Gotta thank Heater for getting me out to the hardware store. I bought a few Type A halogen bulbs (which are in every sense incandescent) to put in places where lights get switched on and off a lot. In a nutshell, they're fantastic! I love the brilliant white light they produce. If they save 28% on electricity, well that's just gravy.
I like them so much I may even replace a few CFLs with halogens - not exactly the spirit of the new law but tough noodles.
I like the halogens too, except that around here (here is currently Norway) there are only low-quality bulbs to be found. They fail quickly, and if you buy a two-pack there's (from my own personal statistics) a 40% chance that only one of the bulbs are working.
Quote by Heater
3) Environmentally I cannot imagine that manufacturing LEDs or CFLs is not a total disaster compared to a simple filament bulb what with all the complex materials and processes required.
That's a great point. I have to find a way to tweet it! Maybe I could list the author as "Technological developer"?.
Wow, this thread is rather humorous. This is one of those threads where you can really see where a person's personality resides, LOL.
As for me, I started changing over to CFLs a number of years ago when that "fad" was a hot topic. I was about half done with my house when I started realizing that the only "burned out" bulbs I was replacing were the CFLs. Plus, I couldn't find any that would work with my automated switches/outlets and the few I tried in my living room ceiling fan produced a horrible color response for most everything in the room. I began switching everything back to incandescent.
Now, I would like to begin switching things over to LED, but I am only willing to do it with high end LED bulbs which means a bigger upfront cost. The aforementioned ceiling fan alone will cost me $55 to populate with LED bulbs. Plus they must be dimmable as most of my lights are on dimmers and I will not change that. As someone else mentioned, my illumination is mine, so it will be done my way (well, at least the end resulting effect will be my way)
As for the various comments on Thomas Edison, I don't think anyone can justify their position if they do not agree that he was one of the most brilliant men in the last few centuries. I am a big fan of his, so of course I woudl disagree with anyone who claims he wasn't unique. If he were alive today, I believe he would have already pushed for better lighting sources, but even more so, upgrades and improvements to the failing and outdated electrical infrastructure that exists in the U.S. Keep in mind that Edison only invented a reliable, longer lasting, and manufacturable light bulb. The filament light bulb concept was nothing new at the time. What most people don't know or forget is the electrical infrastructure that he created at the same time.
A final comment on Edison: If you are getting facts about him from something other than a book published before 1950, you may not be getting the whole story. I have a book/biography written by someone that actually knew him that was published in the early 1900's and it is very well detailed and backed up by information from friends, family, co-workers, etc. Coincidentally, my daughter (2nd Grade) has a project about men in history and Edison was selected for her. A visit to the library yielded 3 potential books for her about Edison. However, 2 of them had completely false statements about things Edison is routinely mistaken for doing or saying, and the third was lather with author's embellishments that degraded the truth. I would guess that this is probably true with many biographies over the years. I know that I have been told several times that "as time goes on, written history changes with the times" meaning that if a part of history can be found to be disagreeable to someone, then that part of history will be re-written and published as "fact".
edit: Oh yeah, as part of my daughter's project about Edison, we will be making an incandescent light bulb tonight using an iron wire filament made from unstranding picture hanging wire and 4 AA batteries. I tried out the project the other night and it works well, but a single strand filament can only last about 2 seconds before burning up. The project outline has her trying different numbers of strands and timing how long they "glow" before burning up.
The two most remarkable facts about Thomas Edison are as follows:
A. He actually thought he may have solved the filament problem when he tried a carbonized bamboo filament that lasted 1200 hours. (Lucky for us that he decided to press onward.)
B. He took all the wealth he earned from the light bulb and created General Electric, and then hired everyone that was a previous competitor if they were willing to work for him.
Frankly, it is not that I am against LED bulbs.
I just feel that lighting is very much a part of ambiance and the regime of forced change over is not going to result in any improvement in my dwelling's lighting ambiance. I have already been forced to accept florescent light for the sake of power conservation. The bulbs don't quite fit in the lamps and they still look odd to me.
Gone are the days when I could have a dimmer switch set the level of intensity of the room lighting. Will LEDs reinstate that device?
