Kathy Joseph
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Kathy Joseph’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for inviting me on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
all of them except for solar, use this basic principle. You spin electromagnets near coils of wire and that induces the electricity.
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
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.
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.
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.
And even then, it was only very wealthy people would have it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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