Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz

http://gizmodo.com/before-1948-las-power-grid-was-incompatible-with-the-r-1683629042

by curtis • 9 years ago

191 163 9 years ago

Aloha3• 9 years ago

Growing up in Southern California, I remember always finding old clocks with conversion stickers on them - I've been looking for a good source on the technical details to find out what they needed to do to accomplish the changeover. I'm not willing to pay 35 bucks to read the IEEE article however.

baobrien• 9 years ago

IEEE articles can be 'obtained' on Sci-Hub.

Aloha3• 9 years ago

Thank You!!

dom0• 9 years ago

Pretty much the only way would be to either swap the gearbox connected to the synchronous motor, or the sync motor itself.

Aloha3• 9 years ago

Having read the article, yes this was a common way - sometimes no conversion was required. Or a new motor was required, because they were using a 60hz motor to start out with (a 60hz motor running on 50hz makes more torque), and with the frequency change the motor would no longer make adequate torque.

zkms2• 9 years ago

I'm not willing to pay 35 bucks to read the IEEE article however.

Me neither: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.sci-hub.cc/document/6444314/

rz2k• 9 years ago

I have a ~10 year old GE microwave. After using a portable power generator which probably does not have a very accurate frequency, this winter when the grid was out, it seemed to switch itself over to 50Hz, and stayed that way after electricity from the grid was restored.

It was very confusing as the clock consistently ran too fast, and the timer ended before food got as hot as it previously had. I was surprised that something like that would be built into the microwave, and that it would be able to guess something like that. Eventually I unplugged it for a couple hours, and it went back to normal when I plugged it back in.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

I recall finding a 'frequency converter' at a surplus store in LA from around the time of the war. Basically it was a motor generator set, the motor ran on 120V AC 50Hz and the generator produced 120V AC 60Hz. I asked about it and it was the first I had heard that LA had been 50Hz at one time.

I presume it was used in a lab or something, it weighed quite a bit and didn't look like something you'd have on your kitchen counter.

ams6110• 9 years ago

People also use rigs like that to get three-phase power in areas or buildings where only single-phase is available.

lb1lf3• 9 years ago

Incidentally, Japan faces this very issue to this day; part of the country run on 50Hz, the rest on 60Hz.

This made matters trickier after Fukushima, as the nation is effectively two smaller electricity grids, not one large one - so making up for the shortfall became harder than it could have been. (However, there's a massive frequency converter interface between the two grids.)

Edit: Aw, shucks - now that I revisit the article, I see the exact same points being made in that article's comment section. My bad.

Libre___• 9 years ago

First thing that came to mind here too. Wikipedia has some fascinating reading about the GE and AEG networks in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan

unsignedint• 9 years ago

Yes, a lot of older appliances actually had a little toggle switch to change between these.

The problem still exists but many of newer machines have its own inverters so it's less of the issues...

lb1lf3• 9 years ago

-It is not much of an issue on a micro scale - biggest issue today is probably direct-drive electrical motors, which will run too fast (if 50Hz on a 60Hz grid) or too slow (vice versa).

Also, running a 60Hz motor on a 50Hz grid will cause it to run hotter (larger current than nominally on 60Hz; also, less efficient cooling as it turns slower). If the designer designed to a price point rather than to a standard, this may be an issue.

On the macro scale, however, you've got a problem if, say, you suddenly lose a power plant in the 50Hz region of your country. You cannot then simply make up for the shortfall by distributing the load between all plants in the country (or, unless you're an island nation like Japan - from your neighbours, too) - only the ones in the 50Hz part of it.

This is just a long-winded way of saying that the larger your power grid, the more robust it is when a power plant goes offline.

The Japanese are in the unenviable position of having two small national grids rather than one large one - and, for an encore, they're on a bunch of islands and likely unable to import significant power from neighbours, too!

Hence any plant downtime is felt much harder than it would any other place. Tough luck.

plorg• 9 years ago

It took a long time to standardize and integrate the US power grid (which even today is basically 3 loosely-connected systems). Some parts held out longer than others.

