TechStuffTechStuff Classic: History of Electricity Part Two
As the 20th century loomed ever closer, the battle waged to determine how we would transmit electricity. Learn about the current wars and why AC ultimately won.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the tech are You.
So it is Friday.
It's time for a classic episode, which means we dive into the tech Stuff archive and pull out an episode from our past to listen to. This one, originally published on June thirty, twenty seventeen, is called The History of Electricity Part two. Let's have a listen. Today, we're going to continue our series about the history of electricity. We're going to conclude it today, although we're concluding it right when electric power grids were starting to become a real thing. But since that point, a lot of the changes are more in electricity generation and less in electricity transmission. And I really wanted to get to the point where we talked about transmitting electricity.
Maybe in a future episode.
I will continue this and revisit the topic and give more context from the early power grids up to modern day, and also talk about some of the other various projects that haven't really materialized, stuff like Tesla's suggestion of broadcasting power over the air, as opposed to over transmission lines and what would that take and would it be a good idea, But.
That's for another episode.
In our last episode, we explored how scientists, philosophers, inventors, and crazy people began to suss out the basics of electricity, largely through a lot of experimentation and a few happy accidents. Now, this story is one of those that really reinforces the fact that discoveries are rarely attributable to a single person.
We like those stories.
We like to say this one person was responsible for X, and this other person and was responsible for why. But the truth is way more complicated than that. Usually people are building upon the work of others that came before them, and they might be refining things and innovating in that space. But if it weren't for those who were earlier working on the same sort of stuff, you might not have ever seen those innovations happen. So, you know, we talk about stuff like Edison invented the light bulb, or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but we really would have to acknowledge some of the other people whose work made all of that possible. First of all, Edison didn't invent the light bulb, but he did improve it greatly. But we would need to talk about all that stuff. And this is not to take away from those inventors and engineers who really did make incredible contributions to technology and to our way of life. They are remarkable human beings and so I don't want to take anything away from them.
But at the same time, I don't.
Want to ignore those who also made other contributions that made all of this possible. It's a disservice to them to gloss over it. So it would be also very difficult to make an hour long podcast if in fact most inventions were due to a single person's moment of ingenuity, Right, if the story were as simple as Thomas s and invented the light bulb. I don't know that I can make an hour out of that. Probably about forty minutes, but I don't know if I could stretch it to a full hour. Now. By the end of the last episode, I talked about an early alternating current generator and how by using what was called a split ring commutator, early inventors could change that alternating current that was being created in the generator into direct current. Just so you remember alternating current, the direction of current revers it is multiple times per second. There're cycles, and we describe them in frequencies. So, for example, here in the United States, we have a sixty hertz frequency for our electricity for our alternating current. That means sixty times per second that direction of current changes. So if you're looking at a wire stretching from left to right, that means that current would be flowing left to right and then right to left, and it would keep changing sixty times every second, whereas in Europe it would be fifty times. They're on a fifty system and not a sixty hert system. More on that and a little bit. Direct current, however, goes in a single direction. It does not change. So it goes from left to right or right to left, but it doesn't change throughout the It doesn't have cycles. It just continues until you shut the power off, in which case the current ceases to flow. Now, I want to continue the timeline we talked about in that last episode, talk more about how electricity moved out of the laboratory and into the real world.
But in order to do that, I.
Also have to backtrack just a bit from the end of the last episode where I was talking about generators, because there are some people who were working in electricity that I didn't really mention too much in the last episode, and I kind of need to in order to understand more about building upon those ideas.
So one of those.
People was Humphrey Davy. I mentioned him briefly in the last episode. He was one of the first people to make a practical use of electricity outside of direct experimentation. So remember in the early eighteenth century, well not early the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, you had inventors and engineers who were experimenting with electricity, but they didn't really have any practical use for it. Humphrey Davy was the first person to create something that could be practically used with electricity. He created the first arc lamp and the first incandescent lamp way back in the first decade of the eighteen hundreds. The Davy lamp became a famous invention. Now, neither of those were meant for commercial use or manufacturing. They weren't made to light people's homes. It was more of a use case to prove that electricity could have some practical application beyond just understanding a fundamental element of the universe or fundamental element of life on Earth at least, so it would be many more decades before anyone could make a commercially viable light bulb or lamp, but Davy's works showed that it was in fact possible. Also in that last episode, I mentioned Ampier, whose last name is used as a unit of measurement within the electrical engineering world. Anyway, I mentioned that Ampier was studying the nature of electricity and magnets, but he was building on the work of others. One of those others was Hans Christian Rsted, who was a Danish philosopher and scientist and discovered something that I mentioned in the previous episode, which was electromagnetism. Airstead heard of Alessandro Volta's experiments with batteries, so Volta made the voltaic pile, the predecessor to the modern battery, and Airstead had heard about it, and by eighteen oh one Airstead started doing his own experiments, making his own batteries, and Airstid proposed that there might be a way of measuring the amount of current passing through a wire by putting the wire into water and allowing the electricity to separate the molecular bonds of hydrogen and oxygen, in otherwise, to create electrolysis. And that if you measured the amount of gas given off by the water, then you could use that to infer how much current was passing through the wire. It was kind of an indirect way of establishing how much current was passing through the wire at any given moment. Now, in eighteen twenty one, Airstead performed an experiment in which he passed an electric current through a wire and then brought the wire near a magnetized compass needle, and this caused the compass needle to swing out of alignment. It was no longer lined up with the Earth's magnetic poles. And you know this will happen when you bring a magnet close to a compass. The Earth's magnetic field is powerful, but if you bring a small, less powerful magnet in close proximity to the compass needle, you will overpower the Earth's magnetic field. The compass needle will move toward the magnet, because again the strength of a magnetic field is somewhat dependent upon its distance to a magnetic material. Well, he said, this shows that an electric current passing through a wire creates its own magnetic field. It's obviously affecting these compass needles. So he continue to experiment to better understand the nature of electricity and magnetism, and he came to realize that an electric current creates a circular magnetic field around it. So if you're looking at a straight copper wire and you turn it so that you're looking at it from the end on, so you're looking down the length of an electric copper wire, and you're able to run current through that copper wire, and if you were able to visualize the magnetic field, you would see the magnetic field appear as a circle, and the copper wire would essentially be the center of the circle, or at least circulure. It wouldn't be necessarily a perfect circle, but it would be a circular field around the core, which would be the wire itself. Also, although this was not understood by Erstad at the time, if you ran an alternating current through that wire, you would see the direction of that magnetic field reverse. So when the current flows in one direction, you would see it flowing in a clockwise direction, and if you reverse the current, you would see it flow in a counterclockwise direction.
