----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas Houston" <[email protected]> To: "Antique Phonograph List" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 2:52 PM Subject: Re: [Phono-L] Last Con Edison Direct Current Customer Is History
Edison was at a bad disadvantage in the area of power transmission. DC is easy to understand. Once you get Ohm's law and power law down, the DC world is yours! But AC is another animal, that makes you drown in mathematics, and that's what Edison couldn't grapple with. The senior year in electrical engineering is a swamp of calculations invovolving power transmission, phase angles, reactive power, and all that stuff. Poor old TAE just couldn't handle it. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ He couldn't handle what? There was no "senior year in electrical engineering" during that period (1880s-90s); the theories were either barely understood or not even stated yet. (ie: Edison's idea that higher resistance would mean lower power consumption was pooh-poohed, only a few years before. ) For the first few years, the AC systems didn't even have a motor or a meter, and certainly no difficult math was involved. The work at Westinghouse was about as trial-and-error as at the Edison or Thomson-Houston works.