My brother recently visited a hydro dam in northern Minnesota that had one turbine operating at 25hz even as recently as the 90s, serving at least one industrial customer still running equipment that predated the interconnected 60hz grid.

lostlogin3• 9 years ago

You prompted me to look up how power stations are synchronised. This rabbit hole leads to The War of Currents. It's worth a read.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents

johnhenry2• 9 years ago

The saddest casualty of war being Topsy :(.

jakobegger• 9 years ago

It‘s amazing how much opposition there apparently was against AC current – a technology that noone is afraid of today.

Gibbon13• 9 years ago

I've seen a few cases where there was a need to run 120VAC a thousand feet or so. The most cost effective solution being to step the voltage up to 240VAC and then back down at the load. Basically you save 75% on wires which pays for the two transformers. Bonus, you can use a tapped transformer to compensate for line loss.

120VAC -> 1.0T2.0 -> 240VAC --> line --> 220VAC --> 1.8T1.0 --> 120VAC

vvanders• 9 years ago

Ironically I was reading recently(wish I could find the source) that some power distribution is switching back to DC due to the inductive load that the AC wave generates over long distances. Solid state has come along far enough that the conversion losses are comparable with AC transformers.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

Similarly the history of voltage levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#History_of_v...

camtarn• 9 years ago

The vibrating reed frequency meter which is the lead image in your link is super cool - never thought about a meter using tuned resonators to measure frequency instead of a discrete time-based counter.

Taniwha• 9 years ago

higher freq reeds were also used to switch on/off street lights and household low-tariff water heating here in NZ - hearing the switching tones coming through the stereo was part of my childhood.

A local ham friend build a high power tone generator back in the 70's ... sent slow morse across town in the early hours one night by turning on/off all the streetlights in his neighbourhood

gumby• 9 years ago

There are other, smaller countries that have mixed frequencies.

PG&E (California' primary gas and electric utility) still has DC tariffs, thought I believe they provision it by installing a converter at the pint of use. I believe this is just for elevators.

Parts of Back Bay in Boston were still wired for 100V DC mains voltage into the 1960s

seandougall• 9 years ago

Fascinating -- I'd always heard that 24 fps developed as a US film standard compared to 25 fps in Europe because of the difference in AC power frequency (24 and 60 being a pretty straightforward integer ratio). And yet, during this time, LA became firmly entrenched as the center of the American film industry while producing 24 fps films. I wonder how that squares -- was this something people had to deal with, or does this article possibly overstate how widespread 50 Hz power was?

aninhumer• 9 years ago

The power frequency isn't that relevant for film, since it just powers motors on the cameras and projectors (or often just hand cranked). In fact, prior to the introduction of sound in films, the exact playback speed wasn't as important, and cinemas often varied.

Where it becomes relevant is for television, and in both cases the refresh rate matches the mains frequency. PAL is 50Hz interlaced, and NTSC is 60Hz interlaced.

acchow3• 9 years ago

I had to read further to understand why Cathode Ray Tube televisions were tied to mains frequency - it's due to an effort to reduce artefacting

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/164252

cesarb• 9 years ago

PAL is 50Hz interlaced, and NTSC is 60Hz interlaced.

Except for PAL-M, which is PAL but 60Hz interlaced (Brazil uses 60Hz mains frequency).

wonderous• 9 years ago

This article covers the topic in more detail, but the general gist is that the film speed was controlled by the projectionist not the camera man recording the film, which was a set speed and powered by hand:

http://gizmodo.com/why-frame-rate-matters-1675153198

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Nah, the 24 frames is the lowest frame rate before we sense the individual images. Leads to less film usage.

Note btw that we need 60 frames to get lifelike.

And gamers often want higher because the input sampling of a game is hooked up to the frame rate, so the higher the rate the more responsive the controls are...

ko27• 9 years ago

And 25 isn't? Do you honestly believe it was one big coincidence?