This would become really important.
Later on when we talk about alternating currents and transformers. Transformers being the type of of gadget that you use to step up or step down electric voltage, not robots that are more than meets the eye. It's a different type of transformer. We're going to take a quick break from this episode about the history of electricity and thank our sponsors. So Airston makes this observation about copper wire with a current flowing through it becoming a magnetic force for emitting a magnetic force, and Ampere made a similar discovery with electric wires attracting one another whenever electricity would flow through them. So this was the earliest observations of electromagnetism that are recorded. In eighteen twenty four, William Sturgeon experimented with electromagnetism by wrapping a bare wire of copper around an iron core. You got like a just an iron nail, and you've got some bare copper wire and you bend the copper wire so it coils around this iron core. Several times. He found that if he passed a current through the wire, it would turn the whole thing into a magnet briefly, but then the effect would disappear. So why was the effect disappearing, Well, the current was moving from the copper wire into the iron core of the structure. It wasn't maintaining a current through entirely. It was shorting out essentially. And William Sturgeon also couldn't do a multi layer wrap of the wire because the copper wire is conductive. If it made contact with itself, then current is flowing in the most efficient pathway. It's not going down the length of the copper wire necessarily, it could pass through as coils touched each other.
So.
He wasn't able to make a very strong magnetic effect this way. You increase the magnetic effect by making more coils. So if you're able to coil a conductive wire more times around a core like in this case, an iron core, you create a more powerful magnetic field as you passed a current through that conductor. In eighteen twenty seven, a man named Joseph Henry found a solution to this problem. He wrapped his copper wires in silk, which insulated them, so now he could have the copper wires laying against an iron core and laying against itself without the current bleeding through because the wires were insulated, and that allowed him to wrap the wires around the iron core several more times than Sturgeon was able to, and that meant the charge could not disappear into the iron and the electromagnetic effect would remain as long as a current was passing.
Through the wire.
So this discovering electromagnetism would become incredibly important for future applications of electricity. Meanwhile, Michael Faraday had been working with moving copper near a stationary magnet, which would induce current to flow through the copper.
This is the basis of generators.
Whether you are moving a conductor through the magnetic fields of some stationary magnets, or you're moving the magnets around a conductor so that the magnetic field is fluctuating around the conductor. Whenever you introduce a conductor through a fluctuating magnetic field, you're going to induce current to flow through that metal conductor, or really I should just say conductor doesn't. That's the important part, not whether or not it's metal. Also important is that it has to be that fluctuating magnetic field, otherwise you will induce current to flow, but as soon as the magnetic field stops to fluctuate, current will no longer flow. So you would typically do this by putting two permanent magnets end to end with the north pole facing the south pole of another one, and in between them. You would have your conductor on a rotatable system. So imagine that you've got a square of copper wire. You formed it to be an empty square, and it's rotatable between these two permanent magnets. As you rotate the square, it passes through the magnetic fields. This is similar to having magnetic flux introduced to the copper wire that induces current to flow, and that's where you get alternating current generators. So he also discovered something interesting. Henry's work involved moving current through a wire, which would create a magnetic field. Faraday's work involved moving a current a copper wire through a magnetic field in order to generate a current. So with Henry's work, they discovered that the magnetic field generated by one electromagnet could induce current to flow in a second electromagnet that wasn't hooked up to the first circuit. This became the basis for an important innovation, that being the AC transformer. I mentioned earlier that steps up or steps down voltage. Now remember voltage is akin to pressure. If you were looking at a water based system, voltage would be the water pressure. It's the push behind a current. And while this early work created the foundation for the transformer, it would take half a century for someone to build a practical, commercially reliable transformer. That person was William Stanley, and we'll talk more about him in just a little bit, But first we have to talk about another invention that relied on electricity and was very important for the adoption of electricity, and that is the telegraph. The telegraph was a means of communication that took advantage of electromagnetism. So once people figured out the nature between electricity and magnetism, they started coming up with some practical applications of this. The telegraph was one of those early ones, and it was incredible. It transformed communication, particularly here in the United States, all over the world as well. So lots of people were exploring the scientific and practical applications of electricity and magnetism, but two groups were specifically looking at it in terms of communication systems. So over in jolly Old England, you had Sir William Cook and Sir Charles Wheatstone who were exploring this possibility. And here in the United States you had Samuel Morse, Alfred Vail, and Leonard Gale working on this. Now, both sets of researchers realized that using electricity to manipulate magnetized pieces of metal could allow for a communication system. The Cook and Wheatstone system was an experiment that began in the eighteen thirties. With magnetic needles. There were positions so they could point at various letters and numbers. So imagine that you've got a needle on a that can rotate horizontally. It's on a horizontal plane, it can rotate around and around on a balance, and you've got letters that are arranged around the needle. And by running an electric current through a circuit, you can create a magnetic field that attracts the needle, so it looks like it's pointing at a specific letter. It's actually pointing in the direction of whatever the magnetic field is, but it looks like it's pointing specifically at the letter. So using several of these needles, I think they had five set up in a panel with a bunch of letters and numbers. They could communicate. You could just choose which circuit you're activating to magnetize a specific point around those needles. The needles would start to point in those directions and you could spell out various messages. These ended up being used in the British railroad signaling service. Now over in the United States, Morse, Veil and Gale began work on a single circuit telegraph system, and it involved a sending station where you had an operating key, and this would complete an electric circuit whenever you pressed it. So an operator key it looks like a little