ABSTRACT
Michael Faraday’s discovery of the concept of continuous generation of electricity was the rst crucial step on the way to large-scale availability of electricity. Converting Faraday’s discovery to a practical working device is credited to several engineers, among them Zénobe Gramme. The generator is, in essence, as shown in Figure 15.1. In this simple generator, the conductor moves through the magnetic eld because we turn it. In other words, we must do work on (or supply energy to) the generator, for which we therefore have the “reverse energy diagram” shown in Figure 15.2. (Two points to keep in mind regarding these “reverse energy diagrams” are, rst, as the name implies, it is “backward” from the energy diagrams introduced earlier, and, second, both arrows in the diagram have to change direction from one type of energy diagram to the other.) The entire essence of large-scale electric energy generation hinges on nding ways to spin the generator reliably and economically.
