The History of Electrical Power Systems

Electrical power systems are what we use to create the electrical current and deliver it to our homes so that we can use it to operate our appliances and lights. These elaborate networks of lines, and generators, and breakers, and all of the other components stretch across every country connecting all of the people to a source of power. All of this came from a humble little beginning in England in the late 1800s.

The beginning of the electrical power systems we know today all started in 1881 when a couple of electricians in England decided that they would use the power of water to generate a current of power that could be used to light things like lamps. So they began to work building the first of these stations. The two men built their station and it operated several lamps from the power that was generated by the two waterwheels. Their supply was not really constant but they were on the right track.

Edison and Electrical Power Systems

The next year in 1882, electrical power systems would begin in earnest with the creation of the Edison Electric Light Company that was developed by Thomas Edison. The Edison Electric Light Company was located on Pearl Street in New York City and it was the very first of these types of stations that was powered by another form of water. The Pearl Street station was the first seam powered electricity station.

When the Pearl Street station began it was providing electricity enough to operate 3,000 lamps for a total of fifty nine customers. They were producing a direct current at one single voltage at this time. When all of this began the direct current could not be turned into the higher voltages that would be necessary to lessen the amount that would be lost if it was transmitted for a long distance. Because of this, the generator creating the electricity could not be located any further than a half mile from the houses it was supplying.

Transformers and Electrical Power Systems

It was the transformer that was designed by Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs that created the real beginning to the electrical power systems we are familiar with today. Their transformer was used to light twenty five miles of railway from one alternating current generator in 1884. This demonstration took place in Turin but the newest invention to this type of lighting had some flaws to it.

The transformer was used to light up the lamps for a distance of twenty five miles but the more distance that the lamp was from the generator source, the dimmer the light it emitted was. This is because Gaulard and Gibbs did not connect the primaries of the different transformers in a series that would allow the lamps on the end to receive the same amount of power as the lamps on the beginning phase.

By 1886 the company Westinghouse had established the system located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The success of Westinghouse could largely be because they had someone that figured out that by connecting the transformers in a certain way the lamp on the end of the line could receive the same amount of voltage as the first one did. By 1890 these networks were starting to be everywhere providing people with the ease of electric lighting.