Kathy Joseph
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for inviting me on.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
This all began in 1831. There was a scientist named Michael Faraday and he was working for a government job that he hated. So he quit his job and he posted in his notebook that he wanted to make electricity from magnetism, from magnets. And his idea was, well, they knew that if you put electricity in a coil wrapped around an iron bar, it would act like a magnet when the electricity was in it.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And it would stop acting like a magnet when the electricity was turned off. And this was called an electromagnet. And he was like, maybe the iron helps transfer the electricity. So he's like, maybe I can use one electromagnet connected to another electromagnet by an iron bar. So he had this iron ring and he put one coil on one side and one coil on the other.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And he says, maybe if I put a really strong current on the first one and make it a really strong magnet, I can make the other one get electricity. And he tried it and it didn't work. And he was super depressed until he unplugged the battery. And then guess what happened? When he turned it off, the other one created a little burst of electricity.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And then when he plugged it back in, the second one got another little burst of electricity. No matter how strong the magnet was, nothing happened unless it changed. That's what he discovered. He discovered that changing a magnet creates or induces electricity. And this is the basis of almost all the electricity that we get in our walls.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Well, there's so many different starting points for electricity and Benjamin Franklin with the kite in the rain and with naming positive and negative electricity was very important. But I would say that the start of generating electricity, which is so vital for us using electricity, starts with Faraday in 1831, because he figured out how to use magnets to make electricity.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Oh yes, definitely. So what he figured right after he published his work, so he figured out changing one magnet created electricity or induced electricity in another coil. And he also found moving a magnet induced electricity. And like months later, this guy in France who was working for Andre Marie Ampere, like amps, like current in the wall.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
This guy named Hippolyte Pixie, he built this machine, and it was a bar magnet with two coils. And you spun the bar magnet, and as the bar magnet went towards the coil, it made electricity go one way. And as it went away from the coil, it made electricity go the other way. And that's called alternating current or AC electricity.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And we currently generate our electricity basically that same way, except we use electromagnets instead of permanent magnets. So like, let's see, coal power. You burn the coal, you make steam that spins turbines, which spins electromagnets near coils of wire. Or wind power, of course, or nuclear. There's a nuclear reaction, it makes steam, which spins electromagnets near coils of wire.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
all of them except for solar, use this basic principle. You spin electromagnets near coils of wire and that induces the electricity.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
There was a major learning curve. The problem was that they didn't have particularly good motors and they didn't have good light sources. So not only were the generators not very efficient, but also they didn't have good uses for them. And so Faraday made his discovery in 1831. Hippolyte Pixie made the first
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
generator where you spun something and the magnets move towards and away from the coils of wire. And it wasn't until the 1850s, that was 20 years later, 1860s, even 1870s, before they started to figure out how to use electromagnets instead of permanent magnets. And then at the same time in the 1860s and 70s, they started working on different kinds of light bulbs and light sources.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And so it took until the 1880s before people like Edison said, I think I have a good idea. We're gonna use this kind of generator and we're gonna have light bulbs that aren't very bright, but a whole bunch of them. That was actually Edison's discovery. It wasn't the light bulb.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
It was the idea that he could make a whole bunch of light bulbs, not super, super bright and put them in homes and that it would come from a centralized location. So people were always arguing who invented the light bulb. But there was an electric light created by Isaac Newton's assistant in 1609. Like, these things were old. They just weren't industry ready until the 1880s.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And even then, it was only very wealthy people would have it.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
That is correct. That is because when Edison heard about it, the most powerful generators out there were DC generators. And also, at the time when he first started, there was no advantage to AC, electricity at the time. It was only after he got everything started that someone else said, oh, there's a trick with these two coils of wire, something called a transformer.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
where we can take alternating current, make it really high voltage and low current and make it go long distances without losing power and then use another transformer to make it safe again. And Edison was like, uh-uh, I have this whole system set up. I don't want to change everything. I don't think that's safe anyway, forget it.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And then he starts doing some very unpleasant things to promote his idea that AC was unsafe. But none of that was really influential. Everyone at the time who was dealing with electricity thought that the real money was not in electrifying houses, but the real money was in providing electric buses, electric trains for public transportation, because only the very wealthy could afford light bulbs.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
But many people rode the bus. And it was only when there was this big World's Fair in Chicago that he lit up with electricity that everyone said, oh, we have to have our houses electrified. We have to have our stores electrified. And then suddenly, America became the most electrified country in the world.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Oh no, that's completely true and not only true, legitimate. It was a legitimate fear to worry that the walls would light on fire because they often did. I mean, Edison set up electricity in JP Morgan's house before he set it up in New York. And it did catch on fire multiple times. And it was loud. The initial ones have generators in the basement.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
So you can't, I mean, just like shoveling coal into this thing that's groaning and moaning and setting fire to things. I mean, people who let electricity into their homes at first,
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
I don't think they were reassured. I think what happened was it became so cool that people didn't worry about its danger as compared to being fashionable. And I think a lot of that had to do with the World's Fair in Chicago. I mean, people wrote poetry about the fair and specifically about the lighting at the fair. They, and I think something like a third of the country visited the World's Fair.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
It was ridiculously popular. And so if you had a store and you knew that if you got it electrified, you would get five times the customer base you were willing to risk a little fire damage.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Yes, it's fascinating to me, especially reading Edison's old material, because He kept everything. But it's fascinating to see him complain about how many details they had to deal with. And they formed the first research institute because there were so many details to deal with. How do you deal with the wires? How do you deal with the manufacturer? How do you install things?
