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds. The Davy lamp became a famous invention. Now,
Speaker 1: neither of those were meant for commercial use or manufacturing.
Speaker 1: They weren't made to light people's homes. It was more
Speaker 1: of a use case to prove that electricity could have
Speaker 1: some practical application beyond just understanding a fundamental element of
Speaker 1: the universe or fundamental element of life on Earth at least,
Speaker 1: so it would be many more decades before anyone could
Speaker 1: make a commercially viable light bulb or lamp, but Davy's
Speaker 1: works showed that it was in fact possible. Also in
Speaker 1: that last episode, I mentioned Ampier, whose last name is
Speaker 1: used as a unit of measurement within the electrical engineering world. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I mentioned that Ampier was studying the nature of electricity
Speaker 1: and magnets, but he was building on the work of others.
Speaker 1: One of those others was Hans Christian Rsted, who was
Speaker 1: a Danish philosopher and scientist and discovered something that I
Speaker 1: mentioned in the previous episode, which was electromagnetism. Airstead heard
Speaker 1: of Alessandro Volta's experiments with batteries, so Volta made the
Speaker 1: voltaic pile, the predecessor to the modern battery, and Airstead
Speaker 1: had heard about it, and by eighteen oh one Airstead
Speaker 1: started doing his own experiments, making his own batteries, and
Speaker 1: Airstid proposed that there might be a way of measuring
Speaker 1: the amount of current passing through a wire by putting
Speaker 1: the wire into water and allowing the electricity to separate
Speaker 1: the molecular bonds of hydrogen and oxygen, in otherwise, to
Speaker 1: create electrolysis. And that if you measured the amount of
Speaker 1: gas given off by the water, then you could use
Speaker 1: that to infer how much current was passing through the wire.
Speaker 1: It was kind of an indirect way of establishing how
Speaker 1: much current was passing through the wire at any given moment. Now,
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty one, Airstead performed an experiment in which
Speaker 1: he passed an electric current through a wire and then
Speaker 1: brought the wire near a magnetized compass needle, and this
Speaker 1: caused the compass needle to swing out of alignment. It
Speaker 1: was no longer lined up with the Earth's magnetic poles.
Speaker 1: And you know this will happen when you bring a
Speaker 1: magnet close to a compass. The Earth's magnetic field is powerful,
Speaker 1: but if you bring a small, less powerful magnet in
Speaker 1: close proximity to the compass needle, you will overpower the
Speaker 1: Earth's magnetic field. The compass needle will move toward the magnet,
Speaker 1: because again the strength of a magnetic field is somewhat
Speaker 1: dependent upon its distance to a magnetic material. Well, he said,
Speaker 1: this shows that an electric current passing through a wire
Speaker 1: creates 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 wire itself. Also, although this was not understood by
Speaker 1: Erstad at the time, if you ran an alternating current
Speaker 1: through that wire, you would see the direction of that
Speaker 1: magnetic field reverse. So when the current flows in one direction,
Speaker 1: you would see it flowing in a clockwise direction, and
Speaker 1: if you reverse the current, you would see it flow
Speaker 1: in a counterclockwise direction.
Speaker 2: This would become really important.
Speaker 1: Later on when we talk about alternating currents and transformers.
Speaker 1: Transformers being the type of of gadget that you use
Speaker 1: to step up or step down electric voltage, not robots
Speaker 1: that are more than meets the eye. It's a different
Speaker 1: type of transformer. We're going to take a quick break
Speaker 1: from this episode about the history of electricity and thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors. So Airston makes this observation about copper wire
Speaker 1: with a current flowing through it becoming a magnetic force
Speaker 1: for emitting a magnetic force, and Ampere made a similar
Speaker 1: discovery with electric wires attracting one another whenever electricity would
Speaker 1: flow through them. So this was the earliest observations of
Speaker 1: electromagnetism that are recorded. In eighteen twenty four, William Sturgeon
Speaker 1: experimented with electromagnetism by wrapping a bare wire of copper
Speaker 1: around an iron core. You got like a just an
Speaker 1: iron nail, and you've got some bare copper wire and
Speaker 1: you bend the copper wire so it coils around this
Speaker 1: iron core. Several times. He found that if he passed
Speaker 1: a current through the wire, it would turn the whole
Speaker 1: thing into a magnet briefly, but then the effect would disappear.
Speaker 1: So why was the effect disappearing, Well, the current was
Speaker 1: moving from the copper wire into the iron core of
Speaker 1: the structure. It wasn't maintaining a current through entirely. It
Speaker 1: was shorting out essentially. And William Sturgeon also couldn't do
Speaker 1: a multi layer wrap of the wire because the copper
Speaker 1: wire is conductive. If it made contact with itself, then
Speaker 1: current is flowing in the most efficient pathway. It's not
Speaker 1: going down the length of the copper wire necessarily, it
Speaker 1: could pass through as coils touched each other.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: He wasn't able to make a very strong magnetic effect
Speaker 1: this way. You increase the magnetic effect by making more coils.
Speaker 1: So if you're able to coil a conductive wire more
Speaker 1: times around a core like in this case, an iron core,
Speaker 1: you create a more powerful magnetic field as you passed
Speaker 1: a current through that conductor. In eighteen twenty seven, a
Speaker 1: man named Joseph Henry found a solution to this problem.
Speaker 1: He wrapped his copper wires in silk, which insulated them,
Speaker 1: so now he could have the copper wires laying against
Speaker 1: an iron core and laying against itself without the current
Speaker 1: bleeding through because the wires were insulated, and that allowed
Speaker 1: him to wrap the wires around the iron core several
Speaker 1: more times than Sturgeon was able to, and that meant
Speaker 1: the charge could not disappear into the iron and the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic effect would remain as long as a current was passing.
Speaker 2: Through the wire.
Speaker 1: So this discovering electromagnetism would become incredibly important for future
Speaker 1: applications of electricity. Meanwhile, Michael Faraday had been working with
Speaker 1: moving copper near a stationary magnet, which would induce current
Speaker 1: to flow through the copper.
