Lineman’s Death – Laurence B

The thing that strikes me most about Mr.Edison’s letter is that he neglects to explain how his DC system would be more efficient. Edison only writes about the dangers of AC. I have heard of fires and faulty wiring at many of Edison’s DC stations, and Mr.Westinghouse pointed out that most electrical engineers themselves prefer alternating current because direct current lacks efficiency and is unsafe. Another issue that needs to be brought into the argument is that electricity has killed people, but so have many other things. As Westinghouse pointed out, in the year of 1888, 64 people died in New York because of streetcar accidents, 55 died because of omnibus and wagon accidents, 23 died by illuminating gas, and only 5 by electricity. The death by electrocution incidents seem to be quite low when compared to other services. I think that Mr.Edison needs to either rethink his position, or simply give up. He is beginning to make a fool of himself.                         -Sir Herbert Gatsby

• Almost every page of Edison’s letter has contradictory information. I will use information from pages 629 632 633 & 634 of Edison’s paper.
• Westinghouse is much more informative in his letter.

16B Edison – Laurence

Edison was a very intelligent man, but he did not take defeat well. I personally think that Edison was wrongfully named the expert in this situation. Everyone thought that because he invented the light bulb, he knew everything about all forms of electricity. His position on electricity was obviously extremely biased towards his direct current, and he wanted alternating current to be seen as the ‘killer current’. His position on electrocution was unethical, not because he was a bad person, but because he had his life’s work on the line. Edison was just trying to save his business.

Side note: It was interesting to see how hard these lawyers fought for Kemmler. I know they were fighting for the bigger issue of electrocution being cruel and unusual punishment, but Kemmler was an axe murderer. My favorite part of the reading was Westinghouses’ quote on the electrocution at the end of the chapter: “I do not care to talk about it. It has been a brutal affair. They could have done it better with an axe.”

Brown – Laurence B.

Harold Brown’s campaign against alternating current was not only unethical, it was disgusting. I have a feeling he and Edison had met before Brown’s letter to the Post. In the end it did a great job of proving the point that AC was dangerous, but electricity was never meant to be played with. Brown’s motives for carrying out these horrible acts are unclear, I personally think he was insane, just a nobody trying to make a name for himself. The worst part about the whole campaign was how open Edison and his men were in supporting Brown. I lost a lot of respect for Edison after reading this chapter.

Tesla and AC motor – Laurence B.

On May 15, 1888 Nikola Tesla traveled to Columbia College where the American Institute of Electrical Engineers was holding a convention. Tesla was there to give a lecture on his alternating current improvements. He had written the literature for the lecture the night before. Tesla was reluctant to attend this convention, but he was slowly overcome by the fact that he needed to make himself known. And so he agreed. He began his lecture by respectfully thanking his benefactors, Professor Anthony, Mr. Martin and Mr. Pope. He explained how he was asked to come on a very short notice, and to be forgiven for the briefness of the lecture. He was also reluctant to do the lecture because he had not even received the patents for some of what he was about to show. Tesla explained his AC motor and how there was no connection between the electricity being put into the motor with the rotor arm. This meant no commutator, which was a huge step forward. A man in the crowd who was known for improving the inventions of electricities kings, was Professor Thomson. Thomson was working on an AC motor as well, but did not think of the idea of having more than one current being supplied. This was the key to getting rid of the slow commutator technology. Westinghouse had known of Tesla’s ideas before the convention was held. Westinghouse purchased Tesla’s patents because they were the final piece he needed to complete his AC empire. There was some trouble in this process because Tesla was a very out of the box kind of person, and H.M. Byllesby had some trouble comprehending Tesla’s ideas. He wrote to Westinghouse that Tesla’s Ideas were far fetched, but he saw many good points that would have been of interest to Westinghouse. Westinghouse almost bought the patents for an AC system that Ferraris had invented in Europe.

Memory – Laurence B.

Delay line memory consisted of an electrical impulse being propagated through some liquid. Mercury was used because it is could hold many waves of information. The computer that was retrieving the information used an internal clock that would compare the time the pulses were sent with the current time. By knowing what time the information was propagated, it could be looked up and retrieved. Upon finding the propagated wave of information desired, the computer would re-transduce the wave back into an electrical pulse, and the computer would read it. DRAM works by storing each bit of memory into its own capacitor, thus eliminating the need for a mercury filled tubes. When the information is needed, the capacitor would be looked up, and the information would be there for retrieval. The design of the two are totally different, but the ideas are the same, store memory in a way that can be easily retrieved. DRAM is used in computers and other smart electronics today. The cool part about DRAM is that when the power is removed, the memory clears, thus leaving you with a clean place to store small pieces of data for easy retrieval. The manufacturing process of modern day electrical memory is quite different from that of the Delay line memory. The manufacturing of todays memory is all very systematic and clean. The lighting is a dark yellow color so as not to damage the intricate wafer pattern with other frequencies of light. Most of the production is done in the dark by machines, and the actual process is kept very secret.

Micron Tour – Laurence B.

The tour of the Micron facility was extremely interesting. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable and just a cool guy in general. He did not even hesitate on answering any questions. First we watched a short presentation on how Micron has there hand in virtually everything electronic that I own. Then we went over to the production side of the building and watched the magic happen. It was very interesting in the production building, a large portion of the floor we were on was lit with yellow lights. This is because white light is really a combination of every color of light. Scientifically, this means many different wavelengths, which could be dangerous to the production of the wafers. The most interesting part of the whole tour was when the tour guide explained to us the size of the chips being manufactured. Were talking tiny, like thousands of times smaller than a strand of hair. Another interesting thing was the chemistry of it all. How Argon gas is used for cleaning the chips because it is inert and will not react with anything, and how the water must be purified so no reactions take place. Also the actual process of etching and smoothing out the wafers was interesting, he explained to us how a layer of some substance is put down and creates a sort of stencil for where the grooves need to be. It was all very interesting.

