The Library of Work and Play: Electricity and Its Everyday Uses

One day Harold expressed a desire to see the dynamos, five miles away, which furnish the electric light in our apartment. So I told him to invite his best friend to accompany us and we would go.

When we were some distance from the station the boys noticed the very tall chimneys and inquired why tall chimneys were needed for dynamos. I explained that the dynamos were run by steam-engines, and steam-engines required the burning of coal. "Oh!" said Ernest, Harold's friend, "I read in the paper that electricity is the rival of steam and is going to drive out the steam-engine." I suggested that we were about to see some steam-engines driving electricity out of that power station. But more seriously, I explained that steam-engines were used for many years as locomotives to draw the trains on the elevated railroads of New York City, and when at last they were displaced by electric trains some people thought that it was a case of electricity driving out steam, whereas what had really happened was that the steam power for running those trains had been concentrated at a central station, and its power was merely transmitted to the trains by means of electricity. The trains were, therefore, run by steam power quite as much as ever. In like manner, the surface cars of New York a few years ago were run by a cable, which was merely a very long belt used to transmit to the cars the power of steam-engines located at a central station. When they were changed to electric cars, electricity became the successful rival of nothing else than a twisted wire cable. The cars still run by steam power as before, but that power is transmitted by electricity instead of the discarded cable. Steam has driven out the horse as a power for drawing street cars, and electricity has enabled us to gather all the steam engines into central stations, where now they are furnishing the power for moving surface, elevated, and subway cars for street traffic, as also trains for suburban travel. Central station steam-engines are producing a vast amount of power, distributed all over the city by means of electricity, for doing a great variety of work and for furnishing electric light and heat, all of which we shall presently study. "Just before we go into this central station, can you tell me how the elevator is run in our apartment house?" "It is an electric elevator," said Harold. "And where does the electricity come from?" I inquired. "Well, I know that it comes from the street mains, but do they come from this power station?" "Yes," said I, "and we will now go in and see the steam-engines which lift you up stairs many times each day by sending electricity to run that elevator. If you choose to do so, you may claim for purposes of discussion that your elevator is run by steam."

As we entered the building we came first to the dynamo room and both boys noticed that the tone which met their ears was that which I had produced for them in the telephone the night before. "I shall try to show you before we get through," I said, "that these dynamos are doing something which makes iron pulsate sixty times a second and that that is the cause of the pitch of this tone. But let us begin with the coal which is the source of all this power.

"This particular station at the present time is burning forty tons of coal an hour. That is as much as Mr. -- uses to heat his twelve-room house for a whole year. One pound of coal is capable of liberating enough energy to supply 5? horse-power for an hour. (Written for short 5? H.P.H.) One ton of coal is capable of furnishing (2,000 × 5?) 11,500 H.P.H. Forty tons would yield 460,000 H.P.H. But the best furnaces, boilers, and steam-engines are terribly wasteful of energy. About nine tenths of all this energy is wasted and only one tenth, or about 46,000 horse-power per hour, is delivered by the steam-engines to the dynamos.

"Coal is already scarce in the world and the supply is rapidly being exhausted. Meanwhile we are growing more dependent upon coal. A century ago we used scarcely any power except that of men, horses, and oxen, and what little heat men then used came chiefly from wood. They lived in cold houses, attended cold churches and schools, did not ride in steam or electric cars, and did not have power plants. Our wood is nearly all gone, our coal is going, and we are very rapidly growing more dependent upon heat and power, our chief source of which is coal. Wind power is too uncertain to depend upon, and we turned our backs upon water-power when we began to crowd into cities. What little water-power there is, however, is nearly all in use.

"There is great need both that we learn how to save the major part of the energy of the coal which we now waste, and that we find a substitute for the coal to use when that is gone.

"A part of the heat from the forty tons of coal which is being burned in this particular power plant goes into the water in the boilers. It converts this water into steam. The steam, if free to expand into the air, would occupy about one thousand seven hundred times the volume of the water. We compel it to expand through the cylinders of the steam-engine, using its force of expansion to make wheels go around-to make the dynamo revolve. These dynamos are not devices for producing power but merely for transmitting the power of these steam-engines to far away places where it may be used, as, for instance, in our apartment house, where we are unwilling to walk upstairs and want some power to carry us.

"Our own apartment is fifty feet above the street. I weigh one hundred and sixty-five pounds. If I walk up stairs from the street to our apartment in one minute, which is the rate of a rather slow elevator, I work at the rate of one quarter of a horse-power. One hundred and sixty-five pounds raised two hundred feet in one minute requires one horse-power. You boys each weigh about half as much as I do, and if one of you walks up the same stairs in one minute you exert half the power that I do, or if you run up the stairs in half a minute you exert the same power, that is, one quarter of a horse-power. When we three walk up together in one minute we exert one half horse-power. If we all three run up the stairs in half a minute we expend one horse-power. Now, the speed of elevators for apartment houses is about one hundred feet a minute. We are unwilling to walk up stairs, not because we are lazy but because we have the New York haste, and so we employ elevators which run at the rate of about one hundred feet a minute.

Photograph by Helen W. Cooke

Testing a Generator

"These dynamos enable us to employ the power of this central station to run the elevator in our apartment house. Here is a dynamo rolling over now in the act of sending out power, some of which goes to that elevator; and standing beside it is another waiting to be used when necessary. Examining these dynamos, we find that they are composed of nothing else than iron and copper. About all that we can say of these mysterious machines is that the moving iron generates the electricity and the copper leads it away.

Fig. 1

"Each one of these dynamos has many hundred tons of iron in it. A huge wheel of iron, thirty-two feet in diameter, one hundred feet in circumference, portions of which are surrounded by insulated copper conductors, forms the centre-piece of the machine. This movable part weighs four hundred tons. Around about this is a fixed ring of iron, portions of which are surrounded by insulated copper conductors. Ordinarily the ring which is stationary is called 'the field,' and the wheel, which rotates, is called 'the armature,' although these terms are sometimes reversed for certain reasons. The movable part in these machines rotates about once a second, that is, its circumference moves a little faster than a mile a minute. The iron moving at this high rate of speed creates ether streams or electric currents, which are led off by the copper conductors. The generation of electricity on a large scale requires large masses of iron and high velocity."

I noticed that the boys stood before this machine in a state of utter bewilderment, bewildered as a man who is told that what he had considered north is really south, bewildered as a man who, having wandered through a maze of city streets, looks up at length and unexpectedly finds the building he has been seeking towering before him. The questions they asked were entirely without thought. "What is inside of it?" "Simply more iron and copper, such as you see on the surface," I replied. "But what makes it go?" "The steam engines, of course, four of which you see, are coupled directly to each dynamo." "But where does it get its electricity?" "Don't forget that you are looking at a generator of electricity. Big mass of iron-rapid motion! That is the whole truth. But it cannot satisfy you as an answer until you have become used to it. We have seen all that we ought to see here to-day. Let us drop the whole matter now, but return to my laboratory to-morrow, and I will give you the next step which will help you."

The boys did no talking upon their return journey. Whether one may say they were thinking or not I cannot tell, but certainly their ideas were incubating.

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