Is Direct Current Electricity Going To Make A Comeback?
Direct current - DC - electricity is used by us every day. If you see a blocky black thing on a power cord, that is a transformer and it turns alternating current (AC) electricity into DC that is used by a device. In the early days of mass electricity, it was Tesla (and then Westinghouse) versus Edison to create an electricity standard. Edison eventually lost because high-voltage AC electricity meant it could go longer distances - and that meant fewer dirty power plants in city neighborhoods. But the device you are reading this on uses DC power, because it needs to work in a 0 and 1 state and with AC, that 1 is always changing. Tell an electrical engineer you want your two-pole transistor to work with three-phase AC and he will throw a copy of Kreyszig at you. read more