Were any of you folks aware of this? I sure wasn't.
This article is from earlier this year, but I only read it just this Saturday:
Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Was Incompatible With the Rest of the US
By Nathan Masters
2/04/15
Before 1948, there was something funny about the Southland's electricity. Plug in a clock from New York and it would lose 10 minutes every hour. Spin a record on a turntable from San Francisco and it would sound deep and drowsy. Some gadgets wouldn't work at all.
The problem? Southern California's power grid ran on a different frequency. Like the rest of the U.S., the region was wired for 120 volts, but its alternating current pulsed out of power plants and into electrical sockets at a slower rate—50 cycles per second (or 50hz) versus than the national 60hz standard.
That standard had not yet emerged in 1893, when the Southland became home to the nation's first three-phase, alternating current hydroelectric plant: the Mill Creek plant outside Redlands, California. As General Electric workers were installing the generator, it was left to the supervising engineer on site, Louis Bell, to determine the frequency. GE's rival, Westinghouse, was then designing equipment to operate at 60hz. Bell could have followed suit, but instead he chose the 50hz favored by his company's European affiliate, AEG.
With his decision, Bell unwittingly locked Southern California into a 50hz frequency. General Electric switched to 60hz just one year later, and as three-phase AC power came to more regions, the nation's power grid began to pulse in harmony. As an early adopter, however, Southern California was left behind. With so much equipment built for compatibility with Mill Creek's 50hz, switching to the emerging 60hz standard was simply cost-prohibitive. (Incidentally, the Mill Creek plant and its peculiar legacy was a product of the region's "Orange Empire," built to power an ice factory and keep the region's prized citrus crop fresh for market.)
For decades, then, the Southland was a sort of electrical enclave...
[...]
Click here to read the rest:
Before 1948, LA's Power Grid Was Incompatible With the Rest of the US
I wonder if this was written about or portrayed in books or in film, about transplants moving to Los Angeles pre-1948 and the appliances they took with them not being compatible with the electric current. I don't recall any transplant old-timers ever telling me that.
Edison Plant, Eagle Rock, undated photo.
LAPL