.And gone forever are the days when about all one really needed to know to buy a light bulb was its wattage and whether you wanted clear or frosted. Now I just about have to consult a specialist to determine what I have and what I need to replace it. I just dread arriving at a store and being told that such and such lamp is no longer available and I have to replace whole fixtures instead of a mere bulb. I like my old table lamps and light fixtures.
I seem to have hit a nerve there. For sure Edison was a clever chap. He will never be forgiven for Topsy the elephant and the big lie that demonstration was. I suspect he was as underhand in business as Bill Gates.
Bill Gates and Thomas Edison certainly do seem to have similar personality traits.
Both were rather obnoxious precocious children. Edison was partially deaf due to having his ears boxed by a railway condutor for being a brat. Both seem to have been very driven and compulsive in their early days.
I seem to have hit a nerve there. For sure Edison was a clever chap. He will never be forgiven for Topsy the elephant and the big lie that demonstration was. I suspect he was as underhand in business as Bill Gates.
Incandescent, CFL, LED. How quaint. SOOOO late twentieth century. On the other hand, Telsa's device is the Next Big Thing.
WBA Consulting
...failing and outdated electrical infrastructure that exists in the U.S.
I'm sure I missed your point but Nikola Tesla won that contest with AC. Heater, I've stocked incandescent bulbs also. LED traffic lights were tried until they froze in the winter.
LED traffic lights were tried until they froze in the winter.
The LED traffic lights did not freeze, they did not emit enough heat to melt the ice off the housings designed for incandescent bulbs.
So the FIRST try for LED in traffic lights failed due to bad housing hardware. The lights worked fine, but need appropriate housing, which changes the cost when they are no longer "drop-in replacement".
If you're on the fence, not sure you will like LED bulbs, just go to your local Home Depot or what ever and buy one Cree "warm white" 800 lumens (60 watt equivalent) LED bulb and try it out. They use only 9.5 watts and yes, they are dimmable. They do not make good heaters though.
Heater, I must point out that I love LED flashlights. I remember having to go through the crawl space of a large apartment building some years ago. I had a Mag-lite in my mouth and the bulb went out. I had to use my cell phone to find my way out. I've only used LED's since that time.
I seem to have hit a nerve there. For sure Edison was a clever chap. He will never be forgiven for Topsy the elephant and the big lie that demonstration was. I suspect he was as underhand in business as Bill Gates.
LOL, no nerve hit and no offense taken, everyone is entitled to their stance as without it, most communication would be worthless.
As for Topsy, it is a sad twist of fate for the beloved animal turned violent, and when the Zoo and Humane Society asked Edison to handle the electrocution, I would agree that seizing that request as an opportunity to demonstrate his viewpoint was poor judgement. Topsy ended up more famous afterwards and I am sure the event didn't help Edison's stance. The reality though is that it was also a very different world at that time as "electricity" in all forms was a safety concern to the average person. There are examples of propaganda posters portraying both AC and DC as dangerous for Americans regardless of it's benefits. Can't find any examples through Google image search, but they are in the book my daughter is using for her project.
Also, one of the key advantages of AC in the AC versus DC challenge was, in my opinion, the factor that tipped the scales without yield: Cost. At the time, only cost effective methods for transmitting AC current were possible. Irregardless of ones point of view on the old AC/DC battle, one fact is and has always been true: AC current IS more dangerous to humans than DC. BUT, methods were found to economically handle AC current in a manner that quieted enough of the safety concerns to make it acceptable by us "common folks". Thus, as they say, the lesser of the two evils won.
The LED traffic lights did not freeze, they did not emit enough heat to melt the ice off the housings designed for incandescent bulbs.
So the FIRST try for LED in traffic lights failed due to bad housing hardware. The lights worked fine, but need appropriate housing, which changes the cost when they are no longer "drop-in replacement".
Good example and explanation. This is one of my concerns. Many items are designed for incandescent lighting, so they may not function properly with LED lighting. Someone already mentioned the easy bake oven, LOL. Although, the easy bake oven uses the bulb as a heating element, not lighting, so it may be exempt (???) Will I ever know if my LED fridge light goes off when I close the door? Will I care since it draws so little current and lasts so long anyways?