almost looks like a stapler. When you press it down, it would create a closed circuit and allow a signal to pass through to the other end. When you would lift it back up or remove pressure from it, it would break that circuit and electric current would cease to flow. So you had a battery that was providing power. Every time you would push down it would complete this circuit and a signal would be sent to the receiving station. The original station had an apparatus that would make marks on paper, and so Morse ended up developing the famous Morse code Morse code is a way of encoding letters in a series of dots and dashes. You represent this on an operator key by the length of time you spend pressing the key downward. So for a dot you do a quick press, it's just a quick jolt of electricity through the circuit. For a dash, the press is a little bit longer so that it comes across. And on the other end, you had a system that would essentially make marks on paper, so you could see dots or dashes. Morse was very clever in this way. He also made sure that the most commonly used letters had the list of encodings, so a very common letter might have a single dot or a single dash. More rare letters like a que might have more complicated encoding because you don't have to use it as frequently, so you save all the very simple encoding for your most common letters. Now, they noticed something really interesting, which is that as operators began to get used to this system, they were able to start understanding messages without having to read the dots and dashes, because they would just hear what was coming out. They would hear the receiving station tapping out either the dots or dashes to market on the paper, and once they started getting used to this and understanding what those taps were meaning, like the long taps versus the short taps, it became clear that you didn't need to have.
The paper at all.
You could have a receiving station that would beep either short or longer beaps to let you know whether it was a dot or a dash, and operators were able to just pick it up up by hearing it because they became so used to it. And so future telegraph stations would get rid of the paper and just become the beeping receiver, so that an operator would transcribe whatever the message was and then deliver it to whomever was supposed to get it. In eighteen forty three, Morse and Vail were able to secure funding for a telegraph system that was between Washington, d c. And Baltimore, Maryland. That's not terribly far in the grand scheme of things, but it was a big deal at the time. The first message sent on the new system went out on May twenty fourth, eighteen forty four. It was sent from Samuel Morse to Vail, and it read what hath God wrought? It's a little bit of drama in the first message, just like social media today. Really, Over the following decades, telegraph systems began to connect more cities together, even as inventors were trying to find other practical applications of electricity. So other people would make improvements to the telegraph and make it more user friendly and more useful. Some of those people included Ezra Cornell, who created a means to insulate telegraph wires and make them more efficient. Cornell would go on to co found a college it's called Cornell. And Thomas Edison, famous inventor and irascible gentleman, also made some improvements to the telegraph, including creating a system called the quadruplex, which, as the name might suggest, would allow up to four messages to transmit over the same wire simultaneously, two going in one direction and two coming from the other direction. Now, one of Stanley's inspirations was another inventor named Charles Brush. Brush, in turn had been inspired by Humphrey Davy. So we see that there's a chain forming here. So Davy was the one who created that early ArcLight. Well, Brush thought the arc lights were super cool, and as a teenager he started to really tinker with stuff. He would start to neglect his chores in the family farm just so he could work on various projects in a workshop, and he built his first static electricity machine when he was just twelve years old. In high school, he built an arc light of his very own, so by high school age he was building stuff that Humphrey Davy had pioneered a few decades earlier. In college, he pursued a degree in mining engineering at the University of Michigan because there was no such thing as an electrical engineering degree at that time. And after working in the iron ore industry for a while, he began a big project to build a dynamo. Now, a dynamo is a direct current generator. It's like what I described at the end of the last episode. It's essentially an alternating current generator that has a commutator to convert alternating current to direct current. Brush also convinced the city of Cleveland to allow him to fit out Cleveland's public square, which at that time was called Monumental Park, with electrical arc lights, and up to that point, the lights in the square had been gas lamps. So on April twenty ninth, eighteen seventy nine, the city switched on the new arc lights. The public reaction was mostly positive. There were only a few people who were saying stuff like it's not as bry as the sun, which tells us that some people were impossible to please even before they had Twitter to post public messages about it. Now, Brush's work advanced our understanding of the electromotive force, which is the force that causes electrons to push in a direction within a conductor, generating a current, and it was that understanding that William Stanley started to build upon. Stanley wanted to work with alternating current, which at that time was mostly seen as interesting but not practical. Everyone was thinking direct current was probably the way to go, and Stanley wasn't entirely convinced.
He thought alternating current might have its uses. In fact, at the.
Time wrote that the general thought on alternating current from his contemporaries was that it was a despised and rejected line of work. But Stanley was convinced there was something more to it.
Now.
Obviously, when we start looking at ways to distribute electricity, it became clear that alternating current, at least initially was superior to direct current, and in eighteen eighty four Stanley began to work with George Westinghouse's company called Westinghouse. Westinghouse himself heard of Stanley's contributions and promoted him to chief engineer of the Westinghouse Pittsburgh facility, and Stanley then learned of Lucian Gaillard and John Gibbs, who had built an alternating current transformer. The problem was that the transformer they had built wasn't really commercially viable, so Stanley wanted to take that same idea and design a transformer that would have real world applications. Now, what is a transformer and how does it actually work to change voltage? We'll look at that in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, so, what the heck is a transformer. I've talked about it. I've said it steps up and steps down voltage, but I haven't really explained it well. It all relies upon that electromotive force and fundamental electromagnetic forces. You remember that when you move a conductor through a magnetic field, the field induces electric current to flow through the conductor. But to do this, you have to keep moving the conductor through the field unless you move the field instead of the conductor, and you keep the conductor in place.
