Well here we go again... As I thought back on the Edison/Westinghouse compition, I started thinking that there may or may not be enough for a decent entry here... So here starts the ramble, and we'll just see where it goes...
As I mentioned in the first edition, Edison was a proponent of direct current (DC) while Westinghouse saw alternating current (AC) as the better system. (in terms of mass distrobution at any rate, there wasn't really much of a low voltage electronics market going on at the time naturally)
As things turn out, AC was the better system. At the very begining though, it was an even field for a few reasons. Copper was very cheap in the early 1880's. DC needs a much heavier wire/cable to deliver the same energy as an AC system. However since the copper was cheap, it did not matter too much at first. Secondly, there was no "grid" delivering power long distance, so electric instalations tended to be in small areas, the longest run being no more than a few miles. DC can hold its own in that situation.
So what do rivals do when the compition heats up?... Out come the smear tactics. Yep, way back in the late 1880's there was plenty of mud slinging going on. The majority of the mud came from Edison as he was facing a better technology. (which he eventually admitted later in life) He played on peoples fear of an unsafe technology. In 1887 he got one of Westinghouse's generators, hooked it to a metal plate, and started electrocuting animals. (dogs, horses and cows) They were useing a 1000 volt Westinghouse generator, which will certianlly do the trick.
At the height of the back and forth between the two, New York State decided that they needed a new form of execution. They decided on electrocution, even though there was no electric chair yet. Well both companies jumped into the fray, designing their own respective chairs, powered by their prefered system. Now comes the odd part. They were both hoping to lose, and had campagined to get the rival's chair accepted. The logic was that people would not want the same kind of power in their homes that was used for ececutions. The end result, was the AC powered chair won, and Edison had a field day. Westinghouse was upset, and actually refused to sell generators to NY state to fry their criminals, going to the extreme of paying for the legal appeals of the first few people sentenced to the chair.
While I am sure there was more fighting between the two, I have never found reference to it. It seems they just seemed to get on with making their power systems after the 80's... Westinghouse figured out the first long distance delivery system in the 1890's. He managed to secure the contract for the Niagra Falls generating station. For this he had to develop transformers to make the transmission effecient. The system generated three phase power, in a system he had aquired the rights to from Nikola Tesla, whom Westinghouse had persuaded to join his company. They sent the power from Niagra to Buffalo where it was the first system that powered multiple sytems. (in this case railways, street lights, home and business power) This is pretty much the way things still are. What happened to all the DC systems? Well in some places, they still exist. Co Ed (a part of the Consolidated Edison group) is still generating DC for some clients, though they offer good incentives to convert. (I'm thinking if those people are still running their DC gear after all this time, they're not going to want to change... Good luck to Con Ed... )
And there ya have it... (well kinda... I guess I rambled a bit there, but hey... its my blog, and I'll ramble if I want to...)
I am not going to pre-determine the next topic of ramble for the Flashback... We'll just see what hits me at the time...
Someone please, explain this one to me... I'm just at a complete loss...
The New York Times (and no... I am not going to link over to them... if you want to get there, I'm not going to help you find the idiots) has just won a lawsuit to get the transcripts of the Port Authority of NY/NJ call center, and radio center traffic from 9/11/01... For those that may not know, the Port Authority provided police and on site fire fighting for the Twin Towers... They also administrated various other aspects like elevator operaters, maintenence etc... What exactly does the Times think they are going to find in those logs?.. The relitives of those Port Authority workers that lost their lives have not in many case seen these transcripts yet... They will get the treat of possibly seeing it in the Times first... I simply can not figure out this one... Somehow, I just feel that they just do not need to get their hands on something that can potentially cause so much pain to people who have already lost so much... I would love to beleave that they will handle the information with some respect... Unfortunatly I simply don't trust them one little bit...
I will never forget that day... I was fortunate in knowing only a small number of victems, and those only just in passing now and again... I doubt that anyone around this area needs to be reminded of the heroisim of the emergency workers, the amazeing loss and the tremendous shock we all felt... I grew up in north Jersey, and I've been around the city my whole life... People are still suffering from that day around the NY/NJ/Conn area as well as down in DC and out in PA... I don't want to forget it... but I sure do not need the damn Times dragging up the old ragged memories... The people around here are tough, and resiliant, but come on... Just leave the transcripts alone...
Sorry if that is all rather dis-jointed... I'm just pissed, and quite honestly, I don't feel like playing editor today on my own post...
Our recent power issues in the northeast got me thinking... (ok, I know it went out to the midwest too, but I don't live there, so it really just didn't matter much to me) (and actually my power was out for all of about 30 seconds, but damn was it strange looking at the NYC skyline I've lived most of my life around completely dark) What was I thinking about?.. Well electric light naturally... So in honor of that flashback to the days when I had to study the history of light, specifically theatre related...
Welcome to the first installment of Backstage Flashback
Thomas Edison did not actually invent the light bulb... What he did was to buy the patent from a couple guys up in Canada for their electric light source... They had a nice idea, but it wasn't a practicle one when they figured it out. Edison figured out several things...
