Historical
by Massimo Guarnieri
The Beginning of Electric Energy Transmission: Part Two
A
fter the early experimental lines
realized by Gaulard and Gibbs
of 1881–1884 [1], the conse-
quent theoretical investigations by
Ferraris, and the improvements de-
veloped at Ganz & Co. (Budapest,
Hungary) by Zipernowsky, Bláthy,
and Déri, who in 1885 introduced
the ZBD scheme (from their initials
[1]), engineers soon started build-
ing on alternating currents (ac) in
several countries. Early operative ac
systems, which exploited the capabil-
ity of transformers to step voltages up
and down, soon appeared, aimed at
distributing and transmitting electric
power over long distances.
One of the very first operative ac
systems was made in 1885 in Rome, It-
aly, for public lighting. It was powered
by two Siemens & Halske alternators
rated 30 hp (22 kW), 2 kV at 120 Hz and
used 200 series-connected Gaulard
2-kV/20-V step-down transformers
equipped with a closed magnetic cir-
cuit, one for each lamp.
One year later, the first British ac
system was put into service at the
Grosvenor Gallery, London. It featured
Siemens alternators and 2.4-kV/100-V
step-down transformers, one per user,
with shunt-connected primaries. At
that time, Siemens & Halske was well
established in the United Kingdom,
where the British branch of the com-
pany had been nurtured from 1858 by
Carl Wilhelm Siemens (1823–1883), a
brother of Werner, who had gained a
great reputation in the United King-
dom and had been knighted by Queen
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIE.2013.2256297
Date of publication: 17 June 2013
52  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  ■  june 2013
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Victoria. However, the Siemens alter-
nators at the Grosvenor Gallery did
not perform very well and were soon
replaced with machines rated 400 kW,
2.4 kV at 83 Hz, designed by a young
British engineer of Italian descent, Se-
bastian Ziani de Ferranti (1864–1930),
who could rely on the support and
expertise of William Thomson (later,
Lord Kelvin). In 1882, the two men had
incorporated Ferranti, Thompson, and
Ince to build such devices. The suc-
cess gained at the Grosvenor Gallery
allowed De Ferranti to go ahead and
put into service in 1889 the first ac
high-voltage power station at Deptford
on the Thames. The 10-kV voltage lev-
el, a record for the time, enabled elec-
trical power to be transmitted with
high efficiency to London, 45 km away.
De Ferranti’s company supplied the
four alternators, rated 1 MW at 10 kV
and 85 Hz. He also designed the power
cables and their special joints (the
very first for a high-voltage operation).
Another major system built on the
ZBD scheme of Ganz & Co. was the pub-
lic electric light system of Rome that
was put into service in 1892, extending
along 28 km from Aniene’s Waterfalls in
Tivoli to the city. It was powered by six
Ganz & Co. alternators rated 1.2 MW at
5 kV, 42 Hz and included 32 step-down
transformers of 30 kVA.
In the United States, the potential
of ac quickly caught on thanks to
railway industrialist George Westing-
house (1846–1914), who initially ad-
opted the European technology, by
buying both the Gaulard and Gibbs
and the ZBD patents in 1885. In 1886,
he established the Westinghouse
Electric Company and hired William
Stanley Jr. (1858–1916). This young
electrical engineer soon perfected
the closed-core transformer into the
laminated type made with interleaved
E-shaped plates. The same year, in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
they implemented the first American
ac system for incandescent lamp light-
ing, featuring step-up and step-down
transformers with ZBD-type primary
shunt connection. It was powered by
a Siemens & Halske alternator.
Two years later, Westinghouse’s
chief electrician Oliver Blackburn Shal-
lenberger (1860-1898) built the first
crude induction meter that was needed
to complete a commercial ac distribu-
tion system, and the following year (the
same year of Ferranti’s Deptford sta-
tion), Westinghouse was able to put the
first American ac power station with
long-distance transmission into service
at Willamette Falls, Portland, Oregon.
Via a 22-km line, it supplied Portland at
voltages of 4,000/100 V and 125 Hz.
Energy metering was an issue for
those trailblazers of commercial elec-
tricity. Edison’s very early counters,
used since his 1882 dc systems, were
actually charge meters, and the first
device capable of precise measure-
ment was the clock meter envisaged in
1884 by the German engineer Hermann
Aron (1845–1913), later the inventor of
the Aron connection for measuring
three-phase power by means of two
counters. In 1889, soon after Shallen-
berger’s device, an induction meter
that worked on the principle of the
rotating magnetic field was also made
in Europe by Hungarian Ottó Titusz
Bláthy (1860–1939) of Ganz & Co., one
of the fathers of the ZBD concept.