Of course Topsey turned violent. Poor thing was a circus animal who no doubt had a hard time and then ended up in a zoo where there is some suggestion she was mistreated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
...one fact is and has always been true: AC current IS more dangerous to humans than DC....
Do you have a definitive reference for this fact? It seems to be a hotly debated and undecided around the web.
Lardom.
I love LED flash lights too. I have a whole collection of them.
Wow, I cannot believe this has derailed into Edison v. Tesla.
There can be no doubt that Edison was clever and at times visionary. There is also no doubt that he was sleazy, exploitative, and quick to seize credit for anything within reaching distance. His vision also had notable blind spots, such as his utter failure to recognize the usefulness of the Edison Effect (which led to vacuum tubes, which led to modern electronics).
Topsey was the tip of a very large iceberg. During the AC v. DC campaign he had a crew of propagandists criscrossing the country demonstrating the electrocution of animals, trying to get the term "Westinghousing" to stick for electrocution. He campaigned hard to get AC used for the electric chair execution machine for the same reason.
It is also very hard to come away from the AC v. DC campaign without getthing the impression that Edison's objection to AC rose in large part from the fact that the math involved was simply beyond him. Edison was clever but he was a build it and see what breaks kind of guy. Tesla would think of equations (not needing to write them down) for days until he was ready to enter the machine shop, start fabricating without any written plans, and emerge with a machine that would work the first time.
When Edison was done electrocuting animals and humans to maximize his profit Tesla sold his AC patent to Westinghouse for one dollar so that it would be used for the betterment of humanity instead of being neglected because of the royalties that would be owed to himself.
The comparison of Edison to Bill Gates is very apt, except I don't think Gates ever actually literally had anything killed to further the progress of Microsoft. As for Tesla, I don't think the world has seen too many people like him at all. Buckminster Fuller maybe.
Do you have a definitive reference for this fact? It seems to be a hotly debated and undecided around the web.
On the web, perhaps, but in medical texts regarding physiological effects of electrical currents and the human body, it's reasonably undisputed. Unfortunately, there aren't many medical texts on the web. However, this article regarding Electrical Injuries on the Merck Manual site basically has the details that I have learned and use for my basis. One quote:
Low-voltage 60-Hz AC traveling through the chest for a fraction of a second can cause ventricular fibrillation at amperage as low as 60 to 100 mA; for DC, about 300 to 500 mA are required.
High-voltage DC often causes a large single muscle contraction that throws the victim away from the source, resulting in a brief duration of contact with the source flow. In contrast, AC of the same voltage is considered to be approximately 3 times more dangerous than DC, because the cyclic flow of electrons causes muscle tetany that prolongs victims' exposure to the source. Muscle tetanyoccurs when fibers are stimulated at 40-110 Hz; the standard 60 Hz of household current is within that range. If the source contact point is the hand, when tetanic muscle contraction occurs the extremity flexors contract, causing the victim to grasp the current and resulting in prolonged contact with the source.
localroger, We were never told of Topsy in school. What I saw on YouTube was disturbing. To electrocute an animal that entertained people all those years was beyond cruel. Edison thought he could smear the AC crowd with that stunt...
Heater, I didn't mean to hijack your thread but it bothered me since I found that out.
Well, since you asked, I would say the idea of chopping liver has had more impact on human life.
The geodesic dome was just an implementation of Platonic solids that humans have been thinking about for thousands of years.
The tensigrety thing is cool, but that's just an extension of how we built masts on a tall ships a little while ago.
As for the weird impractical car, there were hundreds of people designing al kinds of weird automobiles.
Now a days we have "Buckminsterfullerine" or C60 or "Bucky Balls". But wait, that is exactly the geometry of the football that has been around for ages. In fact the guy who discovered C60 (whose name I can't recall just now) asked his mathematician colleague what shape it was, the reply was "It's a foot ball!".
Lardom.
No props. with thread heigh jacking. It was me that mentioned Topsy in the first place.
Ironically, Edison continues to be shocking to this day.
.. I suspect that If LEDs become the go to light sorce for decades to come . that We may see a DC bus in out house .
I am tesla fan . however edison was right . but for all the wrong reasons ...
He did not have HVDC . and I dont know if he knew about the impeadance issues you have with longgggggggggg AC 3 phase 700kV ish systems ...... DC can use the full wire amp rating . AC can not . And over a long run the cost of a huge SMPS at each end is less then the huge cables needed .....