Koshkin• 9 years ago

This is correct.

elihu2• 9 years ago

I've heard of European broadcasters speeding up a film slightly so that it's 25 fps instead of 24. Thus the same movie could be several minutes shorter on European broadcast TV. As long as the speed difference is small enough, people don't notice.

Rebelgecko• 9 years ago

Digressing a bit from the power grid, but American broadcasters will often speed up older shows (e.g. Friends reruns) because an hour long block of TV has more commercials now than it did in the 90s.

breakingcups• 9 years ago

I've always noticed this in the PAL DVD releases of The Shield compared to the NTSC captures. In PAL, the music and voices are noticeably "sped up", mostly noticeable by the pitch shift.

Animats• 9 years ago

Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power, and some old Edison 100VDC power. There was a huge basement area full of rotary converters to interconvert all this. Various ancient machinery and lighting ran on different power sources.

In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad traction power was converted to 60Hz. All conversion equipment was replaced with solid state gear. It took quite a while just to find everything that was powered off one of the nonstandard systems.

It wasn't until 2005 that the last 25Hz rotary converter was retired from the NYC subway system. (Third rail power is 600VDC, but subway power distribution was 13KV 25Hz 3-phase.)

zkms2• 9 years ago

60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power, and some old Edison 100VDC power.

The only thing missing is 400Hz power!

jacquesm• 9 years ago

Isn't that usually used just for ships and aircraft?

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power,..."

Do you mean 50Hz there?

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

I really don't understand the downvotes, this was a sincere question. Please note, the OP states:

"Until the 1990s, Grand Central Station in New York had almost everything - 60Hz commercial power, 40Hz LIRR power (Pennsylvania Railroad standard) 25Hz NYC Subway power, 700VDC Metro North power, 600VDC subway third rail power, and some old Edison 100VDC power."

and then subsequently states:

."In the 1990s, Grand Central was rewired, and everything except railroad traction power was converted to 60Hz."

I am asking because I am trying to make sense of the entire comment. They also mention 4 or 5 other electrical frequencies and voltages, so there's a lot packed into that comment. I am genuinely interested in the comment and trying to learn something.

janvdberg• 9 years ago

This 99% invisible episode also talks about this (third segment): http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/you-should-do-a-story/

IshKebab• 9 years ago

Yeah the timing seems not coincidental.

wolfgang42• 9 years ago

I had a Waring Blendor [sic], cat. no. 700A, with the widest range I've ever seen: "115 Volts, 6 Amps, 25 to 60 cycle A. C. - D. C." I haven't been able to pin down an exact date on this model, but it seems to date from the 1940s or so, when the U. S. power grid still hadn't completely settled on a standard. I've read that portions of Boston still had 110 volts DC in residential areas up through the 1960s, though I've been unable to find much detail about this.

mrlyc• 9 years ago

The motor on my mum's Singer Featherweight model 3-120 sewing machine runs on 110-120 volts 25-75 cycles AC and DC. It was made around 1950.

MertsA• 9 years ago

That's because it's quite common for simple appliances to use a universal motor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor

It basically doesn't make a difference what polarity you feed it, if it's positive going into the rotor then it's positive going into the stator as well. When the rotor changes polarity, so does the stator.

mysterypie• 9 years ago

customers could bring their old 50hz appliances for free adjustments and exchanges, [including] 380,000 lighting fixtures

Surely ordinary light bulbs don't care about the frequency. Do they mean the electronics for fluorescent lamps? Were those common in the 1940s?

workerIbe• 9 years ago

I wish we still had these. I run half my house "off grid", my inverter is putting out 61Hz and my old digital alarm clock runs fast.

MBCook• 9 years ago

The most recent episode of the podcast 99% invisible talked about this. Basically anything with a motor needed to be replaced or somehow changed so the motor would run at the right speed.

If you didn't, your electric clocks would run 12 minutes fast every hour (for example).

sitharus• 9 years ago

Incandescent bulbs certainly don't care about frequency, and I can't think of a frequency-dependant component in 40s florescent lamps. The starters and ballast from that era were pretty simple, unless there's some difference for 120V operation I don't know about.