1932-4529/13/$31.00©2013IEEE
 In 1888 Serbian-American inven-
tor and polymath Nikola Tesla (1856–
1943), a former Edison’s engineer,
registered his first patent for the induc-
tion motor and delivered a lecture at
an AIEE conference titled “A New Sys-
tem of Alternating Current Motors and
Transformers,” describing the advan-
tages of ac systems. Soon after, West-
inghouse acquired Ferraris’ rights to
the rotating magnetic field for the sym-
bolic sum of US$1,000 and, from Tesla,
the rights of the induction motor for
US$60,000 and a royalty of US$2.5 for
each hp of built motor (only partially
paid). Westinghouse produced his
first induction motor in 1991, but it
took three more years to bring it to full
success. At that time, ac systems were
also tested in the United States by the
Thomson-Houston Electric Company
of Elihu Thomson (1853–1937) and Ed-
win J. Houston (1847–1914).
Meanwhile, major advancements
were ongoing in Europe. Building on
the idea of a three-phase system,
conceived and patented in 1882 by
British engineer and physicist John
Hopkinson (1849–1898), German en-
gineer Friedrich August Haselwander
(1859–1932) built the first three-phase
synchronous generator in 1887. Other
Germans were heading in that direc-
tion. One year after organizing the
1882 Münich Exhibition and sustaining
the 1.5-kW, 2-kV experimental dc line
by Marcel Deprez (1843–1918) [1], Os-
kar von Miller (1855–1934) had entered
Rathenau’s Deutsche Edison-Gesell-
schaft für Angewandte Elektricität [1]
as director, boosting the diffusion of
dc urban systems in Germany. In 1887,
the company, renamed Allgemeine
Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), hired
as chief engineer Mikhail Osipovic
von Dolivo-Dobrowolski (1862–1919),
of Russian descent, who, in 1898, de-
signed and patented two-phase asyn-
chronous motors with a squirrel cage
and with wound rotor and starting
rheostat. Soon after, to overcome prob-
lems of torque ripple, he developed
the first three-phase asynchronous
motors with an isolated cage (20 hp,
i.e., 15 kW) and a wound rotor (100 hp,
i.e., 75 kW), realizing the superiority of
three-phase currents. In 1890, he went
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further, building the first three-phase
power transformer, with a triangular
base. Dolivo-Dobrowolski carried out
the following development at AEG
in cooperation with Charles Eugene
Lancelot Brown (1863–1924), a Swiss
engineer of British descent of Mas-
chinenfabrik Oerlikon, Zurich, Switzer-
land, and with Oskar von Miller, who,
in 1890, had started his own company.
In 1891, the latter organized the In-
ternational Electro-Technical Exhibi-
tion at Frankfurt, Germany, where he
presented the first experimental three-
phase line, rated 240 kW and 15 kV,
which extended over 175 km between
the Lauffen waterfalls on the Neckar
River and Frankfurt, a distance never
tried before. Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon
and AEG provided the three-phase al-
ternator (200 kW at 40 Hz, Figure 1),
three-phase step-up and step-down
transformers, and a three-phase asyn-
chronous motor (75 kW) that powered
an artificial waterfall at the exhibition.
The line also fed 1,000 lamps. The
plant was a success, demonstrating
the advantages of three-phase sys-
tems in the efficient transmission of
high electrical power over great dis-
tances. The way was paved for con-
centrating generation in large power
stations next to primary sources and
transmitting power to a large num-
ber of users over long distances. To
Figure 1 – Alternator installed in Lauffen as part of the 240-kW, 15-kV, 175-km, three-phase
experimental system for the Frankfurt am Main International Electrical exhibition of 1891.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lauffen-
Frankfurt_1891e.jpg?uselang=eng.)
june 2013  ■  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  53
exploit this new market, C.E.L. Brown
and Walter Boveri (1865–1924) soon
established Brown Boveri & Company
(BBC), based in Baden, Switzerland,
which, in a matter of years, emerged as
one of the leading electromechanical
companies in the world. In 1893, the
first operational three-phase systems
for regular service were turned on at
Soden, Germany by Siemens & Halske,
and at Hellsjön, Sweden, by ASEA.
