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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 12
Publication Date: December 25, 2023
DOI:10.14738/assrj.1012.16015.
Baldwin, I. (2023). The Electrification of the World. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(12). 64-94.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
The Electrification of the World
Ian Baldwin
Publisher Emeritus,
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Craftsbury Common, Vermont, 05827 USA
ABSTRACT
It is unlikely there is a more momentous event in the creation of modern civilization
than the invention of the electric light and its handmaiden, the worldwide grid. The
21st century Green Economy rests firmly on the foundation of the electric grid. Few
know that the dynamo, the electric light – both arc and incandescent – and the
electric grid were invented and launched in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This
essay describes how and why these inventions happened. It is divided into two
parts, each with its separate references, for the sake of clarity, as a great many
important discoveries and technicalities had to be worked out each step of the way.
Part One covers the development of the arc lamp and its “engine,” the dynamo. Part
Two covers the invention of the long-burning carbon-based filament of the
incandescent light bulb, as well as more powerful dynamos to supply power to
thousands and soon millions of these new bulbs, and Edison’s visionary and
pioneering construction of the revolutionary first electric grid. These developments
seeded the construction of the universal worldwide grid in the 1890s and early 20th
century. Their origins and history are integral to understanding the basis of our 21st
century material civilization.
Part One: How Electrification of the World Began: The Dynamo and the Arc
Lamp
INTRODUCTION
It was not until the later 1870s that the transition to cleaner, safer, eventually more reliable,
and less expensive electric lighting could begin. It began with the development of the arc lamp
and the dynamo. Though the sensational novelty of the arc lamp’s use in public spaces was soon
eclipsed by the commercial availability of the less powerful, gentler incandescent bulb in
private residences and businesses, the arc light retained its role in public spaces – streets, parks,
train stations, docks, stadiums, and large emporiums – well into the 20th century. And the
dynamo, the generator of direct current that was far more convenient and powerful than a
cumbersome battery bank, made both the arc lamp and the incandescent bulb possible, and
ushered in the electrical, modern age.
LIGHT, THE ETERNAL INSPIRATION
People relied on tallow candles and whale oil for light well into the 19th century. At the end of
the 18th century, meantime, an enterprising engineer at Matthew Boulton and James Watt’s
steam engine works in Birmingham, England, had developed “a practical system to distill and
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Baldwin, I. (2023). The Electrification of the World. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(12). 64-94.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.1012.16015
distribute coal gas for illumination.” The engineer, William Murdoch, continued to improve his
extraction process in the early 1800s until his coal gas could be pumped from factory storage
tanks into a maze of pipes buried beneath streets and “into home, church, theater, store, and
office ... where it was metered and finally piped to individual burners” [1]. In 1812, the world’s
first gas company was chartered in London. It was followed in 1816 by the first US municipal
gas plant, in Baltimore, and that same year Germany’s first gasworks was established in
Freiburg. In 1820 Paris, known as the City of Lights since the reign of Louis XIV, adopted gas
street lighting, and within a few years the inhabitants of cities worldwide grew accustomed to
their streets, homes, and places of business being lit by gas. Despite the technology’s noxious
odors and flammability hazard, by the 1870s gas lighting had become a large and powerful
industry.
Electric lighting, envisaged by inventors and scientists since the start of the 19th century, had
been stalled for decades for want of a sufficient, dependable power source. In the first decade
of the 19th century, Faraday’s mentor, Sir Humphry Davy, gave a public demonstration of what
he termed “arch” (later, “arc”) light at London’s Royal Institution. Using two opposed charcoal
stalks connected to a wire circuit powered by “a cumbersome array of 220 linked battery cells,
the largest source of electrical power in the world” [2], Davy sent a powerful current into the
stalks of charcoal, making a circuit, and then slowly separated them until a brilliant sparking
“arch” of electricity formed across the gap, creating what Davy himself termed a light of
“dazzling splendor.” Davy’s experiment showed that “electricity could produce high intensity
lighting if the details could be worked out” [3]. The details took another seventy years to work
out.
INVENTING THE DYNAMO
The most important detail was the creation of a reliable, steady source of power to replace
Davy’s massive acid-filled battery array. Within a year of Faraday’s first demonstration of the
principle of a dynamo in late 1831, a French instrument maker named Hippolyte Pixii was
inspired to build the first practical dynamo. Faraday, who coined the term “dynamo,” had
demonstrated that if either a magnet or a wire coil (a solenoid) moves in relation one to the
other, an electric current arises in the wire [4].
Beneath a bar of iron tightly wound with wire, Pixii placed a horseshoe magnet mounted on a
shaft turned by a hand crank. In effect, the stationary wire-wound bar, or bars, was the stator
or stationary magnet in whose magnetic field the rotating magnet’s poles induced a current
whenever they passed beneath (see Fig. 1). But the rotating magnet’s north and south poles
induced pulses of current that travelled in opposite directions (as measured by a
galvanometer). In effect, Pixii’s machine operated as a magneto or primitive alternator,
producing alternating current (AC). Alternating current, however, was a form of electric power
both new and more complicated than the familiar direct current (DC) of the battery, a
technology that had been used experimentally by scientists and inventors ever since Volta
demonstrated it in 1800. To solve the problem of alternating current, Pixii modified his
magneto by inventing a commutator, a switching device he attached to the rotating shaft
beneath the horseshoe rotor. Two spring-loaded contacts or “brushes” touched the
commutator on its opposite sides and acted to reverse the current at each half turn, causing it
to pulse in one direction instead of two, and thus produce unidirectional torque.
