How
do we get this current to drive our appliances??
Answers
Explanation:
One of the most significant battles of the 19th century was fought not over land or resources but to establish the type of electricity that powers our buildings.
At the very end of the 1800s, American electrical pioneer Thomas Edison (1847–1931) went out of his way to demonstrate that direct current (DC) was a better way to supply electrical power than alternating current (AC), a system backed by his arch-rival Nikola Tesla (1856–1943). Edison tried all kinds of devious ways to convince people that AC was too dangerous, from electrocuting an elephant to (rather cunningly) supporting the use of AC in the electric chair for administering the death penalty. Even so, Tesla's system won the day and the world has pretty much run on AC power ever since.
The only trouble is, though many of our appliances are designed to work with AC, small-scale power generators often produce DC. That means if you want to run something like an AC-powered gadget from a DC car battery in a mobile home, you need a device that will convert DC to AC—an inverter, as it's called. Let's take a closer look at these gadgets and find out how they work!
Photo: A selection of electricity inverters