Speaker 2: This is the basis of generators.
Speaker 1: Whether you are moving a conductor through the magnetic fields
Speaker 1: of some stationary magnets, or you're moving the magnets around
Speaker 1: a conductor so that the magnetic field is fluctuating around
Speaker 1: the conductor. Whenever you introduce a conductor through a fluctuating
Speaker 1: magnetic field, you're going to induce current to flow through
Speaker 1: that metal conductor, or really I should just say conductor doesn't.
Speaker 1: That's the important part, not whether or not it's metal.
Speaker 1: Also important is that it has to be that fluctuating
Speaker 1: magnetic field, otherwise you will induce current to flow, but
Speaker 1: as soon as the magnetic field stops to fluctuate, current
Speaker 1: will no longer flow. So you would typically do this
Speaker 1: by putting two permanent magnets end to end with the
Speaker 1: north pole facing the south pole of another one, and
Speaker 1: in between them. You would have your conductor on a
Speaker 1: rotatable system. So imagine that you've got a square of
Speaker 1: copper wire. You formed it to be an empty square,
Speaker 1: and it's rotatable between these two permanent magnets. As you
Speaker 1: rotate the square, it passes through the magnetic fields. This
Speaker 1: is similar to having magnetic flux introduced to the copper
Speaker 1: wire that induces current to flow, and that's where you
Speaker 1: get alternating current generators. So he also discovered something interesting.
Speaker 1: Henry's work involved moving current through a wire, which would
Speaker 1: create a magnetic field. Faraday's work involved moving a current
Speaker 1: a copper wire through a magnetic field in order to
Speaker 1: generate a current. So with Henry's work, they discovered that
Speaker 1: the magnetic field generated by one electromagnet could induce current
Speaker 1: to flow in a second electromagnet that wasn't hooked up
Speaker 1: to the first circuit. This became the basis for an
Speaker 1: important innovation, that being the AC transformer. I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that steps up or steps down voltage. Now remember voltage
Speaker 1: is akin to pressure. If you were looking at a
Speaker 1: water based system, voltage would be the water pressure. It's
Speaker 1: the push behind a current. And while this early work
Speaker 1: created the foundation for the transformer, it would take half
Speaker 1: a 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 electromagnetism. So once people figured out
Speaker 1: the nature between electricity and magnetism, they started coming up
Speaker 1: with some practical applications of this. The telegraph was one
Speaker 1: of those early ones, and it was incredible. It transformed communication,
Speaker 1: particularly here in the United States, all over the world
Speaker 1: as well. So lots of people were exploring the scientific
Speaker 1: and practical applications of electricity and magnetism, but two groups
Speaker 1: were specifically looking at it in terms of communication systems.
Speaker 1: So over in jolly Old England, you had Sir William
Speaker 1: Cook and Sir Charles Wheatstone who were exploring this possibility.
Speaker 1: And here in the United States you had Samuel Morse,
Speaker 1: Alfred Vail, and Leonard Gale working on this. Now, both
Speaker 1: sets of researchers realized that using electricity to manipulate magnetized
Speaker 1: pieces of metal could allow for a communication system. The
Speaker 1: Cook and Wheatstone system was an experiment that began in
Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties. With magnetic needles. There were positions so
Speaker 1: they could point at various letters and numbers. So imagine
Speaker 1: that you've got a needle on a that can rotate horizontally.
Speaker 1: It's on a horizontal plane, it can rotate around and
Speaker 1: around on a balance, and you've got letters that are
Speaker 1: arranged around the needle. And by running an electric current
Speaker 1: through a circuit, you can create a magnetic field that
Speaker 1: attracts the needle, so it looks like it's pointing at
Speaker 1: a specific letter. It's actually pointing in the direction of
Speaker 1: whatever the magnetic field is, but it looks like it's
Speaker 1: pointing specifically at the letter. So using several of these needles,
Speaker 1: I think they had five set up in a panel
Speaker 1: with a bunch of letters and numbers. They could communicate.
Speaker 1: You could just choose which circuit you're activating to magnetize
Speaker 1: a specific point around those needles. The needles would start
Speaker 1: to point in those directions and you could spell out
Speaker 1: various messages. These ended up being used in the British
Speaker 1: railroad signaling service. Now over in the United States, Morse,
Speaker 1: Veil and Gale began work on a single circuit telegraph system,
Speaker 1: and it involved a sending station where you had an
Speaker 1: operating key, and this would complete an electric circuit whenever
Speaker 1: you pressed it. So an operator key it looks like
Speaker 1: a little almost looks like a stapler. When you press
Speaker 1: it down, it would create a closed circuit and allow
Speaker 1: a signal to pass through to the other end. When
Speaker 1: you would lift it back up or remove pressure from it,
Speaker 1: it would break that circuit and electric current would cease
Speaker 1: to flow. So you had a battery that was providing power.
Speaker 1: Every time you would push down it would complete this
Speaker 1: circuit and a signal would be sent to the receiving station.
Speaker 1: The original station had an apparatus that would make marks
Speaker 1: on paper, and so Morse ended up developing the famous
Speaker 1: Morse code Morse code is a way of encoding letters
Speaker 1: in a series of dots and dashes. You represent this
Speaker 1: on an operator key by the length of time you
Speaker 1: spend pressing the key downward. So for a dot you
Speaker 1: do a quick press, it's just a quick jolt of
Speaker 1: electricity through the circuit. For a dash, the press is
Speaker 1: a little bit longer so that it comes across. And
Speaker 1: on the other end, you had a system that would
Speaker 1: essentially make marks on paper, so you could see dots
Speaker 1: or dashes. Morse was very clever in this way. He
Speaker 1: also made sure that the most commonly used letters had
Speaker 1: the list of encodings, so a very common letter might
Speaker 1: have a single dot or a single dash. More rare
Speaker 1: letters like a que might have more complicated encoding because
Speaker 1: you don't have to use it as frequently, so you
Speaker 1: save all the very simple encoding for your most common letters. Now,
Speaker 1: they noticed something really interesting, which is that as operators
Speaker 1: began to get used to this system, they were able
Speaker 1: to start understanding messages without having to read the dots
Speaker 1: and dashes, because they would just hear what was coming out.
