Electricity shortage of 1956 -- half-century-old precursor to the broadband shortage
I love this 1956 ad on the race to install adequate electrical infrastructure to accommodate the ballooning demand for gizmos and appliances. A little bit of word-substitution and you'd have an article from the past five years bemoaning the lack of high-speed wiring to the curb.
Adequate wiring means business (Feb, 1956)
The problem: The thirty-year electric appliance boom is running into a snag—warns the National Adequate Wiring Bureau. Most houses and apartments were built with relatively small electrical requirements in mind. Already, 50% of the people in some areas who want air conditioners can’t buy them because their wiring is inadequate, one expert estimates. The sale of freezers, ranges, water heaters and other appliances is being slowed.The solution: New homes built under the adequate wiring code of the National Association of Home Builders provide at least 100-ampere cable into the home—and adequate inside circuits. In older buildings— the answer is rewiring.
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They are still just now getting around to rewiring some buildings in NYC for air conditioning and appliances now. As far as that goes , there were still apartments with direct current in them as late as 1986. Killed a TV set by plugging it into a DC outlet once.
Having retrofitted the wiring in a house constructed in the 1930s, I will confirm that at the time they assumed you'd be running maybe 10 light bulbs.
Yet, to this day, even new houses and buildings are not constructed with conduit for new cable in the future. Residential structures could learn some lessons from the design of commercial structures and data warehouses.
@6
mixing up 208 with DC?
What is a Broadand?
Fixed.
I grew up on a farm, and know my 2 phase from my 3 phase and my 110 from my 120 because cows or water won't wait for the electricia to show up.
NYC finally completed the switch from DC to AC just last November
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison/
They still use DC for incandescent lights in the subway, and they look beautiful because they don't flicker.
Don't know why they still had buildings on the lower east side wired for DC in the late 1980s.
mein gotts! Zavages!
I'm still somewhat fascinated by the antiquity of ConEdison's continued facilitation of steam pipes in NYC.
50's ads are awesome. They're all about the future. Take a trip to the library and find the old bound Time magazines and so on. I did that the other day and the first thing I opened it up to was an ad for Hertz Rent-a-Plane. Google turns up nothing except this article from 1958 which is miraculously online in text format:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1958/07/26/1958_07_26_017_TNY_CARDS_000258625
Most of the ads were for aviation companies. Nowadays all the ads are for drug companies.
There are still a whole village in Wales that has never had mains electricity at all- despite being adjacent to a hydro-electric installation.
100 amps is nothing in todays world. My garage alone has a 100 amp service, while my house has a 200. How the times have changed!
I love advertising from this period. The woman in this ad is making it seem like her life is now fulfilled, now that she has her cleaning and cooking appliances delivered to her.
I came to Japan in 1984, when 20 amps was common in the hutches. I lived through an upgrade in the 90's to 30 amps. I now live in a house with 900 square feet, and 40 amps on the fusebox.
That was a time when you could go into many people's homes, and the wiring consisted of two cloth-covered strings of copper suspended from the attic ceiling by white ceramic insulators.
The fuse box had, maybe, 4 fuses. Literally ... fuses, that you needed a flashlight to replace, if you could find one.
Rough equivalent today: internet wiring. Running along the floorboards in -how- many houses?
WAS a time? I have in my refrigerator box: knob and tube, cabtire, Loomex, BX, zip cords, and lately fiber (albeit not power) all patched willy nilly. Appalling when I look at the scope of technology represented. I do make a point of keeping a dial phone as well.
It's not the wiring that's the problem now. You can always use less juice (I say as I type this on a computer running Boinc...).
The problem is that over half of the electricity comes from coal, and the US no longer has the capacity to make nucular (modern spelling) power plants (at least within the next 20 years), and the ones it has are old, and solar and wind power are too unreliable for baseline power (one only works half the time, and the other only works when you're trying to rake up leaves), and the "need" for power keeps increasing.
Not having broadband is a minor inconvenience compared to that.