However, dc transmission had not
reached the end of the road. Another
Swiss engineer, René Thury (1860–
1938), who had spent six months at
Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, was
famous in those years for his dc sys-
tems, which resorted to the series con-
nection of generators and loads. They
were successfully used for transmitting
power from hydro generators and were
the forerunners of high-voltage (HV) dc
(HVDC). The first in 1885 was a 30-kW,
500-V system built in Bözingen, Switzer-
land, while the first high-voltage system
went into service in 1889 in Genoa, Italy,
for the Acquedotto de Ferrari-Galliera
company. This system transmitted 630
kW at 14 kV by means of a 120-km-long
line. The largest Thury’s system was
the Lyon-Moûtiers project of 1906, 230
km in length, eventually delivering 20
MW at 125 kV. At that time, Thury’s
high-voltage dynamos were more com-
pact and more efficient than Edison’s
 contemporary generators. His systems
were in use in England, Hungary, Rus-
sia, and France, too. For several de-
cades, dc systems like those stayed in
service, and the competition between
dc and ac continued, even if the final
supremacy of ac was already traced.
The contest in Europe remained limited
in the field of science and technology.
This was not so in the United States,
where the opposition evolved into the
“war of currents,” during which pro-
paganda was used against competi-
tors, particularly by the dc party that
was technically on the weaker side,
although 1,500 Edison’s dc stations
were in operation against 300 West-
inghouse’s plants in 1890. Animals
were electrocuted to show the dan-
ger of the ac system. The climax oc-
curred on 7 August 1890 when, at New
York’s Auburn Prison, convicted mur-
derer William Kemmler underwent
the first execution by electrocution.
The electric chair was powered by a
Westinghouse alternator proposed by
Edison’s party, backed by banker John
Pierpont Morgan, to discredit ac. Be-
cause of the low amperage, execution
was painfully slow: the first discharge
at 1,700 V lasting 17 s was not enough,
and a second was given at 2,000 V. The
New York Times reported: “…an awful
spectacle, far worse than hanging.”
Figure 2 – Adam’s power station at Niagara Falls with the three Tesla/Westinghouse ac genera-
tors of 1895 providing an overall 3.5 MW at 2.2 kV, 25 Hz. (Photo courtesy of the Tesla Memorial
Society of New York: http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm.)
54  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  ■  june 2013
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However, the advantages of ac over-
came those expedients, and the West-
inghouse Electric Company was able to
obtain the contract for illuminating the
1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Expo-
sition, also thanks to a largely underbid
offer compared to General Electric (GE).
The latter company had been incorpo-
rated in 1892 through the merging of the
Edison GE Company and the Thomson-
Houston Electric Company, initially ex-
ploiting European BBC patents. At the
Exposition, Westinghouse presented a
fully integrated ac system for lighting
and traction operating at 60 Hz, a com-
promise between the lower frequencies,
ideal for the induction motor, and the
higher ones, which prevented the flick-
er of incandescent bulbs. The system
was powered by two single-phase alter-
nators designed by Tesla and included
several step-down transformers, over
96,000 bulbs, and a 500-V ac–dc rotary
converter powering a small dc electric
railway. Westinghouse’s first commer-
cial induction motor was on display, and
Tesla presented its own new 60-Hz, two-
phase system provided with 1,000-hp
alternators, 600-hp motors, and rotary
converters. Leading European compa-
nies also attended: Siemens and Halske
introduced the first ac electric locomo-
tive, powered by two 20-hp (15-kW)
motors. The exhibition made clear that
the deciding advantage of ac was the
availability of low-cost step-up and
step-down transformers, which allowed
all customers to be supplied by a com-
mon system, the so-called “universal
system,” regardless of the required volt-
age and at minimal cost of conversion,
while dc was hampered by the higher
cost and lower efficiency of dc–dc ro-
tary converters.
The success of his displays at the
exposition granted Westinghouse the
first contract for building the new large
power station at Niagara Falls. The com-
mission was given after a long process
of selection started in 1890 by the Inter-
national Niagara Commission chaired
by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). In
an early phase in 1891, offers by highly
qualified European companies such
as BBC were rejected on nontechnical
bases and possibly also because of a
protectionist choice. Eventually the
competition remained between GE and
Westinghouse, both presenting poly-
phase systems. The first hydropower
station, designed by Tesla and built
by Westinghouse, entered service on
26 August 1895 (Figure 2). It featured
three alternators with total power of 3.5
MW at 2.2 kV, 25 Hz. One of the first com-
panies to use Niagara’s electric energy
was the Reduction Company of Charles
Martin Hall (1863–1914), later ALCOA,
which needed huge amounts of energy
for their cheap electrolytic production
of aluminum. Two years later, the pow-
er station was upgraded with the 11-kV
three-phase line supplying Buffalo, at a
distance of 32 km. GE provided step-up
transformers, while the ten new alter-
nators rated at a total of 36 MW were
designed by Tesla and provided by
Westinghouse. It was by far the largest
power plant ever built and established
the supremacy of poly-phase ac. The
Niagara power station was expanded
and enhanced in 1902 and subsequently
provided a fifth of the electricity pro-
duced in the United States.
