War of Currents

 
"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind."
 
-John F. Kennedy





Man has seen thousands and thousands of wars. He killed thousands, conquered thousands and still ready to fight another thousand battles.

They fought themselves for land, water, money and even for fame.

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, who, more than a century ago, engaged in a nasty battle over alternating and direct current, known as the “War of Currents”. 

After Edison developed the first practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, supported by his own direct current electrical system, the rush to build hydroelectric plants to generate DC power in cities across the United States practically guaranteed Edison a fortune in patent royalties. But early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem. Nikola Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as “splendid” but “utterly impractical.” Tesla was crushed and claimed that Edison not only refused to consider AC power, but also declined to compensate him properly for his work.

Within a year, Westinghouse Electric began installing its own AC generators around the country, focusing mostly on the less populated areas that Edison’s system could not reach.  But Westinghouse was also making headway in cities like New Orleans, selling electricity at a loss in order to cut into Edison’s business.

In November 1887, Edison received a letter from a dentist in Buffalo, New York, who was trying to develop a more humane method of execution than hanging. Having witnessed a drunk man accidentally kills himself by touching a live electric generator, Alfred P. Southwick became convinced that electricity could provide a quicker, less painful alternative for criminals condemned to death.

In June 1888, Edison began to demonstrate the lethal power of alternating current for reporters.  He rigged a sheet of tin to an AC dynamo and led a dog onto the tin to drink from a metal pan.  Once the dog touched the metal surface, it yelped and“the little cur dog fell dead.”

Electricity will kill a man “in the ten-thousandth part of a second,” Edison told one reporter shortly after the demonstration, and he was quick to remind him that “the current should come from an alternating machine.”

The battle of the currents had begun.!!!!!!!!

When New York State sentenced convicted murderer William Kemmler to death, he was slated to become the first man to be executed in an electric chair. Killing criminals with electricity “is a good idea,” Edison said at the time. “It will be so quick that the criminal can’t suffer much.” He even introduced a new word to the American public, which was becoming more and more concerned with the dangers of electricity. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”

  To further demonstrate the lethal nature of alternating current, he held a widely attended spectacularly in Coney Island, New York, where a circus elephant named Topsy was to be executed after she was deemed to be too dangerous to be around people.  The elephant had killed three men in recent years—one a trainer who had tried to feed Topsy a lit cigarette. Edison had Topsy fitted with copper-wire sandals, and before a crowd of thousands, an AC current of 6,000 volts was sent coursing through the elephant until she toppled to her side, dead.

Despite all of Edison’s efforts, and despite his attempts to persuade General Electric otherwise, the superiority of the AC current was too much for Edison and his DC system to overcome.  In 1893, Westinghouse was awarded the contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair, bringing all the positive publicity he would need to make alternating current the industry standard. For his part, Edison later admitted that he regretted not taking Tesla’s advice.

You are quizzing me.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act. 
 -Maxwell Maltz   


Here is a well known story of a bet.
There was a man named Richard Daly. He was a patentee of the Irish theatres. He usually spent Saturday evening in the society of some of the first wits and men of fashion of the day. Gambling was introduced, and the manager staked a large sum that he would cause a word to be spoken, by a certain day, in all the principal streets of Dublin, having no meaning, neither derived from any known language. Wagers having been laid and the stakes deposited, Daly went immediately to the theatre, and dispatched all the supernumeraries and servants of the establishment with a 'word'. They chalked on most of the shop doors and windows in the city. It is Sunday next day, all the shops were shut, and everyone going to or coming from church saw the word. Every person at the same time repeating it, talking about it. The word was heard all over Dublin. Obviously he won the bet.

The word was QUIZ.

   The circumstance of so strange a word being on every door and window caused much surprise; and ever since should a strange story be attempted to be passed current and it draws forth the expression of "you are quizzing me." 

Football??? KABOOOOM!!!!!!!!

The 2014 FIFA World Cup will be the 20th FIFA World Cup, an international football tournament that is scheduled to take place in Brazil from 12 June to 13 July 2014.

Everyone likes football. Me too. Barack Obama also liked football very much. He was offered a football when he won the election. He did it, they gave it. Football??? Kabooooom!!!! It's Nuclear!!! ;)

The President is always accompanied by a military aide carrying a "football" with the launch codes for nuclear weapons.
It is a metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase carried in a black leather "jacket". The package weighs around 20kg. A small antenna protrudes from the bag near the handle.
In his book Breaking Cover, Bill Gulley, the former director of the White House Military Office wrote^:

There are four things in the Football. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Broadcast System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes. The Black Book was about 9 by 12 inches and had 75 loose-leaf pages printed in black and red. The book with classified site locations was about the same size as the Black Book, and was black. It contained information on sites around the country where the president could be taken in an emergency.

 If the President (who is Commander-in-Chief) decided to order the use of nuclear weapons, he would be taken aside by the "carrier" and the briefcase would be opened. Then a command signal or "watch" alert would be issued to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President would then review the attack options with the aide and decide upon a plan which could range from a single cruise missile to multiple ICBM launches.

According to history channel report the president lives with the football (the briefcase) more time than with his wife.

God only knows why on earth they named it a football?

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh...................

Would you prefer SILENCE or NOISE?

Most of us will answer it with SILENCE..

We say “speech is silver, silence is golden” but there’s a room in the U.S that’s so quiet. It becomes unbearable after a short time.

The longest that anyone has survived in the ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes.

It’s 99.99 percent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.

It achieves its ultra-quietness by virtue of 3.3-foot-thick fibreglass acoustic wedges, double walls of insulated steel and foot-thick concrete.

The company’s founder and president, Steven Orfield, told MailOnline: ‘We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark - one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes.

‘When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly.

‘In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.’

And this is a very disorientating experience. Mr Orfield explained that it’s so disconcerting that sitting down is a must.

He said: ‘How you orient yourself is through the sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechoic chamber, you don't have any clues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you're in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.’

The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, which test how loud their products are.

Mr Orfield said: ‘It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things - heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard.’

It’s also put to use to determine sound quality.

Mr Orfield and his team will help companies such as washing-machine maker Whirlpool develop metaphors for what sound should, well, sound like.

Motorbike maker Harley-Davidson used the lab, for instance, to make their bikes quieter, while still sounding like Harley-Davidsons.

‘We record products and people listen to them based on semantic terms, like “expensive”, “low quality”, said Mr Orfield. ‘We measure their feelings and associations.’

Nasa, meanwhile, uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts.

They are put in a water-filled tank inside the room to see ‘how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it’.

As Mr Orfield explains, space is like one giant anechoic chamber, so it’s crucial that astronauts are able to stay focussed.

Mr Orfield admits that he can last a very respectable 30 minutes in his chamber, despite having an off-putting mechanical heart valve that suddenly becomes very loud indeed once he's inside.

When you have been there you will never choose SILENCE, I guarantee :)