Speaker 1: They would hear the receiving station tapping out either the
Speaker 1: dots or dashes to market on the paper, and once
Speaker 1: they started getting used to this and understanding what those
Speaker 1: taps were meaning, like the long taps versus the short taps,
Speaker 1: it became clear that you didn't need to have.
Speaker 2: The paper at all.
Speaker 1: You could have a receiving station that would beep either
Speaker 1: short or longer beaps to let you know whether it
Speaker 1: was a dot or a dash, and operators were able
Speaker 1: to just pick it up up by hearing it because
Speaker 1: they became so used to it. And so future telegraph
Speaker 1: stations would get rid of the paper and just become
Speaker 1: the beeping receiver, so that an operator would transcribe whatever
Speaker 1: the message was and then deliver it to whomever was
Speaker 1: supposed to get it. In eighteen forty three, Morse and
Speaker 1: Vail were able to secure funding for a telegraph system
Speaker 1: that was between Washington, d c. And Baltimore, Maryland. That's
Speaker 1: not terribly far in the grand scheme of things, but
Speaker 1: it was a big deal at the time. The first
Speaker 1: message sent on the new system went out on May
Speaker 1: twenty fourth, eighteen forty four. It was sent from Samuel
Speaker 1: Morse to Vail, and it read what hath God wrought?
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of drama in the first message,
Speaker 1: just like social media today. Really, Over the following decades,
Speaker 1: telegraph systems began to connect more cities together, even as
Speaker 1: inventors were trying to find other practical applications of electricity.
Speaker 1: So other people would make improvements to the telegraph and
Speaker 1: make it more user friendly and more useful. Some of
Speaker 1: those people included Ezra Cornell, who created a means to
Speaker 1: insulate telegraph wires and make them more efficient. Cornell would
Speaker 1: go on to co found a college it's called Cornell.
Speaker 1: And Thomas Edison, famous inventor and irascible gentleman, also made
Speaker 1: some improvements to the telegraph, including creating a system called
Speaker 1: the quadruplex, which, as the name might suggest, would allow
Speaker 1: up to four messages to transmit over the same wire simultaneously,
Speaker 1: two going in one direction and two coming from the
Speaker 1: other direction. Now, one of Stanley's inspirations was another inventor
Speaker 1: named Charles Brush. Brush, in turn had been inspired by
Speaker 1: Humphrey Davy. So we see that there's a chain forming here.
Speaker 1: So Davy was the one who created that early ArcLight. Well,
Speaker 1: Brush thought the arc lights were super cool, and as
Speaker 1: a teenager he started to really tinker with stuff. He
Speaker 1: would start to neglect his chores in the family farm
Speaker 1: just 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 ninth, eighteen seventy nine, the city
Speaker 1: switched on the new arc lights. The public reaction was
Speaker 1: mostly positive. There were only a few people who were
Speaker 1: saying stuff like it's not as bry 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.
Speaker 2: He thought alternating current might have its uses. In fact,
Speaker 2: at the.
Speaker 1: Time wrote that the general thought on alternating current from
Speaker 1: his contemporaries was that it was a despised and rejected
Speaker 1: line of work. But Stanley was convinced there was something
Speaker 1: more to it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Obviously, when we start looking at ways to distribute electricity,
Speaker 1: it became clear that alternating current, at least initially was
Speaker 1: superior to direct current, and in eighteen eighty four Stanley
Speaker 1: began to work with George Westinghouse's company called Westinghouse. Westinghouse
Speaker 1: himself heard of Stanley's contributions and promoted him to chief
Speaker 1: engineer of the Westinghouse Pittsburgh facility, and Stanley then learned
Speaker 1: of Lucian Gaillard and John Gibbs, who had built an
Speaker 1: alternating current transformer. The problem was that the transformer they
Speaker 1: had built wasn't really commercially viable, so Stanley wanted to
Speaker 1: take that same idea and design a transformer that would
Speaker 1: have real world applications. Now, what is a transformer and
Speaker 1: how does it actually work to change voltage? We'll look
Speaker 1: at that in just a minute, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, so,
Speaker 1: what the heck is a transformer. I've talked about it.
Speaker 1: I've said it steps up and steps down voltage, but
Speaker 1: I haven't really explained it well. It all relies upon
Speaker 1: that electromotive force and fundamental electromagnetic forces. You remember that
Speaker 1: when you move a conductor through a magnetic field, the
Speaker 1: field induces electric current to flow through the conductor. But
Speaker 1: to do this, you have to keep moving the conductor
Speaker 1: through the field unless you move the field instead of
Speaker 1: the conductor, and you keep the conductor in place.
Speaker 2: Now, one of the.
Speaker 1: Ways you could do that is you could create an
Speaker 1: electromagnet using alternating current, and that would give you the
Speaker 1: same effect of moving a magnetic field around a conductor.
Speaker 1: Because remember I mentioned earlier, when the inventors were looking
Speaker 1: at how electric current generates a magnetic field, they thought
Speaker 1: of it as as current travels down a wire, a
Speaker 1: magnetic field is generated as a circle around that wire,
Speaker 1: with the wire being the core or hub of that circle.
Speaker 1: If you think of it that way, well, if electricity reverses,
Speaker 1: then the magnetic field changes direction. That creates magnetic flux
Speaker 1: because it's the same thing as moving a conductor through
Speaker 1: a stationary magnetic field back and forth. Like if you
Speaker 1: took a piece of metal conductive metal and you waved
Speaker 1: it through a magnetic field repeatedly, you could induce electricity
Speaker 1: to flow through the conductor. So the same thing is
Speaker 1: true if you have this alternating current electro magnet. And
Speaker 1: remember that alternating current switches voltages on either end of
Speaker 1: the conductor several times a second, so that's what's making
Speaker 1: the electricity flow in different directions. One direction at one
Speaker 1: point the other direction at the other point. If you're
Speaker 1: looking at your traditional alternating current generator, it's when the
Speaker 1: conductor breaks that perpendicular plane or really no, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: the parallel plane to the magnetic field and starts to move,
Speaker 1: so that the side that was going up with a
Speaker 1: relation to a magnetic field is now moving down. That's
Speaker 1: what ends up creating this alternating current. So every time
Speaker 1: you change that current direction, the magnetic field also changes.