Now, one of the.
Ways you could do that is you could create an electromagnet using alternating current, and that would give you the same effect of moving a magnetic field around a conductor. Because remember I mentioned earlier, when the inventors were looking at how electric current generates a magnetic field, they thought of it as as current travels down a wire, a magnetic field is generated as a circle around that wire, with the wire being the core or hub of that circle. If you think of it that way, well, if electricity reverses, then the magnetic field changes direction. That creates magnetic flux because it's the same thing as moving a conductor through a stationary magnetic field back and forth. Like if you took a piece of metal conductive metal and you waved it through a magnetic field repeatedly, you could induce electricity to flow through the conductor. So the same thing is true if you have this alternating current electro magnet. And remember that alternating current switches voltages on either end of the conductor several times a second, so that's what's making the electricity flow in different directions. One direction at one point the other direction at the other point. If you're looking at your traditional alternating current generator, it's when the conductor breaks that perpendicular plane or really no, I'm sorry, the parallel plane to the magnetic field and starts to move, so that the side that was going up with a relation to a magnetic field is now moving down. That's what ends up creating this alternating current. So every time you change that current direction, the magnetic field also changes. If you were to introduce a second conductive material within range of that alternating magnetic field, that would induce a similar alternating current in the secondary conductor. So let's say you've got an electromagnet and it consists of an iron core, and around this iron core you've wrapped insulated copper wire twenty times. So let's say you've got an iron nail and you've got some copper wire of a fairly small gauge, and you do twenty coils around this iron nail. This is your electromagnet. If you were to hook this up to a battery, it would create a direct current through the wire and you would have an electromagnet. But that's just a simple electromagnet. Let's say that you hooked it up to an alternating current. Now the current is moving down from the top of the nail to the bottom of the nail, and then from the bottom of the nail to the top of the nail more over and over and over again, several times a second. That creates a fluctuating magnetic field. Now, let's say you get a second nail with a second length of copper wire wrapped around it. This one is not attached to a battery or a power system. You bring that one close to the first one, which will be your primary electromagnet. You bring this secondary electromagnet close to it. Once it's within that fluctuating man metic field, it's going to induce current to flow through the second electromagnet. Even though it's not hooked up to a power source, it will start to have electric current induced in it. This is the basis for the transformer, But by itself, it's not that useful because you're not changing the voltage at all. You're just inducing electric current to flow through a secondary coil.
But if your second.
Electromagnet has a different number of coils from the first one, as in you've wrapped the copper wire more times or fewer times than the one you have on your primary electromagnet, the second electromagnet will have a different voltage than the first.
So again, let's say you've got that.
Iron nail and you've wrapped copper coil around it twenty times, and your secondary one, your iron nail, you've only wrapped it ten times around. Well, this will step the voltage down by half. The voltage in your new your secondary electromagnet will be half of what it is in the primary one. But if you primary one has twenty coils and your secondary one has forty coils, this will step up the voltage by twice the original amount. So whatever the voltage was in your original circuit, it will be twice as powerful in your secondary one because you have twice the number of coils. The number of coils in your secondary circuit is going to determine whether the voltage is stepped up or step down. Now, Stanley build a prototype transformer for high voltage transmission and demonstrated it on March twentieth, eighteen eighty six.
He then got.
Wrapped up in some serious drama in the electrical utility industry, which I'll talk about a bit later. But holy cal If you think Hollywood and politics are all about backstabbing and scandal, wait till we get to the Shenanigans during the current wars, because people got messed up. There were all sorts of backstage dealings and just shady practices, people not getting paid, people getting forced out of the business. It was really cutthroat in the late nineteenth in early twentieth centuries.
Now remember sense voltage.
Is the force or pressure that pushes electric current through when you use a transformer. Can come in mighty handy if you want to distribute power across the system, because, as it turns out, to transmit power efficiently, you need to have high voltage. You've got to have a lot of pressure to transmit power over significant distances.
If you don't have high.
Pressure, you can only transmit power a short distance before the efficiency drops to nothing. So you've got to have a lot of force. Now this again, if you think of it in terms of a water system, this makes sense. If you have very low water pressure, that's going to be hard to get a shower on the top floor of a hotel, for example. To have much of anything happen. If you have very very high water pressure, it may be that on the first floor, you might feel like the shower is going to push you through the back wall. So you need that high voltage because you need that high pressure to transmit electricity great distances. That's really what Stanley was looking at. So using transformers, you can step up or step down the voltage as needed for distribution purposes. So at the power generation site, you might generate power at a specific voltage and then you want to transmit it fifty miles away, so you use a transformer to step up that voltage to make it a high voltage signal so that it will transmit efficiently across the power lines you've strung between your generation point and your destination. Once it reaches the destination, you go through a second type of transformer to step the voltage back down so it's appropriate for whatever you want to use it for. So when you see transformers on utility poles around cities and on houses, there are usually small transformers attached to those as well. The purpose of that is so that it can either step up the voltage so it can transmit it, or step down the voltage so it can deliver that electricity to home. These are also the things that when they get overloaded, they explode in a ton of sparks, they get shorted out, they get too much electricity pushed through at one time. This can happen if you have like a really serious electrical storm. And if you've ever heard a transformer go off, it is unforgettable. It sounds like a shotgun and sparks fly everywhere. The first time I ever saw one do that, I was a kid in the backseat of my parents' cars. We were driving through downtown Atlanta, and I grew up in rural Georgia, so I'm from backwoods country up in Georgia and wasn't used to seeing explosions go off right outside the car window in a city.
