REGISTER NEW USERLOST PASSWORD? WELCOME, Logout

What we have isn’t what we want

Paul's Posts — 13 October 2012

By

What we have isn’t what we want

What comes out of your home’s power wall socket is not what anything in your stereo system needs.  In fact, what comes out of your home’s wall socket is the wrong thing for 99% of everything in your home.  Certainly there are few things that like it: washing machines, refrigerators and an electric oven, but for the most part what we get isn’t what we want.

Which begs the question of why don’t we get what we want and need out of our home’s wall power?  The answer goes back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the battle between two geniuses: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Let’s start by understanding what it is we get (that we don’t want) and what it is that we want (but don’t get).  What we get is AC power – and what we want is DC power.  99% of everything you plug into the wall must convert AC to DC before it can be used.

Imagine for a moment the size of the power grid in the United States – of which there are 3 (east, west and Texas) and the thousands of millions of devices that use that power.  In each case power must be converted from AC to DC using inefficient methods and losing 10 to 30 percent of available power in the process.

Let’s just round it down and say that 15% of the power in the world is lost because we have to convert AC to DC.  That’s a lot of power to spend on this process, so why go through it?  The simple answer is that the amount we would lose delivering the power to your home in final DC form is greater than what we lose converting AC to DC.  It is more efficient to use AC to send power long distances and that’s where we start our story.

Most of us know Thomas Edison as the guy who invented the electric light bulb and the phonograph.  The fact is he invented neither; instead his inventions took the work of others and made them practical to manufacture and use.  Edison was a brilliant businessman and had a genius for making things work and turning them into industries.  He changed our culture perhaps more than anyone of his time.

After figuring out how to build the world’s first practical light bulb, Edison set about to produce and sell light bulbs as fast as he could.  He had one big problem, however, and that was providing electricity to operate the new bulbs.  Without power the light bulb was pretty useless and people were just fine using gas lanterns.  In fact, homes of that day weren’t wired for electricity at all but instead were “wired” with plentiful gas for their lights.  Convincing people to convert from gas lights to this new fangled light bulb was a real challenge.

Tomorrow how Edison started America’s first power company.

email What we have isnt what we want Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers

Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here

Related Articles

What’s all the fuss about? Young turks Get that mole! Treat the cause or the symptoms?

Share

About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(10) Readers Comments

  1. Tom

    October 13, 2012 at 6:35 am

    Various years ago, I owned and lived in a house in Buffalo, NY which had in an alcove off the living room a dual-purpose lighting fixture, fed by both gas and electricity. The gas feed was still live and the fixture could provide illumination with tried and true gas or new and perhaps less reliable electricity. The house dated from 1911, according to an etched brick in the chimney work.

  2. Ed S

    October 13, 2012 at 7:41 am

    Saying Edison didn’t invent the electric light is a little like saying nobody invented the wheel. Although it is fashionable now to bash Edison, he still holds more patents for not just the practical incandescent light, but the entire distribution system necessary to poet those light and many other devices, including the insulated wires, switched, fuses, meters, sockets etc. while others produced blazing arc lamps here and there, no one had the vision Edison did to electrify entire cities.

    • October 13, 2012 at 8:50 am

      Well, he didn’t invent the light bulb – so that’s not bashing anyone but getting the facts straight. Light from electricity was well known by the time Edison jumped into the fray – and even the idea of a glass envelope, the vacuum necessary inside and the filament were all invented before Edison touched it.

      Edison’s genius was in making something practical. There are many examples of true inventions and true inventors – meaning an entirely new concept created by someone. Edison, to my knowledge, never succeeded at any such thing.

  3. Soundminded

    October 13, 2012 at 7:54 am

    You get exactly what you want from the electrical power grid, as much electrical power as you can possibly need transmitted reliably (over 99% of the time) to wherever you want it as efficiently as possible. In fact the modern world would not exist at all without the inventions of Nikola Tesla. A reading of the real history shows Edison was a cheat, crook, and scoundrel who stole Tesla’s work refusing to pay him $50,000 he’d promised after Tesla’s work was done. Westinghouse was no less mendacious exploiting Tesla. Tesla, a Serbian immigrant died broke in New York City. At one point he had to dig ditches just to earn enough money to buy food. The true history of people like Edison and Westinghouse is sordid, shabby, shameful.

    Not only did Tesla invent AC power, he invented the AC electric motor and generator. A dynamic loudspeaker is nothing more than a linear version of tesla’s rotary AC motor. The voice coil is the armature and the permanent magnet or field electro-magnet in the old days is the stator. Tesla also determined that 60 hz is the most efficient frequency to transmit power at, not 50 hz used in Europe and elsewhere.

    Were it not for AC electricity, you’d need a power plant every mile and to transmit a milion watts would take a wire the size of a large tree trunk instead of one the size of a very thin rope.