Speaker 1: If you were to introduce a second conductive material within
Speaker 1: range of that alternating magnetic field, that would induce a
Speaker 1: similar alternating current in the secondary conductor. So let's say
Speaker 1: you've got an electromagnet and it consists of an iron core,
Speaker 1: and around this iron core you've wrapped insulated copper wire
Speaker 1: twenty times. So let's say you've got an iron nail
Speaker 1: and you've got some copper wire of a fairly small gauge,
Speaker 1: and you do twenty coils around this iron nail. This
Speaker 1: is your electromagnet. If you were to hook this up
Speaker 1: to a battery, it would create a direct current through
Speaker 1: the wire and you would have an electromagnet. But that's
Speaker 1: just a simple electromagnet. Let's say that you hooked it
Speaker 1: up to an alternating current. Now the current is moving
Speaker 1: down from the top of the nail to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the nail, and then from the bottom of the
Speaker 1: nail to the top of the nail more over and
Speaker 1: over and over again, several times a second. That creates
Speaker 1: a fluctuating magnetic field. Now, let's say you get a
Speaker 1: second nail with a second length of copper wire wrapped
Speaker 1: around it. This one is not attached to a battery
Speaker 1: or a power system. You bring that one close to
Speaker 1: the first one, which will be your primary electromagnet. You
Speaker 1: bring this secondary electromagnet close to it. Once it's within
Speaker 1: that fluctuating man metic field, it's going to induce current
Speaker 1: to flow through the second electromagnet. Even though it's not
Speaker 1: hooked up to a power source, it will start to
Speaker 1: have electric current induced in it. This is the basis
Speaker 1: for the transformer, But by itself, it's not that useful
Speaker 1: because you're not changing the voltage at all. You're just
Speaker 1: inducing electric current to flow through a secondary coil.
Speaker 2: But if your second.
Speaker 1: Electromagnet 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 2: So again, let's say you've got that.
Speaker 1: Iron nail and you've wrapped copper coil around it twenty times,
Speaker 1: and your secondary one, your iron nail, you've only wrapped
Speaker 1: it ten times around. Well, this will step the voltage
Speaker 1: down by half. The voltage in your new your secondary
Speaker 1: electromagnet will be half of what it is in the
Speaker 1: primary one. But if you primary one has twenty coils
Speaker 1: and your secondary one has forty coils, this will step
Speaker 1: up the voltage by twice the original amount. So whatever
Speaker 1: the voltage was in your original circuit, it will be
Speaker 1: twice as powerful in your secondary one because you have
Speaker 1: twice the number of coils. The number of coils in
Speaker 1: your secondary circuit is going to determine whether the voltage
Speaker 1: is stepped up or step down. Now, Stanley build a
Speaker 1: prototype transformer for high voltage transmission and demonstrated it on
Speaker 1: March twentieth, eighteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: He then got.
Speaker 1: Wrapped up in some serious drama in the electrical utility industry,
Speaker 1: which I'll talk about a bit later. But holy cal
Speaker 1: If you think Hollywood and politics are all about backstabbing
Speaker 1: and scandal, wait till we get to the Shenanigans during
Speaker 1: the current wars, because people got messed up. There were
Speaker 1: all sorts of backstage dealings and just shady practices, people
Speaker 1: not getting paid, people getting forced out of the business.
Speaker 1: It was really cutthroat in the late nineteenth in early
Speaker 1: twentieth centuries.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: If you don't have high.
Speaker 1: Pressure, you can only transmit power a short distance before
Speaker 1: the efficiency drops to nothing. So you've got to have
Speaker 1: a lot of force. Now this again, if you think
Speaker 1: of it in terms of a water system, this makes sense.
Speaker 1: If you have very low water pressure, that's going to
Speaker 1: be hard to get a shower on the top floor
Speaker 1: of a hotel, for example. To have much of anything happen.
Speaker 1: If you have very very high water pressure, it may
Speaker 1: be that on the first floor, you might feel like
Speaker 1: the shower is going to push you through the back wall.
Speaker 1: So you need that high voltage because you need that
Speaker 1: high pressure to transmit electricity great distances. That's really what
Speaker 1: Stanley was looking at. So using transformers, you can step
Speaker 1: up or step down the voltage as needed for distribution purposes.
Speaker 1: So at the power generation site, you might generate power
Speaker 1: at a specific voltage and then you want to transmit
Speaker 1: it fifty miles away, so you use a transformer to
Speaker 1: step up that voltage to make it a high voltage
Speaker 1: signal so that it will transmit efficiently across the power
Speaker 1: lines you've strung between your generation point and your destination.
Speaker 1: Once it reaches the destination, you go through a second
Speaker 1: type of transformer to step the voltage back down so
Speaker 1: it's appropriate for whatever you want to use it for.
Speaker 1: So when you see transformers on utility poles around cities
Speaker 1: and on houses, there are usually small transformers attached to
Speaker 1: those as well. The purpose of that is so that
Speaker 1: it can either step up the voltage so it can
Speaker 1: transmit it, or step down the voltage so it can
Speaker 1: deliver that electricity to home. These are also the things
Speaker 1: that when they get overloaded, they explode in a ton
Speaker 1: of sparks, they get shorted out, they get too much
Speaker 1: electricity pushed through at one time. This can happen if
Speaker 1: you have like a really serious electrical storm. And if
Speaker 1: you've ever heard a transformer go off, it is unforgettable.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a shotgun and sparks fly everywhere. The
Speaker 1: first time I ever saw one do that, I was
Speaker 1: a kid in the backseat of my parents' cars. We
Speaker 1: were driving through downtown Atlanta, and I grew up in
Speaker 1: rural Georgia, so I'm from backwoods country up in Georgia
Speaker 1: and wasn't used to seeing explosions go off right outside
Speaker 1: the car window in a city.