It gave me a.
Very specific and as it turns out, not entirely accurate view of what city life must be like. It was a special circumstance. Now we're at the dawn of the electrical age. So you had Brush's arc lighting system that showed electricity did have practical uses outside the laboratory. You had worked with DC and AC generators. That was progressing, and now it's time to talk about some of the big names I haven't really talked about extensively yet, namely Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
So, first of all, a lot of people.
When they talk about Tesla seem to think that he invented alternating current.
He did not.
There were inventors who were working with alternating current before Tesla was even born. They didn't really know what it would be good four. But alternating current existed before Tesla came along, and transformers existed before Tesla came along. He didn't even invent the alternating current transformer. He did, however, make significant improvements to transformer technology so that it became a much more commercially viable tech, and he made some great strides in that field.
So I don't want to take anything away from Tesla.
I don't want to say that he didn't make any significant contributions or that he was just wack a doodle crazy. That's not That's not what I'm saying at all. First of all, we don't know if he was crazy. He was certainly eccentric. And second of all, he made very significant contributions to our understanding of and use of electricity. But again, if we ignore the contributions of other people were doing them a disservice.
So that's why I'm bringing this up.
I should also mention Tesla, as eccentric as he got and as grandiose as his ego was, he only did not deserve the mistreatment.
He was subjected to toward the end of his life.
He was not prepared for the drama that would unfold as he got older. Thomas Edison, meanwhile, tends to be portrayed as one of two things. It depends on whether you're pro Edison or anti Edison. There are two versions of Edison that tend to be presented to people. He's either a brilliant inventor and he's a guy who just held more patents than anyone else and was incredibly ingenious, or he was a manipulative, vindictive businessman who was mostly disliked, standoffish, Only a few people really took to him, and he would take credit for things that he had very little to know involvement in. In other words, he would have engineers working for him that would invent stuff, and he would just append his name to the patents. Thus his name was attached to more patents than anyone else but if you were to look into it, you might say, well, Edison didn't really have much to do with this invention. Now, the truth is between those two extremes. So you've got the pro Edison people saying he was a brilliant man and businessman, invented a ton of stuff that we I think that's the very foundation of electronics today. And then you have the other people saying, no, he was kind of a manipulative businessman who really took advantage of other people. And the truth is not either of those extremes. He was a person like any other person, with faults and with virtues. So I will try my best not to paint him too far in either direction. But like Brush, Edison was born in Ohio, Ohio Moosts two of the most prolific engineers who worked in the field of electricity, and as a child he was intelligent, but he was easily distracted. He also had difficulty hearing, initially because of a bout with scarlet fever. He also had a few incidents that probably depleted his hearing further, including getting cuffed on the side of the head by an engineer once upon a time in the mid eighteen hundreds, Edison found work as a telegraph operator, and he was still a teenager at the time. He did so because he rescued the son of a telegraph engineer from being run down by a train, and as a reward, he was given a position as a telegraph operator. He continued tinkering with gadgets as he was growing older, and in eighteen sixty nine he invented stuff like the universal stock printer, which made him a ton of money like forty thousand dollars, which in the late nineteenth century was an enormous sum and allowed him to set up business for himself. By the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, he had found much success working with giant companies like Western Union, and he operated a laboratory and employed other machinists and inventors to work with him. First they had a lab in Newark, New Jersey, and then later in Menlo Park, New Jersey. In eighteen eighty two, Edison opened the Pearl Street Generating Station in Lower Manhattan. It provided one hundred and ten volts of electrical power to just fifty nine customers, so at this time it was the first central power station in the United States, and as a central power station. It could only deliver power to areas that were close to the generation station. This was using direct current, and it wasn't high voltage direct current, so it couldn't go very far before the efficiency dropped to nothing. It also meant that it limited the number of customers that you could have. Not many people had any use for electricity. Only a few places had outfitted their buildings with electric lighting, for example, so you might find a hotel like a Posh Hotel might have upgraded to electric lights. Some of the mansions like Westinghouse's mansion, had electric lights, but most people did not have any need for electricity yet. However, it was an early generating station in the US. It didn't exactly usher in a whirlwind of electric systems though, and the reason for that again goes to that transmission efficiency. You needed that high voltage in order to send electricity a great distance. If you wanted to use direct current and you weren't able to generate a high voltage direct current, then what you would do is build a lot of power stations close to where you needed them. That's not very practical, especially as areas get larger, and if you want to deliver electricity to people who are not in an urban setting, it becomes extremely problematic. It would be better if you could use high voltage, because then you could send it out from a central station to much further distances. But at the time there wasn't a practical way of doing high voltage direct current, so alternating current had a different approach. Remember, direct current does not work with transformers. You have to have that magnetic flux. You have to have that alternating magnetic field, so direct current only generates a steady magnetic field. That's why you can't do a transformer using direct current. You have to have alternating current for transformers to work. So if I wanted to transmit power a far distance, I would probably want to use an alternating current power generator. Use transformers to do what I had mentioned earlier, step up that voltage for transmission, send it hundreds of miles to wherever I need to use other transformers to step down the voltage and then deliver it to my customers. Otherwise I would need to build de power stations near all the places that required electricity. Now, given time and resources, Edison and some of his fellow direct current advocates probably would have designed a very compelling high voltage direct current system. And the neat thing is, if you have a high voltage direct current system, it can actually be more efficient than alternating current, but at the time they didn't really have a way of doing that, and alternating current had it in the form of the transformers. So alternating current had the initial advantage, which meant that people were more likely to adopt it. So we just had to figure out the kinks and converting high voltage alternating current to direct current in order to really make high voltage direct current a more viable alternative. That initially started to happen in the nineteen thirties. Of course, by the nineteen thirties the electric power grids were already becoming standardized, so it was it was like you were trying to fight against inertia and momentum. You couldn't really change things because there had been so much investment in the alternating current system that high voltage direct current didn't have much of a chance in that time. But in the nineteen thirties they used something called mercury arc valves in order to do this conversion of high voltage AC to high voltage DC and then back again from DC to AC. So one place you would want to do this because it just makes more sense from an efficiency standpoint, is for.
