Re: AC ver. DC Motors
Coulter, I should have been more specific. This is what i mean: Taken from "War Of the Currents" Direct current flows in a uniform direction, staying within the limits of one polarity, and alternating current flows between the two poles, positive and negative, and it does this at a specific frequency, usually sixty times a second in a sinusoidal pattern. Thomas Alva Edison had been the manufacturer up until that point in history of the system that carried the current to the households of America.
Direct current was not practical for traveling long distances to houses, and required transformers to boost the signal several times along the path from the generating plant to a person's house or to a building because of the resistance of the direct signal through the copper wires they used. This required costly and bulky equipment to have to be installed along the path to one's house, and caused electricity to be expensive and therefore rare. Edison was the leader in the production and maintenance of the equipment that his transmission system required; he designed and was responsible for the building of the system.
As I described, Tesla offered the idea of a rotating magnetic to produce AC.
This meant that the voltage could be changed without serious loss of energy, using transformer, which are not costly, and quite small. Now I'll have to mention a little physics:
The loss of energy in the moving of electricity is the thermal energy created in the wires. This energy depends on the resistance of the wires R, which is a constant, and the size of the current I
P= I*I*R <- The units are watts
The station produces constant power. Which means you can't change the value of I*V. But if you enlarge V, using transformers, 'I' is reduced, and thus, the thermal energy lost I*I*R is much, much smaller! And a lot of money is saved! Another transformer is needed to reduce the voltage in the household, so it won't be dangerous. Voila!
The equations have the parentheses omitted.