Speaker 2: It gave me a.
Speaker 1: Very specific and as it turns out, not entirely accurate
Speaker 1: view of what city life must be like. It was
Speaker 1: a special circumstance. Now we're at the dawn of the
Speaker 1: electrical age. So you had Brush's arc lighting system that
Speaker 1: showed electricity did have practical uses outside the laboratory. You
Speaker 1: had worked with DC and AC generators. That was progressing,
Speaker 1: and now it's time to talk about some of the
Speaker 1: big names I haven't really talked about extensively yet, namely
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
Speaker 2: So, first of all, a lot of people.
Speaker 1: When they talk about Tesla seem to think that he
Speaker 1: invented alternating current.
Speaker 2: He did not.
Speaker 1: There were inventors who were working with alternating current before
Speaker 1: Tesla was even born. They didn't really know what it
Speaker 1: would be good four. But alternating current existed before Tesla
Speaker 1: came along, and transformers existed before Tesla came along. He
Speaker 1: didn't even invent the alternating current transformer. He did, however,
Speaker 1: make significant improvements to transformer technology so that it became
Speaker 1: a much more commercially viable tech, and he made some
Speaker 1: great strides in that field.
Speaker 2: So I don't want to take anything away from Tesla.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say that he didn't make any
Speaker 1: significant contributions or that he was just wack a doodle crazy.
Speaker 1: That's not That's not what I'm saying at all. First
Speaker 1: of all, we don't know if he was crazy. He
Speaker 1: was certainly eccentric. And second of all, he made very
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: So that's why I'm bringing this up.
Speaker 1: I should also mention Tesla, as eccentric as he got
Speaker 1: and as grandiose as his ego was, he only did
Speaker 1: not deserve the mistreatment.
Speaker 2: He was subjected to toward the end of his life.
Speaker 1: He was not prepared for the drama that would unfold
Speaker 1: as he got older. Thomas Edison, meanwhile, tends to be
Speaker 1: portrayed as one of two things. It depends on whether
Speaker 1: you're pro Edison or anti Edison. There are two versions
Speaker 1: of Edison that tend to be presented to people. He's
Speaker 1: either a brilliant inventor and he's a guy who just
Speaker 1: held more patents than anyone else and was incredibly 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 that he had very little
Speaker 1: to know involvement in. In other words, he would have
Speaker 1: engineers working for him that would invent stuff, and he
Speaker 1: would just append his name to the patents. Thus his
Speaker 1: name was attached to more patents than anyone else but
Speaker 1: if 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 really took advantage of other people.
Speaker 1: And the truth is not either of those extremes. He
Speaker 1: was a person like any other person, with faults and
Speaker 1: with virtues. So I will try my best not to
Speaker 1: paint him too far in either direction. But like Brush,
Speaker 1: Edison was born in Ohio, Ohio Moosts two of the
Speaker 1: most prolific engineers who worked in the field of electricity,
Speaker 1: and as a child he was intelligent, but he was
Speaker 1: easily distracted. He also had difficulty hearing, initially because of
Speaker 1: a bout with scarlet fever. He also had a few
Speaker 1: incidents that probably depleted his hearing further, including getting cuffed
Speaker 1: on the side of the head by an engineer once
Speaker 1: upon a time in the mid eighteen hundreds, Edison found
Speaker 1: work as a telegraph operator, and he was still a
Speaker 1: teenager at the time. He did so because he rescued
Speaker 1: the son of a telegraph engineer from being run down
Speaker 1: by a train, and as a reward, he was given
Speaker 1: a position as a telegraph operator. He continued tinkering with
Speaker 1: gadgets as he was growing older, and in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine he invented stuff like the universal stock printer, which
Speaker 1: made him a ton of money like forty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: which in the late nineteenth century was an enormous sum
Speaker 1: and allowed him to set up business for himself. By
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, he had found much
Speaker 1: success working with giant companies like Western Union, and he
Speaker 1: operated a laboratory and employed other machinists and inventors to
Speaker 1: 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 two, Edison opened the Pearl Street Generating
Speaker 1: Station in Lower Manhattan. It provided one hundred and ten
Speaker 1: volts of electrical power to just fifty nine customers, so
Speaker 1: at this time it was the first central power station
Speaker 1: in the United States, and as a central power station.
Speaker 1: It could only deliver power to areas that were close
Speaker 1: to the generation station. This was using direct current, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't high voltage direct current, so it couldn't go
Speaker 1: very far before the efficiency dropped to nothing. It also
Speaker 1: meant that it limited the number of customers that you
Speaker 1: 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 upgraded 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 wanted 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 de 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. So we just had to figure out
Speaker 1: the kinks and converting high voltage alternating current to direct
Speaker 1: current in order to really make high voltage direct current
Speaker 1: a more viable alternative. That initially started to happen in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties. Of course, by the nineteen thirties the
Speaker 1: electric power grids were already becoming standardized, so it was
Speaker 1: it was like you were trying to fight against inertia
Speaker 1: and momentum. You couldn't really change things because there had
Speaker 1: been so much investment in the alternating current system that
Speaker 1: high voltage direct current didn't have much of a chance
Speaker 1: in that time. But in the nineteen thirties they used
Speaker 1: something called mercury arc valves in order to do this
Speaker 1: conversion of high voltage AC to high voltage DC and
Speaker 1: then back again from DC to AC. So one place
Speaker 1: you would want to do this because it just makes
Speaker 1: more sense from an efficiency standpoint, is for.