DC is just harder to handle ... the Gotland HVDC lite is a cool thing to read on .
I would love to see 48V as a DC bus in the home . ..
I'm not going to say Edison was right or wrong about AC vs DC in the long run. Clearly at the time he was wrong.
At the time we did not have the solid state technology to make those SMPS. We also did not anticipate wanting to drive power over such long distances.
So, we needed long thin wires for power distribution. That means high voltage for lower losses and thinner conductors.
We needed lower voltages for safe use in the home, office, factory. That means a conversion. A conversion most easily and efficiently done my simple transformers.
Today we are looking at transmission distances long enough that the wire becomes an antenna and losses are reduced by going high voltage DC. Which we can now do with semiconductor SMPS.
Even now, is there a generator that outputs DC directly?
I'd be very happy with a DC bus in the home. With modern SMPS that can cater for pretty much all TV, computer, lighting, etc tasks.
I'm not going to say Edison was right or wrong about AC vs DC in the long run. Clearly at the time he was wrong.
I will agree to that. I have similar feelings about some of his single-pour concrete building ideas. Wrong at the time due the ability to do it effectively, but many commercial buildings around my work are built using concrete and methods extremely similar to those he played around with or patented.
I would love to see 48V as a DC bus in the home . ..
Yes, I would love to have a 48VDC POE network in my house. A few years ago I sketched out a whole 48V household system that had a bank of batteries, a small scale home solar panel setup, a managed POE hub, POE adapters, and a few other things. I never really did all the math to determine how much I could run from it, but the plans were to use it to power my ADSL modem, both wireless routers, the networked digital TV tuner, and any wall-wart powered items (like cordless phones, phone/camera chargers, etc). After seeing the price tag on an "inexpensive" POE hub that would have been perfect for the setup, I set the idea aside for when I get rich.
Buckminster Fuller? What earth changing thing did he ever come up with?
Tesla had more of an obvious impact, but Fuller has been far more influential than his list of practical accomplishments might imply. He made and lost several fortunes, saw his purpose in life as creating ideas for the betterment of the human condition first and making money second, and he acted on those ideals consistently through a life filled with invention. Sometimes his inventions were wacky but a few were quite profound, and more than a few were very prescient; his house and car may not have caught on, but the innovations he put into him are used all the time today in more conventional-looking ways. For one small example he invented the idea, now very common, of the integrated bath as a factory-assembled module to be treated as a self-contained component in the construction of a building.
Tesla certainly did harder things more of which were directly adopted for use in his time. But I see them as similar men acting in a similar arc.
Sounds like I'm having a real downer on Buckminster Fuller. I don' mean it that way. He was inspirational in many ways.
Years ago an artist friend of mine was enthralled by BM, as I said above, he made a series of tensigrity constructions that got ever bigger and more complex. I wish I had a picture to share they were very impressive.
Somewhere in Spain there is a roundabout with a giant tensigrity construction in the middle of it made out of what looks like telegraph poles and steel cables. I nearly crashed the car there, it was such a fascinating thing.
Sorry to take this thread back to light bulbs......
Two days ago, I purchased a 60w equivalent CREE LED light. Very well made, nice rubber coating on the bulb (kind of strange to get used to). It replaced an incandescent bulb in my basement stairwell. So far, it's performing well but it's $12 in the red on its cost model compared to the incandescent.
I noticed there are dimmable LED bulbs (cool!) but I didn't see any 3-way LED replacements. We have a large number of table and floor lamps that have 3-way bulbs (nice to be able to up the lumens when you want to read or work under the light. Are there such things as 3-way LED replacement bulbs? Have all my lamps (and lighting behaviors) just been invalidated by technology?
I plan on purchasing more LED lights but currently, the several thousand dollars for a whole house replacement program is a bit daunting.
The kitchen alone would take about $250 in flood lights.
Comments
I like them so much I may even replace a few CFLs with halogens - not exactly the spirit of the new law but tough noodles.
