16c Edison, Brown, and Electrocution – Chris C

To whom it may concern,

The dangers of Alternating Current (AC) are quite real, but this is no different than the potential danger in all new technology.  For instance, would the one who presented rat poison to modern era have expected that it would end up killing more than just rats?  It is most likely that the answer is yes, the dangers were present and known, but the substance was used and expected to be handled with great care.  Such care must also be demonstrated with AC and with time it will lead us into an era of great prosperity that similar, Direct Current (DC) systems may not provide.  The fears that have prompted this letter are not painful shock or instant death, but one of such horror of an incident that its memories invade the mind upon any thoughts of linemen.  While his death was caused by a high voltage current, the issue here is not the dangers that high voltage AC provides, but how it should be handled and maintained.

In the case of Mr. Feeks, a live wire was attempted to be removed improperly.  The loss of a trained man, a productive member of society, a husband, and a father are worth far more than any line.  From this further enforcements and training are being implemented, and hopefully most will think twice before attempting a similar task.  However, this work was being done in response to the poor state of the New York overhead lines.  An unnecessary death in a clearly dangerous tangle and for what?  Nothing.  A good man lost his life, yet there are others sitting comfortably upon a very bloated salary disguising themselves as “The New York City Board of Electrical Control”.  Had the subways been enacted as mandated by law men would not be working near such dangerous forced while performing a strange balancing act high up on poles, but down on the earth with firm footing and exterior distractions, away from the people where there would be no chance to cause serious harm to passerbys.

Those passerbys, however, are in need of this power, this AC.  Giving them this tool opens up holes for the danger, but we have little to worry about.  The same power coursing through the wires overhead is not the same power in the homes of our customers.  With the induction transformer electricity is lowered to voltages even lower than Edison’s safe 300V pressure.  As he has claimed and tested this has not caused instant death, even in a dog, an animal that generally has a smaller build than a person.  So why do we change our voltages?  The change in voltages allows AC to provide power to people much further away for less money and raw material than DC systems.  This makes electricity an affordable commodity that everyone, from the farmers to the aristocrats and even the factory workers of New York to enjoy.  And because we transmit over such a long range we have but one generation plant releasing minimal smog far away from the cities, much different from the Edison Central Stations, which must be placed within miles of each other creating unreasonable amounts of noise and smoke in our cities.

While AC is a new tool, we are doing our best to make it work safely and cheaply to provide everyone a healthy life.  A dead customer is a costomer no more, but a happy customer is a customer for life.

Sincerely,

Westinghouse Co.

Edit (Planning):

Source – Semicontinuous currents, how DC may kill.  What DC is, and why it is (not) safe.

Not even done reading them.

16b Edison Punishment – Chris C

The position taken by Edison was completely unethical because of the assumptions made upon his misinformation.   Testing performed on animals involved no rigorous scientific method to guarantee pure data (or close to) and no autopsy to confirm and explain the cause of death from electric treatement.  Basing the voltage and current to kill a man, off the assumption that what kills a “healthy” horse must kill a man.  I say “healthy” because again, nothing was confirmed with his testing.  To continue to judge a man and submit him to an untested procedure which is supposedly instant and painless despite his willingness to accept the previous form of capital punishment is more or less wrong.  Making everything worse is the lack of “ethics” in the courtroom.  Despite experience and training the judge allowed himself to become biased, and accepted the words of “The Wizard”, who only assumed it was safe, against that of an established lawyer, who proved that this method of execution was unproven and should not be used.  Edison was not the only one at fault, but that he would use his prestige and abandon ideals he once followed to secure business in the future is a perfect display of  immorality.

