The bane of DC Power
Bret L
for houses pretty well petered out (at least in the US) around WW1 but
it lingered into apartment buildings and other urban highrises in
certain areas in the Northeast, in Chicago and perhaps Cleveland and
Detroit (not sure about those two) until after WWII. JFK and MM were
dead and buried (or put in the granite filing cabinet) and Vietnam
raged like the fires of peritonitis when the last sizable numbers of
residential DC lines were changed over and a few stragglers in
Manhattan south of Central Park had it into the Disco Era.
At first one might think DC in the house would be neat. You could
build a tube radio with no rectifier tube, and indeed a very few were
built for 110 DC Only saving the rectifier tube. (They were also used
for boats with 110 VDC systems.) But indeed it was a curse, like
women's periods except it was all the time and not just once a month.
You couldn't have a transformer, obviously. Dynamotors worked, but at
spectacular inefficiency and expense and noise.
Noise was a big issue not only from DC motors, dynamotors and
vibrator inverters, but also from every switch in the building. Boy
they popped with a big arc. In a large residential building listening
to the radio was a constant irritant from the switch buzzing.
Why were these buildings DC? Two reasons, one being that many of them
were in the vanguard of technology when they were built, at a time
when many houses had no electricity. DC was used and Edison was the
supplier for many of them, any big building had a steam plant for heat
and an electric plant for lighting, and they were often interrelated.
Steam drove the generator. Later, when there was a utility, making
your own juice was cheaper for the building landlords, or buying it
off the nearby rail or trolleybus system.
The history of this is most fascinating and I have not found any
really comprehensive historical treatment of DC and low cycle power to
consumers in the US. If anyone knows of a good one please feel free to
cite it.