
Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz - curtis
http://gizmodo.com/before-1948-las-power-grid-was-incompatible-with-the-r-1683629042
======
Animats
Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything -
60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz
NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power,
and some old Edison 100VDC power. There was a huge basement area full of
rotary converters to interconvert all this. Various ancient machinery and
lighting ran on different power sources.

In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad
traction power was converted to 60Hz. All conversion equipment was replaced
with solid state gear. It took quite a while just to find everything that was
powered off one of the nonstandard systems.

It wasn't until 2005 that the last 25Hz rotary converter was retired from the
NYC subway system. (Third rail power is 600VDC, but subway power distribution
was 13KV 25Hz 3-phase.)

~~~
bogomipz
>"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything -
60Hz commercial power,..."

Do you mean 50Hz there?

~~~
bogomipz
I really don't understand the downvotes, this was a sincere question. Please
note, the OP states:

>"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything -
60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz
NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power,
and some old Edison 100VDC power."

and then subsequently states:

."In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad
traction power was converted to 60Hz."

I am asking because I am trying to make sense of the entire comment. They also
mention 4 or 5 other electrical frequencies and voltages, so there's a lot
packed into that comment. I am genuinely interested in the comment and trying
to learn something.

~~~
Gracana
I don't think 50Hz was ever used in the US. What are you curious about?

They probably had some old 60Hz three phase supply, maybe something weird like
a "wild leg" configuration, but when everything was modernized they likely
switched to 480V three phase for the big stuff like the ventilation motors,
and 240V single phase with neutral for supplying smaller motors and 120V
systems.

~~~
function_seven
> _I don 't think 50Hz was ever used in the US_

I think Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz :)

~~~
Gracana
Haha, geez... That's what I get for picking my phone up to the comments hours
later. Embarrassing.

------
lb1lf
Incidentally, Japan faces this very issue to this day; part of the country run
on 50Hz, the rest on 60Hz.

This made matters trickier after Fukushima, as the nation is effectively two
smaller electricity grids, not one large one - so making up for the shortfall
became harder than it could have been. (However, there's a massive frequency
converter interface between the two grids.)

Edit: Aw, shucks - now that I revisit the article, I see the exact same points
being made in that article's comment section. My bad.

~~~
unsignedint
Yes, a lot of older appliances actually had a little toggle switch to change
between these.

The problem still exists but many of newer machines have its own inverters so
it's less of the issues...

~~~
lb1lf
-It is not much of an issue on a micro scale - biggest issue today is probably direct-drive electrical motors, which will run too fast (if 50Hz on a 60Hz grid) or too slow (vice versa).

Also, running a 60Hz motor on a 50Hz grid will cause it to run hotter (larger
current than nominally on 60Hz; also, less efficient cooling as it turns
slower). If the designer designed to a price point rather than to a standard,
this may be an issue.

On the macro scale, however, you've got a problem if, say, you suddenly lose a
power plant in the 50Hz region of your country. You cannot then simply make up
for the shortfall by distributing the load between all plants in the country
(or, unless you're an island nation like Japan - from your neighbours, too) -
only the ones in the 50Hz part of it.

This is just a long-winded way of saying that the larger your power grid, the
more robust it is when a power plant goes offline.

The Japanese are in the unenviable position of having two small national grids
rather than one large one - and, for an encore, they're on a bunch of islands
and likely unable to import significant power from neighbours, too!

Hence any plant downtime is felt much harder than it would any other place.
Tough luck.

------
shagie
For some other fun with California's 60hz legacy...

The timezone database (maintained by the people who are very particular about
making sure that a time specified is a well known time) have a note in the
northamerica data file:

[https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo-
data/blob/master/data/north...](https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo-
data/blob/master/data/northamerica#L449)

# From Paul Eggert (2016-08-20):

# In early February 1948, in response to California's electricity shortage,

# PG&E changed power frequency from 60 to 59.5 Hz during daylight hours,

# causing electric clocks to lose six minutes per day. (This did not change

# legal time, and is not part of the data here.) See:

# Ross SA. An energy crisis from the past: Northern California in 1948.

# Working Paper No. 8, Institute of Governmental Studiåes, UC Berkeley,

# 1973-11.
[http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x22k30c](http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x22k30c)

~~~
macintux
Just when you think there might be a finite number of time/calendar
pitfalls...

~~~
aptwebapps
It's a finite number, but it's always at least one bigger than you think it
is.

