Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The war of the currents was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It grew out of two lighting systems developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s; arc lamp street lighting running on high-voltage alternating current (AC), and large-scale low-voltage direct current (DC) indoor incandescent lighting ...
Brush Electric Company's central power plant with dynamos generating direct current to power arc lamps for public lighting in New York. Beginning operation in December 1880 at 133 West Twenty-Fifth Street, the high voltages it operated at allowed it to power a 2-mile (3.2 km) long circuit.
The Westinghouse company installed thirty more AC-lighting systems within a year, and by the end of 1887 it had 68 alternating current power stations compared to 121 DC-based stations Edison had installed over seven years. [21] This competition with Edison led, in the late 1880s, to what became known as the "war of currents". Thomas Edison and ...
The California Electric Company (now PG&E) in San Francisco in 1879 used two direct current generators from Charles Brush's company to supply multiple customers with power for their arc lamps. This San Francisco system was the first case of a utility selling electricity from a central plant to multiple customers via transmission lines. [ 11 ]
"Dynamo Electric Machine" (end view, partly section, U.S. patent 284,110) A dynamo is an electrical generator that creates direct current using a commutator.Dynamos were the first electrical generators capable of delivering power for industry, and the foundation upon which many other later electric-power conversion devices were based, including the electric motor, the alternating-current ...
In general, losses are estimated from the discrepancy between power produced (as reported by power plants) and power sold; the difference constitutes transmission and distribution losses, assuming no utility theft occurs. As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for DC transmission was 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles).
Since a Van de Graaff generator can supply the same small current at almost any level of electrical potential, it is an example of a nearly ideal current source. The maximal achievable potential is roughly equal to the sphere radius R multiplied by the electric field E max at which corona discharges begin to form within the surrounding gas.
A sketch of the Pearl Street Station. Pearl Street Station was Thomas Edison's first commercial power plant in the United States. It was located at 255–257 Pearl Street in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City, just south of Fulton Street on a site measuring 50 by 100 feet (15 by 30 m). [1]