Very long underwater cables.
Alternating current on an underwater cable has some other issues with capacitance and some other things that are a little too technical to get into here, but it's not as efficient as high voltage direct current. So while it wasn't terribly practical to switch from AC systems to DC systems, once we were to come up with this high voltage DC strategy, it did make sense for these very very long cables that would connect something like an offshore island to the mainland, so that you could send power out to the island without having to build a power station on the island itself, then it made more sense to use high voltage DC current, but way back in the day it did not exist. Today, we can also use DC to connect two different alternating current power grids together, which is non trivial because you remember I said alternating current involves current moving back and forth across a circuit many times per second. In the United States, it's sixty times per second. It's sixty hertz. The reason that we chose sixty herts in the first place. That's because of Westinghouse. Westinghouse was the company that was really pushing alternating current. The company that was really pushing direct current was General Electric. Westinghouse said, hey, sixty herts. That frequency works best with the lamps that we're producing today. If we do a different frequency, the lamps tend to flicker. To get nice, steady light, we needed an alternating current of sixty hertz. If you went with fifty or twenty five, which were other rates that people were considering, the lamps would flicker.
So sixty herts was.
Arrived at as the standard here in the United States. Over in Europe it was fifty herts, largely because of monopolies that were rising up in the electrical utility industry. But if you want to connect two alternating current power systems together, you need to have two There are two frequencies synced up. So if you think of this as two different cables, which is drastically oversimplifying things, but think of it as two different cables, you would want the signals to be moving left to right in perfect synchronization. If they were out of phase with one another, you couldn't really transmit power but using high voltage DC, you could convert alternating current from one system into direct current, send the electricity via direct current to the secondary power grid, where it would then be converted back into alternating current in sync with the second power grid. So you can have two alternating current power grids that are out of sync with each other, link them with a direct current connection and allow them to share power. This is important when you start having massive power grids that need to connect with one another. Otherwise you have a bunch of power grids that are acting like independent little island nations instead of an interconnected system. So direct current definitely has its place even today, even though alternating current one out. And I think it's kind of cool that it ultimately comes down to the reason we have a sixty hertz standard here in the United States is because Westinghouse wanted the lamps to be nice and steady. But it took a long time for all of that to shake out. It's not like we just immediately switched over to alternating current. Like people didn't just look at the two different standards and say alternating current is clearly superior. It was a long battle, publicly fought with press releases and press stunts. Media stunts were performed by both sides. You probably have heard the story of top Seed, the elephant that was electrocuted to death with alternating current to show the dangers of high voltage. A high voltage alternating current killing an elephant was meant to show, hey, this type of electricity is dangerous. You could die as a result of it, and people did die as they were working on things like transformers. So neither side was shying away from publicly addressing the bens of their own method, while saying the other method, whether it was direct current or alternating current, was quite literally the worst thing to ever happen to human beings in the history forever, or at least does it seemed like during these pres events. Now, some early victories gave alternating current a real advantage, and the first of those probably was the Chicago World's Fair in eighteen ninety three. And this was a really big deal. The World's Fair was falling on the same year as the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus arriving in the New World, which in the United States was seen as a really important milestone. I'm not going to dive into the historical boondoggle that was the Columbus expeditions. Other than to say, there are better heroes to hold up than Christopher Columbus not a great hero, as it turns out, unless you are completely ignoring the plights of people that Columbus also completely ignored. I recommend you do not do that, because it's a terrible thing to do. But it was seen at the time as a really big deal for the United States to celebrate this four hundredth anniversary, and the World's Fair was an opportunity for the United States to show off the direction of the country, and so for much of the expedition or exhibition I should say, rather not expedition. Much of the exhibition was dedicated to showing off what the future of the United States was going to be about, and that included future technologies and the use of electricity, which at that point was still pretty limited in the US. Only a few places were using it. But this was seen as the stuff of the future. So the fair was going to be lit up at night by electric lamps rather than gas lamps. But how would the power be delivered to the fair. We'll tell that story in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, So you have Edison working along with General Electric with the backing of JP Morgan, and that's one of the different parties that are really pushing to be the deliverer of electricity to the Chicago World's Fair. Uh, and they're pushing direct current. They're all about DC. Then you have Westinghouse, George Westinghouse's company, and by extension, you have Nikola Tesla who was working with Westinghouse as the other major party, and they're pushing alternating current. Now, the General Electric Company asked for one point eight million dollars to light the fair. That was their bill. That's what they said to the organizers. They said, we can provide the electricity you need to turn this into a sparkling wonderland and it'll only cost you a measley one point eight million dollars. The fair organizer said.
No, that's like a lot of money, and we'd rather.
Not spend one point eight million dollars.
And so the offer was rejected.
