Again and again the US-only narrative. First modern long-range three-wire three-phase transmission was implemented by Dobrovolsky in Germany. Tesla invented and advertised his 6-wire system at first.
They're probably mostly bothered by the title of the article not making it clear "up-front" that it's a U.S.A.-centric article. If the title were "The Birth of the American Grid" or somesuch, they likely would not have had a complaint about it.
It’s unfortunate how much everything is America centric. Even in tiny details, such as Office and Teams defaulting to American instead of English even when installed on a Windows PC set to UK.
It's a problem in Australia too, but I firmly believe that's just an oversight which has been de-prioritised in favour of other junk, rather than an imaginary attempt to export some form of linguistic imperialism.
The issue re; Office and Teams is likely simply due to Microsoft being a U.S.A. based company. Many corporations here sadly believe themselves to be the "center of their Universe" and forget about everywhere and everyone else, even when they do business world-wide, or run a business that somehow affects everyone. There's also a long-standing issue with many software developers (especially in corporate environments) not considering issues of "accessibility" by people outside their "local norm" until they're forced to consider the issue. We also have a highly "xenophobic" subset of our population that contribute somewhat to "foreign" language issues as well (which is quite odd, considering how much of our population consists of "immigrants" or the descendants thereof; nearly all of us?), being that we're supposedly "the Great Melting Pot" nation here, as well as being a popular "tourist" destination.
That's simply not the case. Windows is perfectly capable of telling software what locale, language, and keyboard it's supposed to use. It's sheer laziness.
For VCs into this, see "The electrical manufacturers, 1875-1900 : a study in competition, entrepreneurship, technical change, and economic growth" [1]
This has, among other things, Edison's business plan. His plan called for the Pearl Street Station project to pay back its capital cost in one year. It took longer, a few years. ROI on early electric generating plants was really good. That's why capacity grew so fast. Electric lighting was far cheaper than gas or candles per unit of light.
> Electric lighting was far cheaper than gas or candles per unit of light.
All the more remarkable when you consider how inefficient the "electric lightbulb" is - it's heating a metal filament to a ludicrous temperature (towards 3000K because that's the colour you want) to get light instead of just directly converting the electrical energy into light as you would now.
Maybe not be that remarkable if you consider that the filament is in vacuum, so not a lot of opportunities to conduct the heat. Heat is lost through radiation.
In contrast, gas or candles warm the outside air directly, release hot waste gasses, etc. Lot's of energy that gets lost.
Trying to set something on fire with a classical light bulb is tricky. With a candle, instant effect.
Although it's possible to do this, I don't think commercial incandescent bulbs do, by the 1930s it was well understood that various noble gases work better and are affordable once you decide you're going to produce them in suitable quantities to make light bulbs. I'd be surprised if somehow those still produced don't use noble gases.
At the point when inventors are first trying to make electric light they don't know these gases exist but by the era of the mass produced light bulb scientists know the answer to "What's invisible and doesn't react with hot metal?" is actually "Any of the gases on this part of my periodic table of elements†" not just "A vacuum".
† In the late 19th or early 20th century this table would look all wrong to you, but it's clearly the same idea, and unless you remember your chemistry well or know from first principles why such a table must have a particular shape you can't fix their table, you just know it looks wrong.
The UK Electrical Engineers institute wrote up Ferranti's deployment of DC and the cutover to AC in London about 50 years ago. I don't know where a copy is but it's very interesting.
For a while there, Stepney had street lighting in series which faded as the resistance rose down the path. There must have been a time with Gaslight, DC, and emerging AC all at the same time in the cityscape.
Australias electricity reticulation in Victoria is a fine story too. Gen. Monash who was one of the "victors of WW1" along with the NZ and Canadian equivalents was in charge post-war. He also got caught up in a ridiculous right-wing coup (he refused the offer of being the titular dictator)
I must have because the quality as said was "dimmer at the far end" but you know, tales told to small children, maybe it was electrical engineers humour?
https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/sites.uoguelph.ca/dist/1/170/f... discusses the electrification of london from the 1880s. There was mixed AC and DC supply for some time. Ferranti led efforts to switch to AC and deploy a huge (for the time) AC system. The article says both that DC supply persisted into the 1950s and was uneconomic for transmission beyond about 1.5miles. Maybe that's the root of "lights getting dimmer"
Thanks, I lived in Australia for a bit when I was a child and I still have a lot of fondness for it, so I'm interested to read about this episode of their history that I was unaware of