At that time, the Edison Compa-
nies were also widely exploiting the ac
market. In 1898, Italian Edison put into
service the three-phase power plant at
Paderno d’Adda, which supplied Milan,
(continued on page 59)
 new activities for students, such as
competitions, technical seminars, etc.,
and promoting new IEEE memberships
and Member grade elevations.
Message from the President
Although Africa belongs to IEEE Re-
gion 8, it is a continent in which many
emerging countries are able to orga-
nize conferences that meet interna-
tional standards, and the IES must take
advantage of this. As IES president, I
have recently been asked to give a key-
note lecture at the National Conference
on Energy & Water, which will be held
in Luanda, Angola, at the end of 2013.
Angola is another country that has re-
cently been in touch with the IEEE.
The Middle East is another part
of the world where the IES will have
to go more frequently in the future. I
have recently been approached by
colleagues from Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
and the United Arab Emirates who are
willing to organize small- to medium-
sized conferences in their countries.
The industry is there (mainly because
of the oil), and academia is present as
well with many international universi-
ties being raised by prestigious insti-
tutions (MIT, Texas A&M, and more).
Their students are at the level of inter-
national standards, and the universi-
ties have a decent amount of research
activity. The IES has participated in
Historical
(continued from page 54)
providing 9 MW at 42 Hz by means of
seven BBC alternators with an output
voltage of 13.5 kV (a record at the time)
and no step-up transformer. It was the
largest ever made in Europe and start-
ed a season of exploitation of the large
hydro resources of the Alps, upon which
the industrial growth of cities in north-
ern Italy largely depended. A strong fos-
terage to the development of polyphase
ac systems in the following years came
from German-born engineer Charles
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Further information related to the
activities of the IAS/IES Joint Chapter of
the IEEE CS Section can be found on the
Web site: www.ieee.uniza.sk.
(continued from page 3)
a couple of international workshops
in the Middle East, but it is clear that
we can do more by building a real IES
community in this region.
Last but not least, the IES has many
members in South and Central Amer-
ica, but we do not visit these places
frequently enough. Although IES con-
ferences have been held in these coun-
tries, such as ISIE 2003 in Brazil and
ICIT 2010 in Chile, it is important to visit
these countries on a more regular basis.
Moreover, due to the large number of
universities and high-tech companies
(especially in Brazil), there is a great
need to build another IES community in
this area. I have recently received many
requests from Brazil and from Mexico,
where other Societies have implement-
ed strong links, but in which the IES is
still in the starting blocks.
Finally, there is a tremendous future
for industrial electronics in Southeast
Asia. We already have strong communi-
ties in Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Aus-
tralia, but none in China (unfortunately)
and none in the surrounding countries.
Considering the technical potential of
these countries and the interest of the
Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923), who
entered GE in 1893 and developed math-
ematical models that greatly helped the
study and design of ac systems.
As already stated, the dc systems re-
sisted in the following decades but con-
tinued to occupy a minority position.
New impetus came in the 1940s, thanks
to the development of HV mercury-arc
rectifiers, which made early modern
HVDC lines possible. Today, power
electronics have advanced to a much
june 2013  ■  IEEE industrial electronics magazine  59
—Executive Board of the IAS/IES
Joint Chapter of the IEEE CS Section
IEEE in reaching them, the IES has to
quickly move forward to fill these gaps.
In ten years, it will really be too late.
Conclusion
Considering our international charac-
ter, our versatility, and our great poten-
tial [2], the IES must be present in all
parts of the world and not only in the
places where it has the most members.
This is a natural trend for future devel-
opment. In my opinion, building com-
munities everywhere is the only way to
reach these objectives. In some places,
students will be vectors of this con-
struction by launching Student Branch-
es and Student Chapters. In some other
places, academia will be the place in
which friends and colleagues will relay
IES activities. Somewhere else, the local
industry might be the motor of IES de-
velopment. This is the diversity of the
IEEE!
References
[1] G. A. Capolino, “IES and its numerous confer-
ences to the service of members,” IEEE Ind.
Electron. Mag., vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 3, 55, 2012.
[2] G. A. Capolino, “IES—Among the top of all IEEE
societies,” IEEE Ind. Electron. Mag., vol. 6, no. 4,
pp. 3–4, 2012.
greater extent, new scenarios of power
generation have emerged from renew-
able power sources, and the intelligent
management of power grids has origi-
nated from information and communi-
cation technology. A new age of power
transmission is close to spreading.
References
[1] M. Guarnieri, “The beginning of electric ener-
gy transmission: Part One,” IEEE Ind. Electron.
Mag., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 50–52, Mar. 2013.