The two of them, Edison and JP Morgan, went back to the drawing board, decided they would make a second offer, a lower offer, and said, oh, you know what, we could probably do it for five hundred and fifty four thousand dollars, so less than half of what we asked for before. We as for nearly two million earlier, but we think we can get down to five hundred and fifty four thousand dollars. However, Westinghouse undercut that offer with a proposal to light the fare for the princely sum of three hundred and ninety nine thousand dollars, using alternating current instead of direct current. And that's what the fare organizers wanted to hear. Three hundred ninety nine thousand dollars is still significantly less than five hundred and fifty four thousand dollars. So the fair organizer said, Westinghouse, you get the contract. And it all really came down to a price tag when you get down to it. It wasn't that they were specifically saying alternating current is superior to direct current. That's not what the World's Fair organizers were really saying. They were saying, we can afford alternating current, and direct current is prohibitively expensive for this project. So alternating current got the deal, and because the Chicago World's Fair was such a big deal in eighteen ninety three, the world's attention was on Chicago at the time. The display of the fair lit up at night was incredibly impressive and powerful, and it was a great advertising campaign for Westinghouse an alternating current, honestly because it was such an effective display of what alternating current could do, a lot of different cities and companies were interested in pursuing getting their various areas wired for electricity using alternating current. In eighteen ninety five, Westinghouse won another important battle in the US by landing a contract for the Niagara Falls Power Station. The generator would be an allnating current system instead of direct current. Edison in General Electric had pursued this as well, but they failed. And here's where it comes in handy to talk about how these generators tend to work. And you've got a lot of different ways of generating electricity, right like you've got hydro power, you've got wind power, you've got coal power, you've got nuclear power. Now they all ultimately work on a very similar principle. All of those tend to work the same way ultimately when you get down to the very basics of what is happening, and that is they all involve some sort of mechanical system where a conductor is moving through a magnetic field so that it's experiencing magnetic flux and generating a current or current is induced to flow through the conductor, is a better way of putting it. In other words, these are all very large systems that are following those same basics that were happening at the beginning of the nineteenth century when people were just starting to move conductors. When Faraday was moving a conductive disc through a magnetic field and observing the fact that electric current was flowing through the disc. That's what all these systems ultimately do. It's just on a much, much, much larger scale. It's nothing as modest as the Faraday's approach. Now, with a coal or a nuclear power plant, you're using heat to convert water into steam. So you've got a boiler essentially, and the boilers filled with water, and the heat is provided either through nuclear radiation or through a coal furnace, so you're burning coal essentially, the heat up water, convert the water to steam. The steam then turns a turbine, and the turbine is connected to a system that moves the combination of magnets and conductors, so that you generate the alternating current. Now, with coal plants, the heat is coming from that massive furnace and you're burning, so obviously there's a downside here. You're emitting a lot of greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide.
So it's a very powerful way to.
Generate electricity, but it's very It creates a lot of pollution as a result, which is why when people talk about electricity being cleaner than fossil fuels, it really just it just means that you have to look a step further, where is the electricity coming from. If the electricity is coming from a coal power plant, you still have a problem there because you have the power plant emitting carbon into the atmosphere as well as other greenhouse gases and other types of pollution. So even though the electric utensil, or vehicle or whatever itself may not emit any carbon emissions, the source of its electricity might be emitting a lot of carbon emissions. So coal power plants are not clean right, You're not getting clean electricity that way. Nuclear power plants also have a problem with generating nuclear waste. Now we're getting better and better about finding ways to maximize nuclear material and minimize nuclear waste, so that that doesn't become as big an issue as was feared, because, of course, the worry is where do you put the nuclear waste which will maintain a nuclear dangerous level of nuclear radiation thousands of years after you gather it. Where do you put that stuff? And no one wants it near them, right, You don't want to have a nuclear waste holding facility anywhere close to where you live. It's a scary thought. But nuclear power plants do a very similar thing to carbon coal power plants in that you use nuclear radiation to heat water converted into steam and turn turbine. Both in coal plants and in nuclear power plants, the goal is to create essentially a closed system for the water, so the water evaporates, turns into steam, turns the turbine. Once the pressure builds up, turbine ends up generating electricity. The steam continues through the system until it starts to cool down, condense back into water, and go back into the boiler tank so that it can be turned into steam again. That way, you can just keep using that same water over and over again, and it is separated from the source of heat, so you're not getting pollution from the coal furnace or rate, or you're not getting any radioactive material from the source of nuclear radiation. The two are separate systems. It's just that the water in one system is heated by the output of the other system. Very clever design because it means that you're not having to constantly replenish the water in your closed system. You do have to occasionally do it because you're no system is completely perfect. You're going to have some sort of loss somewhere on there, so you do have to top it off occasionally. But keeping them separate limits the amount of pollution that you have. That being said, you know there are alternatives to cold plants and nuclear power plants that don't emit any carbon radiation or a carbon pollution or any radioactive material either. So hydropower is a great example of that. Wind power also they eliminate the need to heat up water entirely, but you're still talking about the mechanical energy of turning one of these generators so that it induces electricity to flow through a conductor. So with hydropower, you engineer a system in which water turns the turbine as it typically moves from an area of higher elevation to lower elevation. Hydropower dams do this. So if you've ever seen a hydropower dam where there's this enormous dam stretching across a body of water, and you see water pouring out of the base of the dam from the higher section into the lower section. So it's just shooting out of that lower area. That's where the water is turning turbine, So you've got turbines inside the dam. Water pressure on the back end of the dam is forcing water through some channels. Those channels have the turbines in them. The force of the water hitting the turbines turns the turbines. The water continues on and pours out the other side. Meanwhile, you generate electricity wind power, same thing, except you're using wind to turn turbines that have blades on them. So wind blows the blades. This causes rotational force with the turbines, which then ends up turning a generator, just as we've talked about before, and again inducing electricity to flow by creating a difference in voltage. Solar power is different, or at least it tends to be different. Typically, it relies on converting energy from photons striking photo cells into electricity, so it is a different means of generating electricity than these other methods. But there are also some systems that use solar energy to heat water, for example, or some other liquid to turn it into steam and turn turbines. So this would make it more like coal plants or nuclear power plants, except of course you're talking about sunlight and water, so you're not emitting any greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. You could emit water vapor if it's not a closed system, and water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas.
It just doesn't last.
Very long in the environment, but it is a very effective greenhouse gas for its lifespan. It doesn't last very long in the environment, but it is a very absorptive greenhouse gas.