Florescent lamps became really popular during WWII, so there were many around in 1945.

ryandrake• 9 years ago

My mind always boggles at humanity's general inability to standardize on one thing without great pain and fighting. Whether it's Metric vs. Imperial, Beta vs. VHS, Blu-ray vs. HDDVD, OpenGL vs. DirectX, USB speeds, power connectors, instant messaging protocols. Nobody can just sit together and cooperate--we always have to go through that painful period with multiple incompatible standards that fight it out until (hopefully) one of them wins.

unabridged• 9 years ago

Language is probably the oldest (and most sentimental) version of this problem

andreasgonewild2• 9 years ago

Only because of isolation, look at what's happened in only a few years since we got our hands on a global network.

andreasgonewild2• 9 years ago

That would be capitalism's general inability.

hugi5• 9 years ago

I'm actually rather impressed with humanity's ability to standardize. It's perfectly natural (and in many cases desirable) for multiple parties to go through that "painful period" with different solutions that will compete to become "standard". It just takes a little time for everything to align and settle, that's perfectly natural.

As for the U.S. refusing to adopt the planet-wide metric system? You've got me there. That's just… Weird.

zanny4• 9 years ago

It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his replacement immediately halts proceedings.

Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.

fl0wenol2• 9 years ago

Is this a troll?

The U.S. is on metric; NIST defines and curates standards on the ISU and is a critical, founding participant in the GCWM. Manufacturing and engineering specifications (especially for the military) are usually ISU. It's just that commercially imperial units are still popular. Most people aren't engineers or scientists and so they don't think about this a lot, but marketing loves inertia.

tzs• 9 years ago

The metric system was based on one great (mostly) idea, and one stupid idea.

The great idea was having larger and smaller units for a given thing related to the base unit by powers of 10. That's a lot easier to work with than 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile.

The stupid idea was basing the meter on the distance between the North Pole and the Equator.

What they should have done is based it on existing systems of units. The meter should have been equal to 3 feet. The definition of the foot at the time, in both England and on the continent I believe, was a bit fuzzy, but they all had such a unit and it was reasonably consistent everywhere. Then they could have worked at making the definition of the foot/meter more precise and reproducible, keeping it within the range of existing practice.

That would have given us the benefits of a metric system, but with the conversion between metric and prior units easier. Converting feet to meters would have then been a simple division by 3. An inch would be exactly 25 mm. (25 is easy to multiple by in your head: just divide by 4 and shift the decimal point two to the right. Similarly it is easy to divide by in you head if you do it as a multiply by 4 and then shift the decimal two to the left).

Similarly for all other metric base units except for temperature.

For temperature, as far as I can tell, there was NO good reason to switch to Celsius. Unlike with distance, we don't make bigger or smaller units out of multiples of the base unit. We just state the numeric value, in decimal, possibly with modifiers like kilo or micro, and the base unit. In other words, with temperature we were kind of already doing metric, in the sense of using powers of 10 and writing things in decimal.

So the only thing switching from the older, widely in use Fahrenheit scale to Celsius actually made better was changing the anchor points for the scale. Fahrenheit based his scale on a 0 point of the coldest temperature he could make in his lab, and his 100 point at what he thought was human body temperature.

Celsius based his on water freezing at 100 and boiling at 0, but the whole universe thought having lower numbers mean hotter was stupid, so it was quickly flipped to freezing at 0 and boiling at 100.

Now those anchor points are better than the ones Fahrenheit picked, because they are easier to reproduce and more consistent. (They still suck...but they suck a lot less). Fahrenheit's degree size was better, though, especially for the range of temperatures that most people live in. Celsius' degree is too coarse.

The right approach would have been to make Fahrenheit the scale for metric temperature, but anchor at it better points. Instead of 0 as coldest Fahrenheit could make in his lab and 100 human body temperature, use the same anchors Celsius did: freezing and boiling of water. Define freezing as 32 Fahrenheit and boiling as 212 Fahrenheit.