-Tor
As for me, I started changing over to CFLs a number of years ago when that "fad" was a hot topic. I was about half done with my house when I started realizing that the only "burned out" bulbs I was replacing were the CFLs. Plus, I couldn't find any that would work with my automated switches/outlets and the few I tried in my living room ceiling fan produced a horrible color response for most everything in the room. I began switching everything back to incandescent.
Now, I would like to begin switching things over to LED, but I am only willing to do it with high end LED bulbs which means a bigger upfront cost. The aforementioned ceiling fan alone will cost me $55 to populate with LED bulbs. Plus they must be dimmable as most of my lights are on dimmers and I will not change that. As someone else mentioned, my illumination is mine, so it will be done my way (well, at least the end resulting effect will be my way)
As for the various comments on Thomas Edison, I don't think anyone can justify their position if they do not agree that he was one of the most brilliant men in the last few centuries. I am a big fan of his, so of course I woudl disagree with anyone who claims he wasn't unique. If he were alive today, I believe he would have already pushed for better lighting sources, but even more so, upgrades and improvements to the failing and outdated electrical infrastructure that exists in the U.S. Keep in mind that Edison only invented a reliable, longer lasting, and manufacturable light bulb. The filament light bulb concept was nothing new at the time. What most people don't know or forget is the electrical infrastructure that he created at the same time.
A final comment on Edison: If you are getting facts about him from something other than a book published before 1950, you may not be getting the whole story. I have a book/biography written by someone that actually knew him that was published in the early 1900's and it is very well detailed and backed up by information from friends, family, co-workers, etc. Coincidentally, my daughter (2nd Grade) has a project about men in history and Edison was selected for her. A visit to the library yielded 3 potential books for her about Edison. However, 2 of them had completely false statements about things Edison is routinely mistaken for doing or saying, and the third was lather with author's embellishments that degraded the truth. I would guess that this is probably true with many biographies over the years. I know that I have been told several times that "as time goes on, written history changes with the times" meaning that if a part of history can be found to be disagreeable to someone, then that part of history will be re-written and published as "fact".
edit: Oh yeah, as part of my daughter's project about Edison, we will be making an incandescent light bulb tonight using an iron wire filament made from unstranding picture hanging wire and 4 AA batteries. I tried out the project the other night and it works well, but a single strand filament can only last about 2 seconds before burning up. The project outline has her trying different numbers of strands and timing how long they "glow" before burning up.
A. He actually thought he may have solved the filament problem when he tried a carbonized bamboo filament that lasted 1200 hours. (Lucky for us that he decided to press onward.)
B. He took all the wealth he earned from the light bulb and created General Electric, and then hired everyone that was a previous competitor if they were willing to work for him.
Frankly, it is not that I am against LED bulbs.
I just feel that lighting is very much a part of ambiance and the regime of forced change over is not going to result in any improvement in my dwelling's lighting ambiance. I have already been forced to accept florescent light for the sake of power conservation. The bulbs don't quite fit in the lamps and they still look odd to me.
Gone are the days when I could have a dimmer switch set the level of intensity of the room lighting. Will LEDs reinstate that device?
.And gone forever are the days when about all one really needed to know to buy a light bulb was its wattage and whether you wanted clear or frosted. Now I just about have to consult a specialist to determine what I have and what I need to replace it. I just dread arriving at a store and being told that such and such lamp is no longer available and I have to replace whole fixtures instead of a mere bulb. I like my old table lamps and light fixtures.
Both were rather obnoxious precocious children. Edison was partially deaf due to having his ears boxed by a railway condutor for being a brat. Both seem to have been very driven and compulsive in their early days.
Incandescent, CFL, LED. How quaint. SOOOO late twentieth century. On the other hand, Telsa's device is the Next Big Thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_lamp
Heater, I've stocked incandescent bulbs also. LED traffic lights were tried until they froze in the winter.
The LED traffic lights did not freeze, they did not emit enough heat to melt the ice off the housings designed for incandescent bulbs.
So the FIRST try for LED in traffic lights failed due to bad housing hardware. The lights worked fine, but need appropriate housing, which changes the cost when they are no longer "drop-in replacement".
Yep, LED traffic lights don't melt the snow and ice off so much.
Still they are in use in places like Stockholm and Helsinki which can see a lot of snow and ice.
Mostly an upgrade to LED lamps involves a change of the whole signal head anyway. So it has proper protection.