Speaker 2: 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 AC systems to DC systems,
Speaker 1: once we were to come up with this high voltage
Speaker 1: DC strategy, it did make sense for these very very
Speaker 1: long cables that would connect something like an offshore island
Speaker 1: to the mainland, so that you could send power out
Speaker 1: to the island without having to build a power station
Speaker 1: on the island itself, then it made more sense to
Speaker 1: use high voltage DC current, but way back in the
Speaker 1: day it did not exist. Today, we can also use
Speaker 1: DC to connect two different alternating current power grids together,
Speaker 1: which is non trivial because you remember I said alternating
Speaker 1: current involves current moving back and forth across a circuit
Speaker 1: many times per second. In the United States, it's sixty
Speaker 1: times per second. It's sixty hertz. The reason that we
Speaker 1: chose sixty herts 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: Westinghouse said, hey, sixty herts. That frequency works best with
Speaker 1: the lamps that we're producing today. If we do a
Speaker 1: different frequency, the lamps tend to flicker. To get nice,
Speaker 1: steady light, we needed an alternating current of sixty hertz.
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 2: So sixty herts was.
Speaker 1: Arrived at as the standard here in the United States.
Speaker 1: Over in Europe it was fifty herts, largely because of
Speaker 1: monopolies that were rising up in the electrical utility industry.
Speaker 1: But if you want to connect two alternating current power
Speaker 1: systems together, you need to have two There are two
Speaker 1: frequencies synced up. So if you think of this as
Speaker 1: two different cables, which is drastically oversimplifying things, but think
Speaker 1: of it as two different cables, you would want the
Speaker 1: signals to be moving left to right in perfect synchronization.
Speaker 1: If they were out of phase with one another, you
Speaker 1: couldn't really transmit power but using high voltage DC, you
Speaker 1: 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 direct current definitely has
Speaker 1: its place even today, even though alternating current one out.
Speaker 1: And I think it's kind of cool that it ultimately
Speaker 1: comes down to the reason we have a sixty hertz
Speaker 1: standard here in the United States is because Westinghouse wanted
Speaker 1: the lamps to be nice and steady. But it took
Speaker 1: 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 press stunts.
Speaker 1: Media stunts were performed by both sides. You probably have
Speaker 1: heard the story of top Seed, the elephant that was
Speaker 1: electrocuted to death with alternating current to show the dangers
Speaker 1: of high voltage. A high voltage alternating current killing an
Speaker 1: elephant was meant to show, hey, this type of electricity
Speaker 1: is dangerous. You could die as a result of it,
Speaker 1: and people did die as they were working on things
Speaker 1: like transformers. So neither side was shying away from publicly
Speaker 1: addressing the bens of their own method, while saying the
Speaker 1: other method, whether it was direct current or alternating current,
Speaker 1: was quite literally the worst thing to ever happen to
Speaker 1: human beings in the history forever, or at least does
Speaker 1: it seemed like during these pres 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 eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. And this was a really big deal. The
Speaker 1: World's Fair was falling on the same year as the
Speaker 1: four hundredth anniversary of Columbus arriving in the New World,
Speaker 1: which in the United States was seen as a really
Speaker 1: important milestone. I'm not going to dive into the historical
Speaker 1: boondoggle that was the Columbus expeditions. Other than to say,
Speaker 1: there are better heroes to hold up than Christopher Columbus
Speaker 1: not a great hero, as it turns out, unless you
Speaker 1: are completely ignoring the plights of people that Columbus also
Speaker 1: completely ignored. I recommend you do not do that, because
Speaker 1: it's a terrible thing to do. But it was seen
Speaker 1: at the time as a really big deal for the
Speaker 1: United States to celebrate this four hundredth anniversary, and the
Speaker 1: World's Fair was an opportunity for the United States to
Speaker 1: show off the direction of the country, and so for
Speaker 1: much of the expedition or exhibition I should say, rather
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 DC. Then you have Westinghouse,
Speaker 1: George Westinghouse's company, and by extension, you have Nikola 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 can provide the electricity you need to
Speaker 1: turn this into a sparkling wonderland and it'll only cost
Speaker 1: you a measley one point eight million dollars. The fair
Speaker 1: organizer said.
Speaker 2: No, that's like a lot of money, and we'd rather.
Speaker 1: Not spend one point eight million dollars.
Speaker 2: And so the offer was rejected.
Speaker 1: The two of them, Edison and 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 hundred and fifty four
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, so less than half of what we asked
Speaker 1: for before. We as for nearly two million earlier, but
Speaker 1: we think we can get down to five hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty four thousand dollars. However, Westinghouse undercut that offer with
Speaker 1: a proposal to light the fare for the princely sum
Speaker 1: of three hundred and ninety nine thousand dollars, using alternating
Speaker 1: current instead of direct current. And that's what the fare
Speaker 1: organizers wanted to hear. Three hundred ninety nine thousand dollars
Speaker 1: is still significantly less than five hundred and fifty four
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. So the fair organizer said, Westinghouse, you get
Speaker 1: the contract. And it all really came down to a
Speaker 1: price tag when you get down to it. It wasn't
Speaker 1: that they were specifically saying alternating current is superior to
Speaker 1: direct current. That's not what the World's Fair organizers were
Speaker 1: really saying. They were saying, we can afford alternating current,
Speaker 1: and direct current is prohibitively expensive for this project. So
Speaker 1: alternating current got the deal, and because the Chicago World's
Speaker 1: Fair was such a big deal in eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: the world's attention was on Chicago at the time. The
Speaker 1: display of the fair lit up at night was incredibly
Speaker 1: impressive and powerful, and it was a great advertising campaign
Speaker 1: for Westinghouse an alternating current, honestly because it was such
Speaker 1: an effective display of what alternating current could do, a
Speaker 1: lot of different cities and companies were interested in pursuing
Speaker 1: getting their various areas wired for electricity using alternating current.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety five, Westinghouse won another important battle in
Speaker 1: the US by landing a contract for the Niagara Falls
Speaker 1: Power Station. The generator would be an allnating current system
Speaker 1: instead of direct current. Edison in General Electric had pursued
Speaker 1: this as well, but they failed. And here's where it
Speaker 1: comes in handy to talk about how these generators tend
Speaker 1: to work. And you've got a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: of generating electricity, right like you've got hydro power, you've
Speaker 1: got wind power, you've got coal power, you've got nuclear power.