Edison, Brown and Electrocution – Christopher C

The method of campaigning against alternating current (AC) was in a good direction, but was implemented improperly.  In short, their testing and demonstration of electrical currents upon animal subjects would have benefitted greatly from refinement and additional control measures.  On the line of ethics the animals treated with electricity were, for the most part, of unkown origin and stolen from the streets.  There was no reason to kill them making their execution unnecessary and only for the sake of pr.  If the animals used were already sentenced to death for one reason or another the public may not have been as afraid or opposed to the demonstration and the ASPCA might not have taken a foothold into the demonstration.  Also, the demonstration failed to provide any sort of hard scientific data.  It provided no information on what occured to the animal tissues at specific voltages or currents, a very important disction to make when comparing the effects of AC to DC especially when analyzing nervous and muscle tissues.  When combined with proper documentation and publication in a scientific community the effects of such testing would have been far greater than their method as people are more likely to take in the data when they are looking at tables rather than corpses.  This also made it a complete failure to engineering enterprises, as no method of protecting people from stray voltages or information leading to new plans and designs of electrical systems could be developed beyond “this is a potentially dangerous voltage to dogs, let’s use something weaker”.  For business, however, it was a more than valid method of persuading the people.  Fear controls minds, and fear of AC brings business to DC.  It is unfortunate that they had carried out their plan incorrectly and had it backfire.

Tesla and the AC Motor Chris Cook

After a short introduction crediting benefactors and warning the audience of the short notice and preperation for the presentation Tesla began to explain how his system of electrical distibution through alternate currents would prove to be superior in the transmission of power and provide practical results that were unattainable and desired at the time through the use of present electriacal systems.  Polyphase AC was necessary because it replaced the need for a commutator instead using a simple order of currents to provide power to the induction motor he had developed.  With one of his motors next to him he demonstrated it’s action and explained every detail involving the use of the polyphase AC and the magnetic fields used to rotate the motor.  This was a highly efficient system with no direct connections to the motor, the only pieces that would wear being two bearings.  Westinghouse bought the patents with Tesla’s system because he realized they would cover the entire domain of Alternating Current systems.  This had a few drawbacks, however, because Westinghouse had crews that were already working on developing an AC motor and were working off designs introduced by Galileo Ferraris.  Using Tesla’s electrical system would involve redoing a lot of the work they had already completed before moving even a bit forward, a very costly problem.

Memory Chris Cook

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) runs off of a grid of transistors and capacitors that are used to store bit information.  When an element of DRAM is to be accessed selectors find the appropriate row and column to connect to.  The ability to switch from one element of the array to a completely unrelated element of choice leads this to the random access portion of it’s name.  A significant disadvantage of the system is the requirement of precise voltage control and limitations of access to the elements during refresh periods (In DRAM capacitors lose charge over time).  This is nowhere near the limitations of delay line memory (DLM, not official abbreviation).  DLM takes electrical impulses and converts them to some mechanical function, usually waves, that pass through an object over time and are converted back to electrical impulses at the end.  If it is necessary to store the signals longer they are simply rerouted back into the medium.  Because the signals are in a specific order as a mechanical wave they may only be read as a sequence of data that must finish traveling through the medium before any process can be used to split it apart.  This may be significantly slower than DRAM, however, it was the only method available for a long time.  Another disadvantage is that depending on the chosen medium DLM had to be secured by precise environmental controls and featured additional calculations to maintain as well as read.  Today DRAM is used in various electrical devices that store information for a temporary period of time, but only while powered.  A perfect example of this is the computer you are most likely reading this posting from.  Manufacturing of DRAM is a very long and complicated process I will not be covering today.  Bye bye.

Micron Trip Chris Cook

Micron was interesting to say the least.  I was surprised to see how many different conference rooms they had and that were small groups of people in them when we were working.  The gift shop also caught my eye for unusual things.  Above all, though, the secrecy there was unreal to me.  Government facilities feature less security and preventative measures than what I saw at Micron.  Even the break zones and lockers were hidden away and easily passable if you weren’t keeping an eye out.

I believe electrical and mechanical engineers were in the lead there, not only for the production of DRAM and Flash Memory, but also for creating and maintaining the connections between pieces of equipment.  I noticed they had jobs available from outside main production and testing, primarily in the maintenance and installation of equipment.  It was also surprising to see that they offered jobs to members of other companies, but the restrictions appeared a little unfriendly.  If their security offers any insight into the company I’m pretty sure they have a very talented legal team hiding away somewhere.  Personally, though, I would not want to work there.  The constant hum of the fab room would put me to sleep and the entire environment was too clean and perfect.  Compared to other jobs I’ve had Micron showed little interest in providing a friendly, social environment for it’s workers.  Once you’ve had a coworker come up and say “why are you working? It’s snack time!” you can’t go back.

