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
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.
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,
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.
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.
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?
How do you charge people?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then once they're near us, we transform them down so that they're safe to deal with or safer to deal with.
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.
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.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 21–40 of 42 · page 2 of 3
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