~~~
Intermernet
That's pretty much how you prove the infinitude of primes :-)

------
ryandrake
My mind always boggles at humanity's general inability to standardize on one
thing without great pain and fighting. Whether it's Metric vs. Imperial, Beta
vs. VHS, Blu-ray vs. HDDVD, OpenGL vs. DirectX, USB speeds, power connectors,
instant messaging protocols. Nobody can just sit together and cooperate--we
always have to go through that painful period with multiple incompatible
standards that fight it out until (hopefully) one of them wins.

~~~
hugi
I'm actually rather impressed with humanity's ability to standardize. It's
perfectly natural (and in many cases desirable) for multiple parties to go
through that "painful period" with different solutions that will compete to
become "standard". It just takes a little time for everything to align and
settle, that's perfectly natural.

As for the U.S. refusing to adopt the planet-wide metric system? You've got me
there. That's just… Weird.

~~~
zanny
It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an
opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of
translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push
metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate
the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government
operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public
today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his
replacement immediately halts proceedings.

Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can
finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the
world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to
want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let
businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.

~~~
sweettea
Imperial units are better, and I expect the world will convert to them in the
next century. They're sane and easily divisible into eighths and more with a
single significant digit of the next smaller unit, while going from 1 kilo to
125 grams is a awkward increase in digits. They're human scale: a pound is
generally about a big handful, while a gram is hardly an easily estimated
quantity for humans and a kilogram is awkwardly big to hold in one's hand. A
cup and a pint are useful amounts of water to drink, while a liter is a bit
more than a useful quantity to measure such things by. An inch is a knuckle on
my finger, and a foot is the length of my forearm, while a meter is difficult
to measure without a reference and a centimeter is a useful unit but I don't
have an inbuilt measuring unit that long. I could go on, but I think this is a
sufficient set of examples: metric is difficult to use for casual estimation
(which is, after all, what one does most of the time, imperial is designed to
be on a human scale and is better for everyday use and estimation.

Edit: Not sarcasm. I work with imperial daily farming, and worked with metric
doing chemistry in college.

~~~
carussell
> a foot is the length of my forearm

Or the length of one's foot, even.

You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as
feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face.
Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters,
though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up
throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".

Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs
m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the
decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but
smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of
one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human
scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot
more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a
great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and
centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that
anybody can do it in their head.

The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out
to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure
unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its
name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with
fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with
one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of
"conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in
conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify
which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of
precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same
ballpark as one another.

Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly
straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft"
equals "about 3 hands".

People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of
the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because
it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever
would.

~~~
lb1lf
>> a foot is the length of my forearm

>Or the length of one's foot, even.

-If you're using size 14 (US; male), 15,5 (US; female), 48 (Europe), 12,5 (Mexico)...

The good thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.

~~~
jerrysievert
or, if you're in the US, size 14, 15.5, 48, or 12.5.

thus underscoring your point: we can't even agree on how to represent numbers,
let alone measurements!

------
plorg
It took a long time to standardize and integrate the US power grid (which even
today is basically 3 loosely-connected systems). Some parts held out longer
than others.

My brother recently visited a hydro dam in northern Minnesota that had one
turbine operating at 25hz even as recently as the 90s, serving at least one
industrial customer still running equipment that predated the interconnected
60hz grid.

~~~
lostlogin
You prompted me to look up how power stations are synchronised. This rabbit
hole leads to The War of Currents. It's worth a read.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents)

~~~
jakobegger
It‘s amazing how much opposition there apparently was against AC current – a
technology that noone is afraid of today.

~~~
Gibbon1
The open question for me is why did Edison even bother with DC at all? A DC
generator requires a commutator. If there is anything that screams dodgy, that
would be it.

Sliding friction. high current contacts. 60 times a second? Seriously?

~~~
xxpor
Do incandescent bulbs last longer with DC, since they're not switching on and
off 60 times a second?

~~~
cr0sh
There used to exist these "buttons" (for lack of a better term) that you could
place at the bottom of a lamp socket to make your bulbs last longer. They were
actually a diode shaped like a disc (more or less), that ultimately halved the
amount of voltage going to the lamp (while also acting as a half-wave
rectifier to form a noisy DC current). So in such an application - yeah,
running a lamp at half its rated voltage would lengthen the life of the lamp
(while reducing its brightness of course).

There was once the argument that DC would cause the lamp filament to vibrate
like AC would (in the presence of the Earth's magnetic field?) - and thus if
you ran your lamp on DC it would last longer due to not being mechanically
stressed (I think this was one of the pitches behind those buttons, too).

I think it was later found that the argument had little validity, and was more
a marketing pitch. That said, a lamp does experience a moment where, when the
current (AC or DC) is switched on, the filament does "flex" \- partially from
magnetism, partially from thermal loading as it heats up. This flex, over
time, does produce a mechanical stress on the filament. It's a major reason
why incandescent lamps typically burn out when you turn them on.

------
seandougall
Fascinating -- I'd always heard that 24 fps developed as a US film standard
compared to 25 fps in Europe because of the difference in AC power frequency
(24 and 60 being a pretty straightforward integer ratio). And yet, during this
time, LA became firmly entrenched as the center of the American film industry
while producing 24 fps films. I wonder how that squares -- was this something
people had to deal with, or does this article possibly overstate how
widespread 50 Hz power was?

