when did electricity first come to be used commercially?

Answer 1

The name is synonymous with power. Niagara Falls. The natural phenomenon from time immemorial. The myriad tons of water crashing over the solid limestone cliff, with a force that reduces the limestone to boulders, the boulders to rubble, the rubble to a silt the unabated torrent seizes and carries off down the canyon it has formed and shaped through the eons in this same violent, patient manner. The perpetual thunder. The constant cloud of mist from the plummeting waters.

And in the present time, the man-made complement to the natural marvel. The gargantuan electrical power production facilities--the largest in the world--harnessing the prodigious elemental forces.

But five years before start-up of the first large-scale power project at the falls, the method of production and distribution of the power was still undecided. The huge project was to include transmission to Buffalo. Electricity--a novel technology at the time--was only one suggestion. The other methods under consideration were pneumatic, hydraulic, and good old-fashioned mechanical (compressed-air or water mains or steel cables on posts and pulleys the 22-mile distance from Niagara Falls to Buffalo).

The new technology won out in the end. By 1895 the Niagara Falls Power Company began generating alternating current (AC) from three 5000-horsepower generators. The next year electricity was successfully transmitted to Buffalo. The Niagara Falls project ushered in the second phase of the Industrial Revolution and shaped and determined the way power would be produced and delivered from then on.

But in 1890 George Westinghouse recommended that the best way to transport Niagara Falls power to Buffalo would be by compressed air. Westinghouse was likely to know. As the inventor of the air brake, he was the acknowledged expert on pneumatic systems. And of late he had turned his attention to electricity. In 1886 he had organized the Westinghouse Electric Company. By 1890, the company was operating 300 central generating stations.

The Westinghouse organization predominantly utilized AC, and Westinghouse was the champion of AC in the so-called War of the Currents then raging between proponents of AC and advocates of continuous or direct current (DC). But the problem with AC was that it lacked a practical and efficient motor. The AC systems then in operation were primarily lighting systems. In 1888, Nikola Tesla had patented an idea for an AC motor, and Westinghouse promptly bought up the patents and was working on developing the motor. But the motor wasn't ready yet. Niagara power--on the scale that it would have to be developed for the project to make sense--would be mainly for industry. For power more than light.

The fierce and stubborn champion of DC was Thomas Edison. Edison had been in the electrical business since the late 1870s, and within a decade was operating in the neighborhood of 1500 generating stations, including isolated plants associated with individual factories or other commercial installations, as well as central stations, supplying electricity to the public at large. The DC systems were basically lighting systems, too, but there was a DC motor for street-rail traction, and DC motors were beginning to be used for various manufacturing purposes. (The motors were made by the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company. Frank J. Sprague, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, invented the DC motor. After naval service, he worked for the Edison Company for a while, but because Edison wasn't much interested in motors--or industrial applications of electricity in general--Sprague quit to form his own company in 1884. In the early years, when an Edison installation required a motor, the Sprague company supplied it.)

But the problem with DC was transmission. Edison, when asked by cable--he was in Europe at the time--about the prospect of transmitting large-scale power from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, wired back: "No difficulty transferring unlimited power. Will assist." But indeed there was difficulty, as Edison well knew. And neither he nor anyone else figured out how to resolve it using DC.

The DC transmission problem was fundamental. Based on Ohm's Law, (Click here for footnote.) efficient and economical transmission requires high voltage (raising the voltage causes increased flow of current, while the resistance remains constant, thus lowering the resistance per unit flow of current). Too high a voltage for practical uses, such as the operation of lights or motors.

AC, on the other hand, had the transformer for raising or lowering voltage. The transformer was based on phenomena discovered by Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) and English scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Oersted found that an electrical current produces a magnetic field around it. Faraday found that a conductor (wire) cutting through a magnetic field creates a current in the wire. As a result, an alternating current in a (primary) conductor, because of the constantly changing direction of the current, and thus constantly changing direction of the magnetic field, will induce a similar current in a nearby (secondary) conductor. In the transformer, the conductor wires are formed into coils to enhance the magnetic field and induction effects, and by varying the ratio of turns in the primary and secondary coils, the transformer can be used to change the voltage in the secondary. An effective transformer was developed in 1886 by William Stanley, then working for Westinghouse.

But the transformer phenomenon doesn't work with DC because in DC the direction of the current--and thus the direction of the resultant magnetic field--doesn't change. So that for a second conductor to continuously cut across the magnetic field, the conductor would have to be made to move back and forth across the field. As a result, DC voltage cannot easily be manipulated, and so DC is not readily transmissible. In fact, the service areas of the DC central stations were limited to about a square mile per station.

An additional but related consideration was that the Niagara project--again because of the magnitude of the power that would be produced--would have to be a universal system. That is, from one source it would have to be capable of being used in various ways, at various voltages, as AC and DC, for everything from lights to large and small motors. DC--going back to the problem with raising or lowering the voltage--lacked this flexibility. It couldn't be customized for many different uses.

Answer 2

The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway. Wheatstone and Cooke patented it in May 1837 as an alarm system. It ran for 13 miles from Paddington station to West Drayton and came into operation on April 9, 1839. It was patented in the United Kingdom in 1837.

Answer 3

A bit of an open ended question so a lot of right ways to answer.

On September 4 1882 Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York, New York went online this was a coal fired steam plant.
http://www.asme.org/Communities/History/Landmarks/Edison_Jumbo_Enginedriver.cfm
On September 30 1882 Edison's Vulcan Street Hydroelectric Power Plant turned on the lights in Appleton, Wisconsin.
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/milestones_photos/vulcan.html
The exact dates very a little in different sources but I think these are close.
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Andre' B.

Answer 4

The telegraph. 1840's, telegraph lines began popping up in the US, and by the Civil War, Lincoln was recieving daily combat reports by telegraph wire.