Re: Why 60 Hz

[John Gear <catalyst -at- PACIFIER -dot- COM>]

>It's related to Mrs. Edison's little boy. It's a 60 Hz thing because the
>Alternating Current on which it runs is Alternating at that rate, courtesy of
>your regional electricity vendor.

That would be Mrs. Westinghouse's little boy, actually.  Mrs. Edison's boy
fought hard to establish direct-current (DC) as the only safe form of
electricity and made much of lurid descriptions of electrocutions in his
attempts to paint alternating current (AC) as inherently dangerous.

He (Thomas Alva) went so far as to suggest that murderers be sentenced to be
Westinghouse electricians, and took pains to point out that the first
electric chair (which was "invented" depressingly quickly after electricity
was first "domesticated") was run on AC.

But in the end, resistance losses made DC a far less effective competitor
than AC (AC can be transformed to tremendous voltages that can be
distributed with only tiny current flows; small current, small resistance
losses).

Now we just have to sort through the all the hotly contested, polarized
debate (sorry!) and decide whether the cancer pandemic has anything to do
with being bathed in magnetic fields for much of our lives.  Perhaps Mrs.
Edison's boy was onto something.

Just thought you'd want to be current on this.  It has a lot of potential,
don't you think?  (Ohm-igod!  He's impeding progress with his incredible
capacity for awful puns!)  ;^)





John Gear (catalyst -at- pacifier -dot- com)

"If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no
hope.  If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are
opportunities to change things--there's a chance you may contribute to
making a better world.  That's your choice."                   -- Noam Chomsky