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
How do you charge people?
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
if you don't know how much electricity they're using they had to make the first meters to figure out how much electricity people were using because if you don't have a meter you just charge a daily rate and people left their lights on all day and all night and but when it started to catch on even given all of the logistics of meters and wires and poles and walls and all that did it did it happen pretty quick or was there resistance every step of the way
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
I still contend that after that big fair in Chicago, that just sort of, that sort of flipped the switch, if you pardon the pun, and suddenly Americans from every city were trying to build as many skyscrapers as they could to compete with Chicago, and then they need to electrify them, and every new business or every old business wanted electricity.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And after that, we had just so many light bulbs that when they invented a light bulb in Europe that could deal with higher voltages, in Europe, they could just replace the old light bulbs because they didn't have that many. In America, they had way too many light bulbs to replace them.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
If you've ever noticed, you go to Europe, you have like 220, 240 volts. And in the United States, you have like 110, 120. That's because we were so advanced that we couldn't make a change to the next advancement.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Well, it's never been completely solved. Edison's solution was to just put coal plants everywhere. And that's not great for multiple reasons. One, you can't get electricity to the countryside. And two, you got coal plants in the middle of all your big cities.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
But the solution to that has been to do transfer electricity at, like I said, high voltages, which is dangerous, but allows you to transform at long distances without losing a ton of power.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
so that you can usually they say they step up the voltage to transform it and then to transmit it and then they step down the voltage once they get near a home or near a city so that's mostly been our solution so far we just keep on going to higher and higher voltages for the long distances to the power plants that we try to keep far away from us.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And then once they're near us, we transform them down so that they're safe to deal with or safer to deal with.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
What's amazing to me is how many scientists became sort of philosophers about electricity. Now that we have electricity, people can work for 20 hours a day and only need four hours of sleep, and won't that be wonderful? I'm like, no, that sounds horrible. But they thought they could tell they were transforming their world. And sometimes they had weird flights of fancy about what that would mean.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Meaning like their ideal world was something where people worked ridiculously long hours and had no sleep and no family life. Cause they're like, look, we can now work all the time. Isn't this wonderful? But it's fascinating to see how all these thousands and thousands and thousands of years of having it be dark at night was transformed into our modern world where it doesn't have to be.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Yes.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
It's a difficult thing with Tesla because there's such a mix of myth when it comes to the person. there's this push that he invented everything. On the other hand, he was very inspirational because of two things, two major things. One, he invented a kind of motor that worked with AC electricity. And more importantly, he was the first to patent it.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
And once he got paid a lot of money for that patent, Everyone got interested in AC electricity, into AC electricity motors and AC electricity transformers. That sort of broke the stagnation on that issue a little bit. And the second thing is he invented what's called the Tesla coil, which he thought would electrify the entire atmosphere or electrify the entire earth or communicate with Martians.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
He had a lot of thoughts, but it's still this, I don't know if you've ever seen, it looks sort of like a mushroom and you can see these lightning bolts coming off of it. It's one of the most inspirational devices around. And so there's this weird mix of like, he was more influential than people know and simultaneously less, if that makes any sense.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
I would never say we're done. I don't think science is ever done. There's a lot of interesting work now with actually going back to DC electricity. See, in the 1800s, you couldn't transform DC electricity very easily to high voltage. to make it transform long distances, but now you can. So there is a big interest in going back to the old DC, but using our electronics to transform it.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
That was so much fun.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Take Fun Seriously & Electricity’s Amazing Story - SYSK Choice
Everyone at the time thought that the real money was not in electrifying houses, but the real money was in providing electric buses because only the very wealthy could afford light bulbs.