IN PRAISE OF ELECTRIC POWER

By OLIVENE GODFREY

With frigid weather conditions and health problems on weekends
I have been confined to house past three weeks. We almost had ice storms several times past few weeks and that set me on a chain of thoughts about the importance of electric power and of how we often take this marvelous invention for granted.

Electric Power is a relatively new invention, especially for the American South. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a New Deal agency created to generate electric power and control floods
in a seven-U.S.state region around the Tennessee River Valley.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act creating the TVA on May 18, 1933. The agency still exists and has grown to become America's largest public power company.

I grew up in Chattanooga and as far back as I can remember we had electric power in our house. Not so, for some of our Middle
Tennessee relatives. who didn't have electric power in their homes until after World War II. My paternal grandparents
owned and lived on a farm in Middle Tennessee and when I was a child they had electric lights but the only appliance they had was a radio.

I asked son Barry to do some research on the Internet about electric power and it is a fascinating story. Here are some of the high lights from the info he gathered for me.

In the "War of Currents" era in the late 1880s, Nikola Tesla
and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC)for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current (AC) advocated by Tesla.
During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison's
direct current was the standard for the United States and Edison
was not disposed to lose all his patent royalties. From his work with rotary magnetic fields, Tesla devised a system for generation, transmission, and use of AC power. Westinghouse
had previously bought the rights to commercialize this system.
Ultimately, the advantages of AC power transmission outweighed
the theoretical risk, and it was eventually adopted as the standard.

And then experts announced proposals to harness the Niagara Falls for generating electricity, even briefly considering compressed air as a power transmission medium. Tesla's AC
system won the international Niagara Commission contract
Work began in 1893 on the Niagara Falls generation project and Tesla's technology was applied to generate electric power
from the falls. On November 16, 1896, the first electrical power was sent from Niagara Falls to industries in Buffalo
from the hydroelectric generators at the Edward Dean
Adams Station. The hydroelectric generators were built
by Westinghouse Electric Corp. using Tesla's AC system patent. The nameplates on the generators bear Tesla's name. He also
set the 60 hertz standard for North America. It took
five years to complete the whole facility.

See you next time.