Electric Nation – Chris Cook

Overall I found it to be a very enjoyable film.  It did a nice job of conveying historical information without putting me to sleep.  The film handles explaining how American went from having a simple light bulb to having an entire electrical network that could handle all appliances across the nation.  The system was important, because without it the light bulb Edison was inventing could never be implemented in homes as a practical light source.  Insull wanted to reduce the costs of providing and receiving electricity across the nation so that everyone could take part in the way of the future.  This backfire when he recommended that his customers purchase his stock only to have the entire market crash.  He then sunk everything he had into electric stock and lost all of his fortune, appearing nothing but a criminal to the public.  Roosevelt used the idea of expanding affordable electricity as a method of providing jobs to people and keeping America in a state of progression.  Wilkie disagreed with this, because the TVA and government supplied electricity interfered with the productivity of private enterprise.  In the end the TVA won anyway.

Edison the Man – Chris Cook

In the film Edison could best be described as the perfect man.  His personality contains most of the popular traits including, but not limited to humorous, intelligent, hardworking, polite, adventurous, and even a bit handsome.  He is portrayed as a decent father and great friend, a far cry from Jill Jonnes presentation of him as an obsessive inventor with nothing more on his mind than creating new contraptions.  Professionally the presentations more or less matched, showing him to be quite dedicated to his work and very lucky all around.  Luck plays mostly in creating the inventions, where the film showed that his creation of the phonograph was based off of a random ecounter with a faulty product and the use of a vaccuum in the light bulb was thought of through a random conversation with his wife.  I may be wrong, but Edison’s line of discovery appeared slightly more scientific in the book, where he had a general idea of resistance involved in the filament versus the movie’s random testing of metals that were strong enough to survive.

Engineering Specialties, Christopher C

Before I pretty much decided to follow up on electrical engineering after working through some electronics work in middle and high school as well as a few other quirks.  Thanks to the nifty link I managed to get to a nice little cache of information on the GMU Department EE/CpE page that includes some course for various specialties.  What caught my immediate attention was “Microelectronics, Electromagnetics, and Optoelectronics”.  I’m just as likely wrong about the perks of this specialty as I am about holding my major until graduation, but it would appear that this little specialization follows groundwork electronic communications on a hardware level by focusing on applying electromagnetic theory, analog/digital circuitry, optical communications, and so on.  Personally, I would like to work on the hardware and interfacing of circuitry to signals.  If I have this right, and I probably don’t, that takes me a very nice step closer to making a tv remote, or at the least getting things to talk to each other without hardwiring them and being able to limit the signals used in communication.
What would really help me with this is some extra work in physics and trig, especially with emtheory, which I could use in my class, but didn’t fully understand.  It’s impossible to properly use something without understanding it, so some extra work would be really nice there.  While I should be concerned about my human writing and communication skills, I’m fairly certain they will be going under several revisions based off general electives, practice, and whatever foreign languages I choose to learn in the future.  Right now the technical background for any related field is more important to me than the features around it and will become my focus for improvement.

Edison Miracle of Light, Chris C

I learned Edison was a lot stranger than I could have imagined.  I really don’t see why he had to be that stubborn about the hearing aid concept.  Even if he invented it he wouldn’t have to use it, and he’d be helping the world conquer one of the most aggravating issues around.  Even today it’s pretty common to have some hearing loss and being able to put his name to the hearing aid would have been cool.  Other than that, the only thing that really grabbed me was his family.  The webpage didn’t do too much to describe them and it was kinda nice to see a varied collection of the man and his family.  As for the presentation, it felt like a pbs type broadcast.  It could have been a little better, but the real quirk that pushed it for me was the introduction.  The story about the replica bulb was a bit over the top and out of place for the film and I think there could have been a better alternative.  I also feel a bit upset about the snappy ending, but the focus wasn’t on his entire life, just everything relative to electricity and light.  Finally, I beleive Edison to be a cross between an artist and warrior.  The sheer number of materials he kept in the lab and the remarks from Tesla on his methods show just how far he’d push the bouandaries of innovation and persistence.