Speaker 1: Now they all ultimately work on a very similar principle.
Speaker 1: All of those tend to work the same way ultimately
Speaker 1: when you get down to the very basics of what
Speaker 1: is happening, and that is they all involve some sort
Speaker 1: of mechanical system where a conductor is moving through a
Speaker 1: magnetic field so that it's experiencing magnetic flux and generating
Speaker 1: a current or current is induced to flow through the conductor,
Speaker 1: is a better way of putting it. In other words,
Speaker 1: these are all very large systems that are following those
Speaker 1: same basics 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 Faraday's approach. Now, with a
Speaker 1: coal or a nuclear power plant, you're using heat to
Speaker 1: 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, so obviously
Speaker 1: there's a downside here. You're emitting a lot of greenhouse gases,
Speaker 1: namely carbon dioxide.
Speaker 2: So it's a very powerful way to.
Speaker 1: Generate electricity, but it's very It creates a lot of
Speaker 1: pollution as a result, which is why when people talk
Speaker 1: about electricity being cleaner than fossil fuels, it really just
Speaker 1: it just means that you have to look a step further,
Speaker 1: where is the electricity coming from. If the electricity is
Speaker 1: coming from a coal power plant, you still have a
Speaker 1: problem there because you have the power plant emitting carbon
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere as well as other greenhouse gases and
Speaker 1: other types of pollution. So even though the electric utensil,
Speaker 1: or vehicle or whatever itself may not emit any carbon emissions,
Speaker 1: the source of its electricity might be emitting a lot
Speaker 1: of carbon emissions. So coal power plants are not clean right,
Speaker 1: You're not getting clean electricity that way. Nuclear power plants
Speaker 1: also have a problem with generating nuclear waste. Now we're
Speaker 1: getting better and better about finding ways to maximize nuclear
Speaker 1: material and minimize nuclear waste, so that that doesn't become
Speaker 1: as big an issue as was feared, because, of course,
Speaker 1: the worry is where do you put the nuclear waste
Speaker 1: which will maintain a nuclear dangerous level of nuclear radiation
Speaker 1: thousands of years after you gather it. Where do you
Speaker 1: put 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 do a very similar thing to
Speaker 1: carbon coal power plants in that you use nuclear radiation
Speaker 1: to heat water converted into steam and turn turbine. Both
Speaker 1: in coal plants and in nuclear power plants, the goal
Speaker 1: 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 it is separated
Speaker 1: from the source of heat, so you're not getting pollution
Speaker 1: from the coal furnace or rate, or you're not getting
Speaker 1: any radioactive material from the source of nuclear radiation. The
Speaker 1: two are separate systems. It's just that the water in
Speaker 1: one system is heated by the output of the other system.
Speaker 1: Very clever design because it means that you're not having
Speaker 1: to constantly replenish the water in your closed system. You
Speaker 1: do have to occasionally do it because you're no system
Speaker 1: is completely perfect. You're going to have some sort of
Speaker 1: loss somewhere on there, so you do have to top
Speaker 1: it off occasionally. But keeping them separate limits the amount
Speaker 1: of pollution that you have. That being said, you know
Speaker 1: there are alternatives to cold plants and nuclear power plants
Speaker 1: that don't emit any carbon radiation or a carbon pollution
Speaker 1: or any radioactive material either. So hydropower is a great
Speaker 1: example of that. Wind power also they eliminate the need
Speaker 1: to heat up water entirely, but you're still talking about
Speaker 1: the mechanical energy of turning one of these generators so
Speaker 1: that it induces electricity to flow through a conductor. So
Speaker 1: with hydropower, you engineer a system in which water turns
Speaker 1: the turbine as it typically moves from an area of
Speaker 1: higher elevation to lower elevation. Hydropower dams do this. So
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a hydropower dam where there's this
Speaker 1: enormous dam stretching across a body of water, and you
Speaker 1: see water pouring out of the base of the dam
Speaker 1: from the higher section into the lower section. So it's
Speaker 1: just shooting out of that lower area. That's where the
Speaker 1: water is turning turbine, So you've got turbines inside the dam.
Speaker 1: Water pressure on the back end of the dam is
Speaker 1: forcing water through some channels. Those channels have the turbines
Speaker 1: in them. The force of the water hitting the turbines
Speaker 1: turns the turbines. The water continues on and pours out
Speaker 1: the other side. Meanwhile, you generate electricity wind power, same thing,
Speaker 1: except you're using wind to turn turbines that have blades
Speaker 1: on them. So wind blows the blades. This causes rotational
Speaker 1: force with the turbines, which then ends up turning a generator,
Speaker 1: just as we've talked about before, and again inducing electricity
Speaker 1: to flow by creating a difference in voltage. Solar power
Speaker 1: is different, 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 greenhouse
Speaker 1: gases like carbon dioxide. You could emit water vapor if
Speaker 1: it's not a closed system, and water vapor is technically
Speaker 1: a greenhouse gas.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't last.
Speaker 1: Very long in the environment, but it is a very
Speaker 1: effective greenhouse gas for its lifespan. It doesn't last very
Speaker 1: long in the environment, but it is a very absorptive
Speaker 1: greenhouse gas.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: Back to the drama of the current wars, so you
Speaker 1: had Westinghouse in general Electric battling it out big time.
Speaker 1: GE had some good points. Most of our electronics that
Speaker 1: we plug into sockets run on direct current, which means
Speaker 1: if you want to use alternating current to get the
Speaker 1: electricity to those devices, you then have to convert AC
Speaker 1: into DC for it to actually work in the thing
Speaker 1: that you're using. So like a refrigerator for example. I
Speaker 1: mean that's a modern example, but a refrigerator you needed
Speaker 1: to convert AC to DC to run the technology.
Speaker 2: Of the refrigerator.