Edison also figured out and developed a good amount of the transmission and distributionaspects. (hey, he was in the business of making money through invention) So he developed underground transmission systems, switches, the theory of a parallel circuit, (I kinda question that one as there were arc lights out for ages before Edison was around... but I never managed to dig up any earlier mention of such a thing) Ways to boost voltage periodically as it fell off, (he was the proponent of DC, not AC, so it drops off very quickly at distance) better dynamos (remember, DC.. not AC... not alternating generators for him) and of course, he figured out how to bill people for everything... (for those of you in the NY area, Con Ed is the short form of Consolidated Edison)
Next on Backstage Flashback, we'll follow the compition between Edison and Westinghouse for who was producing a better technology, DC or AC, and how they tried to prove it
Ok... here's a couple images of the carnage... FYI the big silver truss is the perminent part of the equation that failed once in the past. All the other stuff (can't call it equipment anymore in that condition) was what the concert was touring with.
Think about what that would have done to people if there was an audience...
The more I look at these things, (I have several more I did not bother to post) the more things I see that just look "off". (besides the fact that the gear is crumbled on the floor)
(I can't give the photographer credit, as these are all probably sixth or seventh hand at this point....)
Ok... Just a minor question... Why is it that when I got my new computer, set it up, and turned it on, I found that I had no less than 30 meg of updates for the OS to download. (yes, I'm a PC guy... please don't tell me to get a Mac, I'm not interested) My problem in this case isn't actually with Microsoft. (it'd be nice if their software worked well when they released it, but that's not what this is about) My issue is with the manufacturer of my PC... I know that they just mirror the drives, or ghost them to make their lives easier, and faster, but come on... I suspect it would take very little time for them to keep their master drive image updated... I'm stuck in the stone ages with my dial up access... 30 meg is quite a commitment for me to download that way...
But wait... there's more...
It somehow seems that it had to go through round one of the updates before it figured out it was still behind on other aspects, so after my first night letting it download, I find the next day, I needed yet another 15 some odd meg worth of stuff...
Now, I finally got mad... All I wanted to do was get online and get current with sites I follow (wasn't chaseing too many blogs at the time, but other sites like news, weather, professional sites) Could I just go through and surf while it was running?... Sure... I could... but ya know I just don't want to have that flashback to the days of 14.4 modems (or worse since I started on modems in the 2k range what ever that was) where we all sat around and waited patiently for basic pages to load, let alone the heavy graphic and scripted pages we have today. Could I just go ahead and surf for a bit then start it running?... Yep... Of course I could... but when I'm seeing updates that are labeled "critical security" I tend to flinch a bit. So it was yet another night shot...
So I'm thinking back now... That was two nights of my life I can't get back... All because my chosen manufacturer is too damn lazy to keep their drives up to date... What a great purchaseing experience... Someone remind me to just build my own next time... At least I'll expect to have to spend a couple days on software issues then...
Here's a thought... If you had a very important system that needed to work 100%, 100% of the time or it was likely that people would end up dead, and it had failed at least once in the past, would you use it if someone said it was ok?... Me?... Well I'd sure have to know what made someone say it was now ok, but you can bet I'd never feel real good about useing it, let alone useing it up in a heavy duty situation... Well some folks down in Atlantic City did just that... They rolled the dice on an overhead support system, that apparently has faile once in the last year or two... Well guess what... It failed again... This time while it was holding quite literally tons of equipment overhead... The report I heard this morning, claims the equipment damage was around a million bucks. (and I suspect that's really just the gear the tour had out with it, ignoreing the stuff on the ground like a bunch of rows of empty (thankfully) AUDIENCE CHAIRS) Somehow nobody got seriously hurt when it came in. I can't for the life of me understand how that miracle happened, though I just met someone that was there when it happened and I'm going to have to grill him when I get the chance...
Who cares?... Why am I worked up about this?.. Well hey, I work in the industry... and even more specifically, I work a lot of the rigging. (rigging is all the hanging overhead work for anyone not of the entertainment world) Someone dropped the ball big time here... I can't point any fingers at anyone since I wasn't there, and I probably wouldn't anyway in a public forum... What I know is that if the facility even considers putting in the same system again, they should be closed down... The admin should all be sent to science labs and studied to find out how they managed to exist with absolutly no brain in their skull... The fact it failed once before has me questioning things right off the bat... Twice is just nuts... While the engineering on such a system can be complex, it can be done... The major unknown is how the unit will get used after it is installed... I can't tell from the pictures how the load was distributed due to the mass carnage... (I'll link the pictures as soon as the webspace I'm setting up for this blog is established)
What really scares me, is that it is quite likely that I will never hear the final outcome of the investigation... I'm going to try to keep on this one though... If I hear anything, it will end up on here I'm sure...
Ok... Enough rant on this... (geesh what a way to start off something I wanted to keep kinda lite)
I'm writing this post over 2 years after the first time I sat down to blog... Its way back here in the begining, because when I opened up shop over at my old Blog-City place, I didn't bother with any opening post... Seems strange after all this time...
At any rate, I managed to get almost all the old posts over here on Mu Nu... I didn't bother with a couple that were links to dead air now, but otherwise it should be a complete archive now...
If you're actually reading this, thanks for taking the time to stop by... No promises that you'll find anything interesting here though... Lots of frustration and anger at times... Lots of random thoughts... Not too much great content...