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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 12, December-2023
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Within a year other inventors changed Pixii’s stator into the rotor. The rotating permanent
magnet, formerly the rotor, was hereafter stationary, and the wire-wound iron bar, formerly
the stator, became the spinning armature (or rotor) that cut the field force lines, or flux, of the
stationary magnet, and induced a current. The modified Pixii dynamo was not used
commercially until the 1840s, for electroplating. In the late 1850s, simple battery-charged
magnetos were used to light arc lamps in lighthouses in Britain and France, and several
countries in Europe began to make generators capable of powering telegraphs. But the spinning
two-pole axial rotor coil developed by Pixii’s successors still only produced a series of electric
pulses, forming a relatively weak direct current useless for most industrial tasks. In the early
1860s, the Italian physicist Antonio Pacinotti developed the “ring armature,” consisting of
“symmetrically grouped coils” of wire wound around a metal ring. Pacinotti’s armature
enhanced the rotor’s field-cutting efficiency. It was “connected to the bars of a commutator”
and “delivered a practically continuous direct current” [5]. Independently of each other, in 1867
Werner von Siemens and Charles Wheatstone proposed replacing the permanent stator magnet
with a self-powering electromagnet. This strengthened the dynamo’s magnetic flux, and hence
its potential to do work, and created the basis “for the modern technology of electric
generators” [6]. Now, whenever the rotor’s wire coils cut across the stationary electromagnet’s
field lines, they induced a powerful electric current. In 1870 a Paris-based Belgian inventor,
Zénobe Gramme, adopted Pacinotti’s and Siemens’ innovations and enlarged the stationary
electromagnet. He also wrapped the rotating armature with multiple coils and used thick wire
to increase amperage (current). The wire was wound in tight proximity all around the rotor
armature or “ring.” Three factors control a dynamo’s output: the size of its magnetic field, the
total length of the wire cutting its field, and the speed of its rotor’s spin, or cutting motion.
Crucially, Gramme also reduced the air spaces between the rotor and stator. The Gramme
dynamo resulted in a “waveform” of electromagnetic energy that was “practically constant” and
supplied a strong direct current capable of powering both arc lights and small industrial
machines and motors [7].
Figure 1: Pixii’s prototype 1832 dynamo (left side) used a hand crank to rotate a permanent
magnet whose poles passed beneath wire coils and induced an alternating current that Pixii
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Baldwin, I. (2023). The Electrification of the World. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(12). 64-94.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.1012.16015
converted to direct current by placing commutator “bars” at the base of the spinning magnet’s
axle. Gramme’s prototype dynamo (ca 1870, right side) placed the rotating armature (rotor),
with layers of copper wire wound tightly around its “ring,” inside a much larger stationary
magnet (the stator), using commutator bars that touched the rotating axle to produce a steady,
direct current more powerful than any dynamo had ever produced.
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Hippolyte_Pixii_dynamo.png
https://nationalmaglab.org/images/education/magnet_academy/history/museum/Gramme_dynamo.png
Gramme and his partner Hippolyte Fontaine began to produce his dynamo in 1871 and started
up the world’s first central power station in Paris to light factories, streets, and public forums
(but not residences). The Gramme machine had already begun to dominate the nascent dynamo
market when the two partners were preparing for the 1973 Vienna Exposition. Fontaine used
“a copper cable to connect Gramme’s machine to another dynamo located 500 metres away.
Unexpectedly, the shaft of the second dynamo began to spin, which in turn” powered a water
pump to which it was attached, thus “turning Gramme’s [second] dynamo into the first electric
motor with enough power” to run industrial machinery. “[I]t also allowed energy to be used at
a different location from where it was generated” [8].
In effect, Fontaine and Graham reconfirmed Lenz’s 1833 “law of reciprocity,” which stated
generators could function as motors, and motors, as generators. After Gramme and Fontaine’s
1873 demonstration, dynamos were used as DC electric motors for various industrial tasks.
THE FIRST ELECTRIC LIGHT: THE ARC LAMP
“Lighting,” meantime, not the electric motor, “was the ‘killer app’ of the early electrical industry
– the one application that was so valuable that it would drive the development of the technology
and investment” needed to build an entirely new, revolutionary industry [9]. Lighting could be
powered directly by a DC dynamo or by an AC alternator or generator. Neither an arc lamp nor
an incandescent bulb depended on an intermediary electric motor to power it, only the current- generating dynamo.
Two years after the Vienna Exposition, a telegraph technician named Pavel Yablochkov, a
Russian émigré, arrived in Paris. In 1875 the carbon electrodes of the arc lamps being deployed
in French factories and public buildings, such as the Gare du Nord train station, burned
unevenly and had severe operational problems, requiring constant repair and maintenance.
Yablochkov placed the electrodes side by side in parallel instead of having each tip opposed to
the other, one on top, the other below, as was customary. He then “devised a startlingly simple
solution” to the problem of uneven burning of the carbon rods that DC current caused. He
switched to “alternating current so that both carbons would be consumed at the same rate.” To
prevent the adjacent electrodes from shorting out, he separated them with a thin sheet of
plaster so that “the arc moved downward in tandem, similar to the burning of a candle,” giving
rise to the term Yablochkov “candle” [10].
To supply the necessary power for Yablochkov’s candle, in 1878 “Gramme developed an
efficient alternator ... whose alternating current ensured the equal consumption of the two
carbon electrodes” [11] and catalyzed the investigation and improvement of AC generators in
Europe (which would eventually overshadow DC dynamos during the last decade of the
century).