All right.
Back to the drama of the current wars, so you had Westinghouse in general Electric battling it out big time. GE had some good points. Most of our electronics that we plug into sockets run on direct current, which means if you want to use alternating current to get the electricity to those devices, you then have to convert AC into DC for it to actually work in the thing that you're using. So like a refrigerator for example. I mean that's a modern example, but a refrigerator you needed to convert AC to DC to run the technology.
Of the refrigerator.
So if you had DC generation and DC transmission, you didn't have to You wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to convert anything. It would cut down on the elements you would need inside the materials themselves. However, you still had the issue of how do you transmit the power from the generating station to where it needs to go, And before the era of high voltage DC, there wasn't really an answer to that question. So Edison and Westinghouse were both making some decisions around this time that were rubbing people the wrong way. Tesla originally worked for Edison. He worked for Edison in Europe for a while. Then he moved to New York and worked with Edison for a while as a contractor, but they had a falling out and then Tesla would end up working over with Westinghouse. However, even at westing Hose Tesla found it frustrating. So one of the problems was Tesla was not very ferocious when it came to protecting his work, and he had really little interest in asserting his authority and demanding what he was worth and protecting his intellectual property and his patents, and if you don't protect patents, people can walk all over you. Tesla believed that he shouldn't have to protect his stuff because it was clearly his and people should just behave better. But in the world we live in sometimes that's not enough, and some people were walking all over him. He would eventually see his finances drain away over time, so as he got older, he became more destitute. He was living for free in various hotels, and typically a hotel would eventually get fed up with Tesla and a victim, and he would just essentially move further down the street and find another hotel that would be thrilled to have the brilliant Nikola Tesla because they thought of it as something that would elevate the hotel and attract more people to their hotel. If Nikola Tesla stays at their hotel, then obviously it's got to be a really awesome place. That was kind of the approach. It's actually pretty sad toward the end of his life, and I've talked about in other episodes of Tech Stuff, So I'm not going to dwell on it here, but just to say that the end of his life was a little tragic. Then there was William Stanlee. That was the guy who made the first commercially viable transformer, the technology that Tesla would improve over time. Stanley also worked for Westinghouse, but Stanley and George Westinghouse had a fundamental disagreement about money. The disagreement was that Stanley felt he was owed money and Westinghouse said no. So Westinghouse's lawyer, Franklin Pope, actually urged George Westinghouse to drop Stanley's business entirely. That same lawyer, Franklin Pope, would later die in a terrible accident. He was checking on one of stan Lee's transformers and was fatally electrocuted. That's redundant. Electrocuted is fatal. A lot of people use electrocute to mean you got shocked, but electrocute means you died as a result of electricity flowing through you. So yeah, that was some pretty nasty irony there that the lawyer who advised Westinghouse to get rid of William Stanley would ultimately die by being electrocuted by one of Stanley's transformers. Stanley himself set out to found his own company. He was hoping to rival General Electric in Westinghouse. He was hoping to become the third big player in that space in the United States. But he found it really frustrating because he had to constantly go to court to fight for his patents.
He was kind of the opposite of Tesla.
Whereas Tesla was sort of lackadaisical in protecting his electual property, Stanley was fierce, but he had to keep doing it over and over again. It's not like you can protect it once and you're fine. Every time there was a threat, he would have to go to court, and this really started to wear on him so much so that he wasn't able to keep control of his own company. It was kind of rested away from him. Eventually, Stanley's company would get swallowed up by General Electric. So he had worked for Westinghouse, left Westinghouse on bad terms, founded his own company, and then that company would get acquired by Westinghouse's big competitor, General Electric. Kind of ugly there too. He would ultimately decide to focus on other things besides electricity. He got completely disillusioned by all the politics and backstabbing, and so he started to go and work on other things. He eventually invented an improved thermos, for example. So he kept on working on things till the end of his life, but he wasn't eager to work in electricity anymore. Edison himself became sort of a victim of his own success. So he built this laboratory in Menlo Park, and it was a place of great innovation, some of it driven largely by Edison himself, some of it by his employees. But the reason they had a place to work was because Edison had created that place. So, whether you want to think of it as direct responsibility or indirect responsibility, Edison played an enormous role in.
Those early years of electricity.
But his lab kept growing, and as it grew, it became more complicated and difficult to manage, and Edison missed it when it was tiny and more intimate. He didn't like corporate structures, he didn't like academic structures.
So he was feeling more and more out of place.
In his own laboratory, and eventually he decided to move away from it. He became more of a business manager than an engineer or inventor. He did go on to work on other things. He eventually would develop a car battery for his buddy Henry Ford for the Model T. And I'm pretty sure at some point I need to do an episode specifically about Henry four. Maybe I'll get Scott to come on Scott from Car Stuff and we can talk about Henry Ford, because I think that would be a fascinating episode to talk about the guy. Another irascible businessman, Edison himself would die at the age of eighty four due to complications with diabetes. He was known as a brilliant but really grouchy dude. He was standoffish even to his own family. But his work, whether directly on projects or as someone who provided a place for innovation to happen, helped shape our world. And that's pretty much where we're going to leave off. This was the era where more and more companies were starting to put up power grids. Cities would contract with Westinghouse and other companies to design power grids and to deliver electricity to homes. We started seeing electric lights get adopted pretty rapidly and replace gas lamps from that point forward, and alternating current one out at least initially because it was easier to accomplish than high voltage direct current. Today could technically switch to high voltage direct current if we wanted to. We have the technology to do it. But again, we already have an existing infrastructure, so that's hard to just ignore. You've got billions of dollars invested in those infrastructures, and to just scrap them and start over would be an enormous and expensive undertaking, so it's not likely to ever happen. I hope you enjoyed this classic episode, and I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
