īy 1889, the electric power industry was flourishing, and power companies had built thousands of power systems (both direct and alternating current) in the United States and Europe. Tesla consulted for a year at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's but it took a further four years for Westinghouse engineers to develop a workable polyphase motor and transmission system. In 1888, Westinghouse licensed Nikola Tesla's patents for a polyphase AC induction motor and transformer designs. However based on that system Westinghouse would begin installing AC transformer systems in competition with the Edison company later that year. The system was unreliable though (due primarily to generation issues) and short-lived. Using this knowledge he built a multi-voltage transformer-based alternating-current power system serving multiple homes and businesses at Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1886.
In 1886, one of Westinghouse's engineers, William Stanley, independently recognized the problem with connecting transformers in series as opposed to parallel and also realized that making the iron core of a transformer a fully enclosed loop would improve the voltage regulation of the secondary winding. Īlso in 1885 George Westinghouse, an American entrepreneur, obtained the patent rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer and imported a number of them along with a Siemens generator, and set his engineers to experimenting with them in hopes of improving them for use in a commercial power system. The system lit more than 1000 carbon filament lamps and operated successfully from May until November of that year. The three engineers went on to present a power system at the National General Exhibition of Budapest that implemented the parallel AC distribution system proposed by a British scientist in which several power transformers have their primary windings fed in parallel from a high-voltage distribution line.
In 1885, Ottó Titusz Bláthy working with Károly Zipernowsky and Miksa Déri perfected the secondary generator of Gaulard and Gibbs, providing it with a closed iron core and its present name: the " transformer". Perhaps the most serious was connecting the primaries of the transformers in series so that active lamps would affect the brightness of other lamps further down the line. Despite the success of the system, the pair made some fundamental mistakes.
The practical value of Gaulard and Gibbs' transformer was demonstrated in 1884 at Turin where the transformer was used to light up forty kilometres (25 miles) of railway from a single alternating current generator. That same year in London, Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs demonstrated the "secondary generator"-the first transformer suitable for use in a real power system. Direct current power could not be transformed easily or efficiently to the higher voltages necessary to minimize power loss during long-distance transmission, so the maximum economic distance between the generators and load was limited to around half a mile (800 m). The power station generated direct current and operated at a single voltage. The Pearl Street Station initially powered around 3,000 lamps for 59 customers.
However, supply to the lamps was intermittent and in 1882 Thomas Edison and his company, The Edison Electric Light Company, developed the first steam-powered electric power station on Pearl Street in New York City. It was powered by two waterwheels and produced an alternating current that in turn supplied seven Siemens arc lamps at 250 volts and 34 incandescent lamps at 40 volts. In 1881, two electricians built the world's first power system at Godalming in England. Specialized power systems that do not always rely upon three-phase AC power are found in aircraft, electric rail systems, ocean liners, submarines, and automobiles. The majority of these systems rely upon three-phase AC power-the standard for large-scale power transmission and distribution across the modern world. A single line diagram helps to represent this whole system. Smaller power systems are also found in industry, hospitals, commercial buildings, and homes. The electrical grid can be broadly divided into the generators that supply the power, the transmission system that carries the power from the generating centers to the load centers, and the distribution system that feeds the power to nearby homes and industries. An example of a power system is the electrical grid that provides power to homes and industries within an extended area. A steam turbine used to provide electric powerĪn electric power system is a network of electrical components deployed to supply, transfer, and use electric power.