Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [49]
In the early 1880s the French inventor Lucien Gaulard applied the principle of induction to the problem of transmitting electrical energy. He would transmit alternating current cheaply at high voltages, then use induction coils to reduce the voltage to levels safe for use in homes and offices. Used in this way, the induction coils became known as converters or transformers. Together with his British business partner John Gibbs, Gaulard designed transformers for use in the long-distance transmission of alternating current. In 1884 they transmitted along a fifty-mile circuit between Lanzo and Turin, Italy.
Gaulard and Gibbs displayed their system at the 1885 London Inventions Exhibition, where it came to the attention of George Westinghouse, who purchased on option on the patent. He also ordered several Gaulard-Gibbs transformers and an alternating-current generator made by Werner Siemens, the German pioneer in electric lighting.27
The engineers on Westinghouse's staff opposed these moves. Like most experts, they believed alternating current could never compete with direct because transformers wasted too much energy. An editorial in a leading electrical journal explained that the best minds in electrical science had tested and abandoned alternating current, and that these men would never "have allowed this subject to dwindle away to mere nothingness had there been a chance of bringing the matter to a successful issue."28
Westinghouse disagreed, and his enthusiasm for alternating current was shared by William Stanley. Starting early in 1886, Stanley redesigned the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer and tested it in a new system. He installed an alternating generator and transformer in an old mill in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, strung a mile of thin copper wire into the center of town, installed another transformer in the basement of a store, and ran wire from that basement to lamps in a hotel and several stores. Stanley used the first transformer to step up a generator's voltage from 500 to 3,000 volts, transmitted the current to the center of town, then used the other transformer to step it back down to 500 volts.29
"All the converters are under lock and key, so that no one knows anything about them," Stanley wrote to Westinghouse after a successful test in March. "I might say a great deal about the system, but briefly, it is all right."30
Despite the continued objections of his other engineers, Westinghouse moved ahead with alternating current. He developed a system that transmitted current at 1,000 or 2,000 volts, then stepped it down to 50 volts for distribution within homes and offices. After further refinement of the system in Pittsburgh, Westinghouse Electric installed its first commercial alternating-current plant in November 1886 in Buffalo, New York, where, at the same time in the same city, Alfred Southwick was in the midst of his research on killing with electricity. Orders for twenty-five more plants arrived within a few months, and Westinghouse Electric moved into bigger quarters in Pittsburgh to handle the business.31
THE TRANSFORMER ALLOWED high-voltage transmission of alternating current over long distances and low-voltage distribution near the point of consumption. Since Edison's low-voltage system required such thick copper conductors, he had to build several different direct-current generating plants to serve an area of a few square