The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

By the early 1890s regular people, industrialists, white-collar workers, small business owners, corporate managers, manufacturers, traction companies, investors, and inventors had all grown fond of electricity and what it could do. Nevertheless, most also found the wild way of building an infrastructure deeply unsatisfactory, with four different kinds of current (DC, single-phase AC, dual-phase AC, and polyphase AC), two different intensities of lighting system (arc and incandescent) that relied on different wiring logics (series and parallel), seven different possible voltages, nine different rates of oscillation, and up to forty competing electric companies (depending on the size of the market), plus all the folks who’d opted out of public power and installed private plants. The result was predictable: not only were there too many wires, but the lack of standardization made it difficult for anyone to make any money, whether selling current or selling the various components and machines that used it.