This would have made as much sense as adopting Celsius, and no one would need a new thermometer.

pmarreck9• 9 years ago

12 inches in a foot, 12 hours in a day... it is arguable that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal system is superior to the "powers of 10" the metric system uses: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-bas...

snarfy• 9 years ago

The US government adopted it in 1975, and Reagan abolished it 1982.

It's frustrating not being able to repair the tools I buy from home depot using tools bought from home depot. I couldn't even go metric if I wanted to. They don't sell raw materials in metric. You get 4x8' sheets of plywood and something called a 2x4 which seems to have nothing to do with either measuring system. It's not even Cartesian.

zanny4• 9 years ago

Standards forfeit control. If you can become a de facto standard, without standardizing, you wield insane power over lives and business. Of your examples, Blu-ray, DirectX, and the "new age" closed silo IM protocols like WhatsApp that superseded an XMPP world are all corporate controlled properties that have no standards body considering the needs of the industry. They behave and act to fulfill the needs of their creators, to the detriment of the users and broader ecosystem.

That is why standards are hard. Because it requires those with power to voluntarily relinquish it, which very rarely will happen. And then to never try to circumvent standards with first mover advantage to reclaim that kind of monopoly power. At least right now societies around the world are very poorly structured to align the incentives towards cooperation.

esolyt2• 9 years ago

Whether it's Metric vs. Imperial

To be fair, humanity did standardize that long ago. There is a country that is refusing to switch to the standard.

mmmpop• 9 years ago

Maybe if every American took a thermodynamics course where the teacher insisted on memorizing the unit conversions we would not have this issue! What an awful semester...

refurb2• 9 years ago

When you're the only super power you can get away with it!

pmarreck9• 9 years ago

If you're not in that country and are speaking English and it's your native tongue, then it's highly probable that your country (or its foreign ruler's Queen) is the one that originally imposed this system on us

jdboyd• 9 years ago

With regard to OpenGL vs. DirectX, the competing standards push each other to keep improving. I suspect that graphics APIs and thus hardware would have really stagnated without the competition.

cr0sh5• 9 years ago

There's more to the history of DirectX and OpenGL than you may be aware of.

Personally, I believe Microsoft helped to engineer the downfall of SGI, via the whole Fahrenheit graphics "co-operation" - which also led to SGI making Windows NT workstations (in place of Irix).

That isn't to say that SGI didn't have some bumbling management of the time, but I do think that Microsoft took advantage of the situation to get them to chase a red herring to accelerate their demise, while also gaining a lot of new knowledge and IP via the sharing agreements they had for Fahrenheit.

Then again, had SGI not imploded, we wouldn't have NVidia today...

Denvercoder9• 9 years ago

Well, different systems have different tradeoffs. It makes sense that people have different priorities, and thus prefer different systems. Almost everyone likes cooperation, but for that compromise is needed, which is always difficult to achieve in a manner satisfactory to all parties involved.

cmurf• 9 years ago

My favorite example of this at the moment is UEFI Time Services. Time is current local time, TimeZone is an offset from UTC in minutes, and Daylight establishes whether DST should apply, and if it has been applied. So yay, no more time incompatibilities with multiple OS's. Except no, not even Microsoft Windows 10 sets the TimeZone value to the actual UTC offset! They set it to EFI_UNSPECIFIED_TIME. And so does Linux. And so does macOS. So we're still fakaked.

Avernar• 9 years ago

UEFI is a good example of a standard that was over designed by a committee. Way too much bad decisions that are now part of the standard.

My favourite is using the FAT file system format for the system partition. No checksums, fragile on disk format, and no built in support for mirroring just to name a few.

And why they kept the idea of having the clock in local time is baffling. That just leads to errors when DST failed to apply or was applied twice.

Tharkun• 9 years ago

Blame all those cheeky buggers who built machines powered by steam engines or water turbines. They basically built their machines to run on whatever was available. Got a waterwheel doing 1000RPM and you need a big saw attached to it? Your saw will be running at 1000RPM (~16Hz).