Not sure about further north so much now a days.
LOL, no nerve hit and no offense taken, everyone is entitled to their stance as without it, most communication would be worthless.
As for Topsy, it is a sad twist of fate for the beloved animal turned violent, and when the Zoo and Humane Society asked Edison to handle the electrocution, I would agree that seizing that request as an opportunity to demonstrate his viewpoint was poor judgement. Topsy ended up more famous afterwards and I am sure the event didn't help Edison's stance. The reality though is that it was also a very different world at that time as "electricity" in all forms was a safety concern to the average person. There are examples of propaganda posters portraying both AC and DC as dangerous for Americans regardless of it's benefits. Can't find any examples through Google image search, but they are in the book my daughter is using for her project.
Also, one of the key advantages of AC in the AC versus DC challenge was, in my opinion, the factor that tipped the scales without yield: Cost. At the time, only cost effective methods for transmitting AC current were possible. Irregardless of ones point of view on the old AC/DC battle, one fact is and has always been true: AC current IS more dangerous to humans than DC. BUT, methods were found to economically handle AC current in a manner that quieted enough of the safety concerns to make it acceptable by us "common folks". Thus, as they say, the lesser of the two evils won.
Good example and explanation. This is one of my concerns. Many items are designed for incandescent lighting, so they may not function properly with LED lighting. Someone already mentioned the easy bake oven, LOL. Although, the easy bake oven uses the bulb as a heating element, not lighting, so it may be exempt (???) Will I ever know if my LED fridge light goes off when I close the door? Will I care since it draws so little current and lasts so long anyways?
Of course Topsey turned violent. Poor thing was a circus animal who no doubt had a hard time and then ended up in a zoo where there is some suggestion she was mistreated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant) Do you have a definitive reference for this fact? It seems to be a hotly debated and undecided around the web.
Lardom.
I love LED flash lights too. I have a whole collection of them.
There can be no doubt that Edison was clever and at times visionary. There is also no doubt that he was sleazy, exploitative, and quick to seize credit for anything within reaching distance. His vision also had notable blind spots, such as his utter failure to recognize the usefulness of the Edison Effect (which led to vacuum tubes, which led to modern electronics).
Topsey was the tip of a very large iceberg. During the AC v. DC campaign he had a crew of propagandists criscrossing the country demonstrating the electrocution of animals, trying to get the term "Westinghousing" to stick for electrocution. He campaigned hard to get AC used for the electric chair execution machine for the same reason.
It is also very hard to come away from the AC v. DC campaign without getthing the impression that Edison's objection to AC rose in large part from the fact that the math involved was simply beyond him. Edison was clever but he was a build it and see what breaks kind of guy. Tesla would think of equations (not needing to write them down) for days until he was ready to enter the machine shop, start fabricating without any written plans, and emerge with a machine that would work the first time.
When Edison was done electrocuting animals and humans to maximize his profit Tesla sold his AC patent to Westinghouse for one dollar so that it would be used for the betterment of humanity instead of being neglected because of the royalties that would be owed to himself.
The comparison of Edison to Bill Gates is very apt, except I don't think Gates ever actually literally had anything killed to further the progress of Microsoft. As for Tesla, I don't think the world has seen too many people like him at all. Buckminster Fuller maybe.
What earth changing thing did he ever come up with?
I had never heard of him until I was nearly 30 when I met an art student who was enthralled with him.
All I can recall is that he came up with the geodesic dome.tensegrity, and some weird impractical car.
Not in the same league as a Tesla.
On the web, perhaps, but in medical texts regarding physiological effects of electrical currents and the human body, it's reasonably undisputed. Unfortunately, there aren't many medical texts on the web. However, this article regarding Electrical Injuries on the Merck Manual site basically has the details that I have learned and use for my basis. One quote:
EDIT: This half disappeared when I posted.......
Another article I found has this:
So what are those? Chopped liver?
We can't electrocute an elephant with them, but they still look pretty cool in the yard
Heater, I didn't mean to hijack your thread but it bothered me since I found that out.
The geodesic dome was just an implementation of Platonic solids that humans have been thinking about for thousands of years.
The tensigrety thing is cool, but that's just an extension of how we built masts on a tall ships a little while ago.
