[Vwdiesel] ----( The Power Factor )

[Dan Sloan]

My Grandfather worked as a master electrician in the Montgomery Ward's
building in Chicago...when that section of the city ran on DC.(somewhere in
the late 30's)  The building ran on AC, and there were monster inverters in
the basement.  As he told it, one day the mechanical governors failed, and
the inverters went wild...to the point that they melted down, and fused the
cutoff knife switches closed.  The electricians abandoned the room, quietly
shut the door, and waited for the inverters to finish self destructing.
Afterwards, they found most of the walls, ceiling, floor had been coated
with metal.

-- Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: vwdiesel-bounces at vwfans.com 
> [mailto:vwdiesel-bounces at vwfans.com] On Behalf Of Roger Brown
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 11:57 PM
> To: vwdiesel at audifans.com
> Subject: Re: [Vwdiesel] ----( The Power Factor )
> 
> LBaird119 at aol.com wrote:
> >   No wonder Edison was hung up on DC!  ;-)
> >   This stuff is ALL new concepts for me!
> >      Loren
> 
> Really interesting reading about Edison (DC) and Tesla (AC) 
> going at it in the early days touting the advantages and 
> disadvantages of the two systems.  My favorite was Edison 
> hiring a Harold Brown (no relation) to design the electric 
> chair and of course it was designed to use that horrible, 
> deadly AC current:
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair
> 
> Of course AC won out for the most part in power distribution 
> systems.  However, DC still gets used here and there.  One 
> big transmission line runs from around Portland Oregon down 
> to Sylmar (near Los Angeles) and uses 500KV DC to transmit 
> power.  DC has the big advantage of no power factor or 
> stability issues.  It is not used more commonly due to the 
> cost, which also tends to limit it to long-distance 
> point-point use.  Huge solid state invertors are very, very expensive.
> 
> -- 
>     Roger
> 
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