So many crazy machines were built before there was either a need or an effective way to standardize anything power related. Keep in mind that many kinds of manipulations of electricity are easy and cheap now, but that certainly wasn't the case when people started converting from steam/water to electricity!

cr0sh5• 9 years ago

So many crazy machines were built before there was either a need or an effective way to standardize anything power related.

One of my favorite, somewhat related, such machinery was those multi-pole "generators" that were used to create carrier waves for radio transmission between the thin era of spark-gaps and vacuum tube oscillators.

mirimir• 9 years ago

Got a waterwheel doing 1000RPM and you need a big saw attached to it? Your saw will be running at 1000RPM (~16Hz).

Most "waterwheels" turned far more slowly than 1000 rpm. More like a few hundred at most. They used pulleys and belts, and eventually CVTs.

Edit: http://www.alternative-energy-tutorials.com/hydro-energy/wat...

elihu2• 9 years ago

Sometimes standards are mostly arbitrary, and it doesn't matter which one "wins" as long as we all agree on one. However, it can also be frustrating when society adopts a standard nearly universally, and then that standard becomes an impediment when some new alternative comes along or some new use case is found that isn't supported by the old standard.

nnq• 9 years ago

nobody can just sit together and cooperate

Doesn't work. If you want fast standardization at all costs, only way to it by forced standardization with "obey or goto gulag" orders send from a "tyrannical government" and "violent" and feared standards enforcement authorities.

When you let people vote standardization takes aaaages. When you let corporations vote, it gets even worse... it may never truly happen because the agreed upon "standards" have purposeful ambiguities sprinkled everywhere 'cause "but that's too hard to implement", and practical implementations never fully obey because "what you gonna do, can't practically sue us for not implementing this". Also standardization favors commoditization, hence doesn't make much business sense to do it if you're the "big guy", and isn't so easy to do if you're the little guy (and you're also eating away your future profits if you're the small guy that knows it's gonna grow bug fast).

pmarreck9• 9 years ago

You may be interested in this article on the general topic of interface wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war

shagie• 9 years ago

For some other fun with California's 60hz legacy...

The timezone database (maintained by the people who are very particular about making sure that a time specified is a well known time) have a note in the northamerica data file:

https://github.com/tzinfo/tzinfo-data/blob/master/data/north...

# From Paul Eggert (2016-08-20):

# In early February 1948, in response to California's electricity shortage,

# PG&E changed power frequency from 60 to 59.5 Hz during daylight hours,

# causing electric clocks to lose six minutes per day. (This did not change

# legal time, and is not part of the data here.) See:

# Ross SA. An energy crisis from the past: Northern California in 1948.

# Working Paper No. 8, Institute of Governmental Studiåes, UC Berkeley,

# 1973-11. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x22k30c

macintux2• 9 years ago

Just when you think there might be a finite number of time/calendar pitfalls...

aptwebapps• 9 years ago

It's a finite number, but it's always at least one bigger than you think it is.

kens• 9 years ago

The story of why parts of the US used 25 Hertz power instead of the standard 60 Hertz is interesting. Hydroelectric power was developed at Niagara Falls starting in 1886. To transmit power to Buffalo, Edison advocated DC, while Westinghouse pushed for polyphase AC. The plan in 1891 was to use DC for local distribution and (incredibly) compressed air to transmit power 20 miles to Buffalo, NY. By 1893, the power company decided to use AC, but used 25 Hertz due to the mechanical design of the turbines and various compromises.

In 1919, more than two thirds of power generation in New York was 25 Hertz and it wasn't until as late as 1952 that Buffalo used more 60 Hertz power than 25 Hertz power. The last 25 Hertz generator at Niagara Falls was shut down in 2006.

Details: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4412948

dixie_land• 9 years ago

don’t this become a moot point in retrospect?

with the global trade electronics are simply made to work anywhere 100~240V 50/60Hz so the manufactures don’t have to make several different models. (They obviously still ship with different plugs but the actual converters work with almost any input)

stevefan1999• 9 years ago

whats the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz besides the timer shift mentioned in the article?

Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Ran at 50hz

Related Stories