There are many jobs available at Micron. Electrical and Mechanical engineering are what the main components of the design and production consist of, Chemistry also plays a large role. There are a few internships available at Micron. One available at Micron in Idaho includes an intern as a product engineer, where you would oversee the design process, debugging and testing, and finally high-volume production. Other internships are available but would most likely consist carrying out the production phase and understanding how it  works, and how it could work better.

I personally would not want to work at a place like Micron because the work done there does not highlight the work that I will be doing as a civil engineer. Also, I don’t particularly like the delicacy of it all. And anything that I build will be visible to the naked eye.

Transformers- Laurence B.

Transformer were originally invented by Michael Faraday, long before Westinghouse began to work with them. Faraday took a soft piece of iron bar and wrapped a piece of insulated wire around it, the primary, then he wrapped a second insulated wire around the first. The result was a difference in voltage of the two wires. Depending on how many times the wire was wrapped around the iron. Many coils would step the voltage up, few coils would step the voltage down. This is the basic idea of a transformer. The plant where the electricity is created needs to push out high amounts of power so that it will reach whatever distance it needs. The issue lies in that the high power that the plant puts out, is too much for charging our iPods and running our coffee pots. So the transformers job is to transform the high voltage, high power energy that the plant gives off, into lower voltage power that is safe for our coffee pots and iPods.

A metaphor for this is a group project. The teacher (power plant) sends out a large assignment that has to be completed, the large assignment is received by the group of students (step-down transformer), and then broken down into smaller, more feasible tasks. One student (device) could not handle the huge amount of work (power) alone, and so it is stepped down and distributed into pieces. This way, one student does not get an overload and combust, and the teacher still gets the completed assignments.

Tesla – Laurence B.

Nikola Tesla was, in my opinion, the most interesting and revolutionary inventor of all time. These “epiphanies” that came to him at times when his life seemed to be on the brink of complete despair are extremely interesting. He saw visions of the alternating current motor, and the wireless transmission of frequencies. In a dream he had, he saw his mother die, and surely enough, when he awoke she had died. Tesla, in my opinion, was a prophet of technology. Tesla envisioned his inventions. He was able to get so deep into his thoughts that he barely even needed to write inventions on paper. With his lightning experiment, he did not even bother to write out the calculations, and it still produced very revolutionary results. 

Tesla and Edison had very different styles of doing business. Edison preferred to stay up all hours and put all of his time towards inventing. With no advanced schooling or mentors, Edison created the wonder of capturing electricity and using it for good. Tesla however, seemed to focus a lot of his tome on creating military based devices and thought a lot about how to use this new technology for destruction. Tesla seemed to be a very anxious inventor who seemed to need someone like Edison to be inspired by. He was extremely excited to meet with Thomas Edison because of how interested he was in Edison’s work. Tesla and Edison soon became rivals, but only because of Edison’s disliking of Tesla’s  implementation of alternating current in his motor. If Edison would have accepted that the AC motor worked much better than the DC motor, the world might not have known of Tesla and his great inventions. Edison turning down Tesla is what led to the Tesla and Westinghouse alliance, which is what boosted Tesla to fame and fortune.

Electric Nation- Laurence B

This documentary was not the most exciting, It was better than the interview with jill Jonnes, but still, I found myself anticipating the end. I learned a lot about the timeline of electricity. The documentary took us back to one of the first blogs that we did on what we thought were the most influential engineering acheivements. I had actually picked the Tennessee Valley Asociation’s work as the most influential with the implimenation of the Grand Coulee Dam. The documentary elaborated on that a lot which was helpful. The documentary addresses the issue’s with money the most. Edison had it all figured out and working properly, but wall street did not. Edison’s idea of a system was so important because there had to be some method to how people would pay for and recieve electricity. Samuel Insull’s vision of electricity was that it was a huge means of profit. He sold out shares of stocks that were invested in electricity to make money. The downfall came when the Great Depression hit. Insull, as well as the united states, totally capsized. His dreams of making huge bucks off electricity were shattered. Roosevelt’s policies were that the federal government was to control the electrification of the united states. This was sealed when the TVA purchased from Wilkie all of the rights to his electricity companies. Of course Wilkie was not very happy about this, until the federal government wrote him a check for 40 million dollars.

Edison the man- Laurence B.

In the film Edison is portrayed as a humorous yet stubborn man. In the film he was quite loving and payed a lot of attention to his son, he was very playful and seemed to spend a good amount of time with his family. The qualities that were shown as key components to his success were, his stubbornness, his persistence, and his ability to just stumble upon solutions. There are a few differences in the Jill Jones portrayal of Edison. Jill Jones portrays him as a workaholic, crazy scientist who was totally infatuated with his work. Jill Jones does not portray him as a very loving or romantic person at all. Edison was portrayed in the movie as always stumbling across inventions rather than researching and really thinking hard about a way to make things work. The film was interesting and made more entertaining for the public’s eye, just as he was portrayed in middle school. The fact is that edison was much less of a personable man. The film would have never shown Edison’s projects with electrocuting animals or arguing with Tesla. I wish a film was made that was more accurate and not so much tailored to fit the public.