Speaker 1: So if you had DC generation and DC transmission, you
Speaker 1: didn't have to You wouldn't have to you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to convert anything. It would cut down on the elements
Speaker 1: you would need inside the materials themselves. However, you still
Speaker 1: had the issue of how do you transmit the power
Speaker 1: from the generating station to where it needs to go,
Speaker 1: And before the era of high voltage DC, there wasn't
Speaker 1: really an answer to that question. So Edison and Westinghouse
Speaker 1: were both making some decisions around this time that were
Speaker 1: rubbing people the wrong way. Tesla originally worked for Edison.
Speaker 1: He worked for Edison in Europe for a while. Then
Speaker 1: he moved to New York and worked with Edison for
Speaker 1: a while as a contractor, but they had a falling
Speaker 1: out and then Tesla would end up working over with Westinghouse. However,
Speaker 1: even at westing Hose Tesla found it frustrating. So one
Speaker 1: of the problems was Tesla was not very ferocious when
Speaker 1: it came to protecting his work, and he had really
Speaker 1: little interest in asserting his authority and demanding what he
Speaker 1: was worth and protecting his intellectual property and his patents,
Speaker 1: and if you don't protect patents, people can walk all
Speaker 1: over you. Tesla believed that he shouldn't have to protect
Speaker 1: his stuff because it was clearly his and people should
Speaker 1: just behave better. But in the world we live in
Speaker 1: sometimes that's not enough, and some people were walking all
Speaker 1: over him. He would eventually see his finances drain away
Speaker 1: over time, so as he got older, he became more destitute.
Speaker 1: He was living for free in various hotels, and typically
Speaker 1: a hotel would eventually get fed up with Tesla and
Speaker 1: a victim, and he would just essentially move further down
Speaker 1: the street and find another hotel that would be thrilled
Speaker 1: to have the brilliant Nikola Tesla because they thought of
Speaker 1: it as something that would elevate the hotel and attract
Speaker 1: more people to their hotel. If Nikola Tesla stays at
Speaker 1: their hotel, then obviously it's got to be a really
Speaker 1: awesome place. That was kind of the approach. It's actually
Speaker 1: pretty sad toward the end of his life, and I've
Speaker 1: talked about in other episodes of Tech Stuff, So I'm
Speaker 1: not going to dwell on it here, but just to
Speaker 1: say that the end of his life was a little tragic.
Speaker 1: Then there was William Stanlee. That was the guy who
Speaker 1: made the first commercially viable transformer, the technology that Tesla
Speaker 1: would improve over time. Stanley also worked for Westinghouse, but
Speaker 1: Stanley and George Westinghouse had a fundamental disagreement about money.
Speaker 1: The disagreement was that Stanley felt he was owed money
Speaker 1: and Westinghouse said no. So Westinghouse's lawyer, Franklin Pope, actually
Speaker 1: urged 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 stan Lee's transformers and was
Speaker 1: fatally electrocuted. That's redundant. Electrocuted is fatal. A lot of
Speaker 1: people use electrocute to mean you got shocked, but electrocute
Speaker 1: means 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 in 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.
Speaker 2: He was kind of the opposite of Tesla.
Speaker 1: Whereas Tesla was sort of lackadaisical in protecting his electual property,
Speaker 1: Stanley was fierce, but he had to keep doing it
Speaker 1: over and over again. It's not like you can protect
Speaker 1: it once and you're fine. Every time there was a threat,
Speaker 1: he would have to go to court, and this really
Speaker 1: started to wear on him so much so that he
Speaker 1: wasn't able to keep control of his own company. It
Speaker 1: was kind of rested away from him. Eventually, Stanley's company
Speaker 1: would get swallowed up by General Electric. So he had
Speaker 1: worked for Westinghouse, left Westinghouse on bad terms, founded his
Speaker 1: own company, and then that company would get acquired by
Speaker 1: Westinghouse's big competitor, General Electric. Kind of ugly there too.
Speaker 1: He would ultimately decide to focus on other things besides electricity.
Speaker 1: He got completely disillusioned by all the politics and backstabbing,
Speaker 1: and so he started to go and work on other things.
Speaker 1: He eventually invented an improved thermos, for example. So he
Speaker 1: kept on working on things till the end of his life,
Speaker 1: but 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 direct responsibility or indirect responsibility,
Speaker 1: Edison played an enormous role in.
Speaker 2: Those early years of electricity.
Speaker 1: But his lab kept growing, and as it grew, it
Speaker 1: became more complicated and difficult to manage, and Edison missed
Speaker 1: it when it was tiny and more intimate. He didn't
Speaker 1: like corporate structures, he didn't like academic structures.
Speaker 2: 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 four. 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 talk about the guy. Another
Speaker 1: irascible businessman, Edison himself would die at the age of
Speaker 1: eighty four due to complications with diabetes. He was known
Speaker 1: as a brilliant but really grouchy dude. He was standoffish
Speaker 1: even to his own family. But his work, whether directly
Speaker 1: on projects or as someone who provided a place for
Speaker 1: innovation to happen, helped shape our world. And that's pretty
Speaker 1: much where we're going to leave off. This was the
Speaker 1: era where more and more companies were starting to put
Speaker 1: up power grids. Cities would contract with Westinghouse and other
Speaker 1: companies to design power grids and to deliver electricity to homes.
Speaker 1: We started seeing electric lights get adopted pretty rapidly and
Speaker 1: replace gas lamps from that point forward, and alternating current
Speaker 1: one out at least initially because it was easier to
Speaker 1: accomplish than high voltage direct current. Today could technically switch
Speaker 1: to high voltage direct current if we wanted to. We
Speaker 1: have the technology to do it. But again, we already
Speaker 1: have an existing infrastructure, so that's hard to just ignore.
Speaker 1: You've got billions of dollars invested in those infrastructures, and
Speaker 1: to just scrap them and start over would be an
Speaker 1: enormous and expensive undertaking, so it's not likely to ever happen.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this classic episode, and I hope
Speaker 1: you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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