    There are a number of ways to convert AC electricity into DC needed to operate electronic devices. (BTW, many electrical loads use AC power, almost all fans, pumps, and other motor driven devices, and most lights. Your car’s ignition system requires it’s DC system be converted to AC power to be transformed to high voltage to operate your spark plugs. AC is how most electrical power is used. One of AC’s advantages over DC is that it can be boosted to very high voltage for efficient long distance transmission of a lot of powr over small wires and then transformed down again to whatever voltage is required to operate electrical loads. The simple way to get DC from AC is to use a full wave bridge rectifier for single phase power like you get from a wall outlet and then a capacitor filter to smooth it out. That’s how most electronic equipment that’s not battery operated does it but it’s hardly the only way. One way to get smoother DC power is to with a motor generator (a single phase AC motor whose shaft is coupled to a generator.) You can generate DC directly at the point of use this way. However, generally 3 phase AC generators are preferred and is then rectified to much smoother DC than from single phase with the same size filter. DC generators are probably less reliable than AC generators called alternators requiring commutators and brushes that need periodic inspection and service. That’s why your car’s generator is actually an AC generator with diodes to convert it to DC. Want even better? Do what some large high speed mainframe computer manufacturers used to. Generate 3 phase AC from a motor-generator set at 400 hz. That’s smoother yet. Very high quality MG sets are available from Pillar of Germany and Kato in the US although there are far less expensive ones. They are very reliable, equal or better in this regard than solid state converters. And then there’s the telephone company solution, convert 60 hz 3 phase using a rectifier output that’s filtered not just by capacitors but by battery banks. Of course batteries do have a shelf life. Gel cells have eliminated the need for special explosion proof rooms banks of lead acid batteries require and are safe in cabinets designed for them. While these ideas are extreme, it seems that there is no fly speck of a problem too small for audiophiles to pour endless money into solving. The $150,000 turntable with two remote air compressors is proof of that. So I offer these suggestions in the same spirit of trying to kill a fly with a Howitzer.

    • October 13, 2012 at 8:53 am

      Yes, this is exactly correct Mark and Tesla is a great example of a true inventor. He didn’t just make things practical he actually discovered and invented whole new concepts never applied before.

      Truth is, all inventions are somewhat based on prior work done by others – but giant leaps like those made by Tesla and Einstein are true inventions. Leveraging prior established art, as did Edison, doesn’t qualify in the same league.

      • Soundminded

        October 13, 2012 at 9:56 am

        As I recall we had a discussion some time back about the theft of intellectual property. While there is limitless money (goverments can print as much of it as they want to), intellectual invention is the truely valuable scarce resource at the heart of all progress. Those who have the money to exploit it often think the discoverer or inventor is entitled to little or none of it. Or they just want the fame taking credit for it brings them. History is replete with stories of this sort of thing.

        I think the most egregious was Watson and Crick’s theft of Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, a discovery for which they won a Nobel Prize. Nova, the PBS science program devoted an entire one hour episode to this theft. Decades later Watson and Crick grudgingly admitted she’d made some small contribution but without surreptitiously seeing her photograph they’d never have gotten it. (She died too soon afterwards to reclaim the credit.) Then there was Sarnoff’s theft of the invention of electronic television from Farnsworth. While Major Armstrong was still alive, nobody would even consider that FM radio would work, his ideas were rejected. It took his widow ten years after his death to get him credit for it. and it isn’t clear that Alexander Graham Bell even invented the telephone. Evidently he stole a critical element at the last moment before applying for the patent from someone else. His effort alone wouldn’t have worked.

        It takes a lot of courage to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, go off on your own, try and sometimes succeed at something entirely new, actually get it to work. Something that’s not merely a small tweak of a previous idea ad copy firms and marketeers proclaim as a breakthrough. There’s an awful lot of that kind of hype around and the high end audio industry seemed to have more than its fair share of it.

  4. Ed S

    October 13, 2012 at 1:45 pm

    Wrong, Paul. The phonograph is absolutely Edison’s baby. There was nothing like it before it. It sprung full blown out his mind. And those funky wiggling needles that put scratches on smoky pieces of film don’t count, they couldn’t be played back. Your definition of “invented” is curious… Is there ANY thing that did not have some prior art somewhere, sometime? Besides atom bombs and lasers?

    • October 14, 2012 at 7:15 am

      Well, you’re right and I stand corrected on that one. There was plenty of prior art but, as you point out, there probably isn’t one invention out there that didn’t have it. Thanks for the correction.

  5. Soundminded

    October 13, 2012 at 6:01 pm

    “What we have isn’t what we want.”

    One more thought. What do “we” (you) want? If you could magically change the world to have the power company send you DC instead of AC, what voltage would you like it at? Remember, the ways to change from one DC voltage to another is to turn it into AC and trandform it, then rectify it again or to insert resistors in series with the load. What DC voltage would you choose for all of your appliances? Remember, the lower the voltage, the more current your appliances will have to draw and the bigger they will have to be. Your electrical distribution system would have to have a higher current rating for a given amount of power as well. It gets very expensive very fast.

    • October 14, 2012 at 7:17 am

      You’re right about that – of course, the single biggest reason as you know is getting the power to our homes. Today, modern DC to DC converters are extremely efficient and cause less damage than AC/DC converters but in the end, AC is really the only way to go for getting what you want in and using it.

Leave a Reply