~~~
aninhumer
The power frequency isn't that relevant for film, since it just powers motors
on the cameras and projectors (or often just hand cranked). In fact, prior to
the introduction of sound in films, the exact playback speed wasn't as
important, and cinemas often varied.

Where it becomes relevant is for television, and in both cases the refresh
rate matches the mains frequency. PAL is 50Hz interlaced, and NTSC is 60Hz
interlaced.

~~~
acchow
I had to read further to understand why Cathode Ray Tube televisions were tied
to mains frequency - it's due to an effort to reduce artefacting

[https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/164252](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/164252)

------
janvdberg
This 99% invisible episode also talks about this (third segment):
[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-should-do-a-
story/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-should-do-a-story/)

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah the timing seems not coincidental.

------
kens
The story of why parts of the US used 25 Hertz power instead of the standard
60 Hertz is interesting. Hydroelectric power was developed at Niagara Falls
starting in 1886. To transmit power to Buffalo, Edison advocated DC, while
Westinghouse pushed for polyphase AC. The plan in 1891 was to use DC for local
distribution and (incredibly) compressed air to transmit power 20 miles to
Buffalo, NY. By 1893, the power company decided to use AC, but used 25 Hertz
due to the mechanical design of the turbines and various compromises.

In 1919, more than two thirds of power generation in New York was 25 Hertz and
it wasn't until as late as 1952 that Buffalo used more 60 Hertz power than 25
Hertz power. The last 25 Hertz generator at Niagara Falls was shut down in
2006.

Details:
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4412948](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4412948)

------
wolfgang42
I had a Waring Blendor [sic], cat. no. 700A, with the widest range I've ever
seen: "115 Volts, 6 Amps, 25 to 60 cycle A. C. - D. C." I haven't been able to
pin down an exact date on this model, but it seems to date from the 1940s or
so, when the U. S. power grid still hadn't completely settled on a standard.
I've read that portions of Boston still had 110 volts DC in residential areas
up through the 1960s, though I've been unable to find much detail about this.

~~~
MertsA
That's because it's quite common for simple appliances to use a universal
motor.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor)

It basically doesn't make a difference what polarity you feed it, if it's
positive going into the rotor then it's positive going into the stator as
well. When the rotor changes polarity, so does the stator.

------
Aloha
Growing up in Southern California, I remember always finding old clocks with
conversion stickers on them - I've been looking for a good source on the
technical details to find out what they needed to do to accomplish the
changeover. I'm not willing to pay 35 bucks to read the IEEE article however.

~~~
baobrien
IEEE articles can be 'obtained' on Sci-Hub.

~~~
Aloha
Thank You!!

------
mysterypie
> _customers could bring their old 50hz appliances for free adjustments and
> exchanges, [including] 380,000 lighting fixtures_

Surely ordinary light bulbs don't care about the frequency. Do they mean the
electronics for fluorescent lamps? Were those common in the 1940s?

~~~
MBCook
The most recent episode of the podcast 99% invisible talked about this.
Basically anything with a motor needed to be replaced or somehow changed so
the motor would run at the right speed.

If you didn't, your electric clocks would run 12 minutes fast every hour (for
example).

------
gumby
There are other, smaller countries that have mixed frequencies.

PG&E (California' primary gas and electric utility) still has DC tariffs,
thought I believe they provision it by installing a converter at the pint of
use. I believe this is just for elevators.

Parts of Back Bay in Boston were still wired for 100V DC mains voltage into
the 1960s

------
agumonkey
Similarly the history of voltage levels:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#History_of_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#History_of_voltage_and_frequency)

~~~
camtarn
The vibrating reed frequency meter which is the lead image in your link is
super cool - never thought about a meter using tuned resonators to measure
frequency instead of a discrete time-based counter.

~~~
Taniwha
higher freq reeds were also used to switch on/off street lights and household
low-tariff water heating here in NZ - hearing the switching tones coming
through the stereo was part of my childhood.

A local ham friend build a high power tone generator back in the 70's ... sent
slow morse across town in the early hours one night by turning on/off all the
streetlights in his neighbourhood

------
dixie_land
don’t this become a moot point in retrospect?

with the global trade electronics are simply made to work anywhere 100~240V
50/60Hz so the manufactures don’t have to make several different models. (They
obviously still ship with different plugs but the actual converters work with
almost any input)

------
stevefan1999
whats the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz besides the timer shift mentioned
in the article?