As for the weird impractical car, there were hundreds of people designing al kinds of weird automobiles.
Now a days we have "Buckminsterfullerine" or C60 or "Bucky Balls". But wait, that is exactly the geometry of the football that has been around for ages. In fact the guy who discovered C60 (whose name I can't recall just now) asked his mathematician colleague what shape it was, the reply was "It's a foot ball!".
Lardom.
No props. with thread heigh jacking. It was me that mentioned Topsy in the first place.
Ironically, Edison continues to be shocking to this day.
I am tesla fan . however edison was right . but for all the wrong reasons ...
He did not have HVDC . and I dont know if he knew about the impeadance issues you have with longgggggggggg AC 3 phase 700kV ish systems ...... DC can use the full wire amp rating . AC can not . And over a long run the cost of a huge SMPS at each end is less then the huge cables needed .....
DC is just harder to handle ... the Gotland HVDC lite is a cool thing to read on .
I would love to see 48V as a DC bus in the home . ..
At the time we did not have the solid state technology to make those SMPS. We also did not anticipate wanting to drive power over such long distances.
So, we needed long thin wires for power distribution. That means high voltage for lower losses and thinner conductors.
We needed lower voltages for safe use in the home, office, factory. That means a conversion. A conversion most easily and efficiently done my simple transformers.
Today we are looking at transmission distances long enough that the wire becomes an antenna and losses are reduced by going high voltage DC. Which we can now do with semiconductor SMPS.
Even now, is there a generator that outputs DC directly?
I'd be very happy with a DC bus in the home. With modern SMPS that can cater for pretty much all TV, computer, lighting, etc tasks.
I will agree to that. I have similar feelings about some of his single-pour concrete building ideas. Wrong at the time due the ability to do it effectively, but many commercial buildings around my work are built using concrete and methods extremely similar to those he played around with or patented.
Yes, I would love to have a 48VDC POE network in my house. A few years ago I sketched out a whole 48V household system that had a bank of batteries, a small scale home solar panel setup, a managed POE hub, POE adapters, and a few other things. I never really did all the math to determine how much I could run from it, but the plans were to use it to power my ADSL modem, both wireless routers, the networked digital TV tuner, and any wall-wart powered items (like cordless phones, phone/camera chargers, etc). After seeing the price tag on an "inexpensive" POE hub that would have been perfect for the setup, I set the idea aside for when I get rich.
Tesla had more of an obvious impact, but Fuller has been far more influential than his list of practical accomplishments might imply. He made and lost several fortunes, saw his purpose in life as creating ideas for the betterment of the human condition first and making money second, and he acted on those ideals consistently through a life filled with invention. Sometimes his inventions were wacky but a few were quite profound, and more than a few were very prescient; his house and car may not have caught on, but the innovations he put into him are used all the time today in more conventional-looking ways. For one small example he invented the idea, now very common, of the integrated bath as a factory-assembled module to be treated as a self-contained component in the construction of a building.
Tesla certainly did harder things more of which were directly adopted for use in his time. But I see them as similar men acting in a similar arc.
Years ago an artist friend of mine was enthralled by BM, as I said above, he made a series of tensigrity constructions that got ever bigger and more complex. I wish I had a picture to share they were very impressive.
Somewhere in Spain there is a roundabout with a giant tensigrity construction in the middle of it made out of what looks like telegraph poles and steel cables. I nearly crashed the car there, it was such a fascinating thing.
Two days ago, I purchased a 60w equivalent CREE LED light. Very well made, nice rubber coating on the bulb (kind of strange to get used to). It replaced an incandescent bulb in my basement stairwell. So far, it's performing well but it's $12 in the red on its cost model compared to the incandescent.
I noticed there are dimmable LED bulbs (cool!) but I didn't see any 3-way LED replacements. We have a large number of table and floor lamps that have 3-way bulbs (nice to be able to up the lumens when you want to read or work under the light. Are there such things as 3-way LED replacement bulbs? Have all my lamps (and lighting behaviors) just been invalidated by technology?
I plan on purchasing more LED lights but currently, the several thousand dollars for a whole house replacement program is a bit daunting.
The kitchen alone would take about $250 in flood lights.