WI: Faraday invents AC in the 1830's?

Faraday Cage

Faraday invents alternating current in the 1830's

It takes 20 years for an industry to fully develop

High historical inertia

Civil War occurs in 1860's as in OTL

1. electrification is big in the South in a way factorization was not

2. the industrial boom of electricity in the South created more free blacks and laws for the human treatment of slaves in many states

3. the electrification of the South helps it to better resist the North, giving more time for black Confederate regiments to be formed

4. the Civil War ends with the North successful but Southerners feeling closer, rather than farther apart, to their black neighbors. Southern blacks are also just as likely to be skilled workers as field hands and make up in technical training what they have been lacking in classical education. Less African Americans immigrate North to the big cities and instead work to rebuild and to build up the cities of the South. Conflict in the South is more likely to be regional (Appalachian "backstabbers" versus Dixie-landers) than racial.

5. Appalachian areas are even more resistant to change than in OTL, with West Virginia miner riots much worst and little to no industrial buildup in parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee unlike the rest of the South which grows to rival the North.

6. Due to bastion of support in Appalachia, diffuse socialist and anarchist movements in the United States put up more of a fight against unionbusters. This leads to more and more violent confrontations from the Wild West to the early 1900's W.Va. miner revolts to the homefront communism of the 1930's during the Great Depression, starting with Appalachian participation in the Haymarket affair in the 1880's (the longer war is made up for in the shortened time to industrialize.

7. Wobblies ride this notoriety to maintained prominence and large membership throughout the forties, fifties, and up to the sixties where they influence the anti-war counter-cultural movement and are in turn influenced.

8. Thus Hippie and Hillbilly are seen as similar as often as not, rather than antithetical and results in seventies movement revivalist communes in Appalachia many of which are raided by the federal government - prolonging the countercultural "war" at home longer than in OTL.

9. This spirals into the war on drugs as marijuana and opium farms in the Appalachians are attacked in the late seventies and the eighties.

10. The careers of liberal hillbilly Willie Nelson and Southern liberal Bill Clinton are even more successful than in OTL due to more supporters and the mainstream anxiety against hipbillies having died out by the nineties.

11. The Hipbilly archetype and the archetype of the African-American Technician are alive and strong in TTL.

12. Technology overall is more advanced in TTL worldwide than in OTL.
 
Faraday invents alternating current in the 1830's. It takes 20 years for an industry to fully develop.


Faraday Cage,

Who invents the transformer? The mercury vapor valve? And how do they do so with 1830 - 1850 materials technology?

1. electrification is big in the South in a way factorization was not.

Factorization? Huh? Are referring to "dispersed" industry? No River Rouge or Homestead but scattered smaller facilities? No one has stumbled across the idea of economy of scale?

Speaking of industry, how is you're "un-factorized" South going to make or import the millions of kilometers of wire it's dispersed electrified economy requires? How is the South going to create or import the electricity to flow down those wires? How is the South going to create or import the tens of thousands of motors, generators, transformers, and other equipment the electrified economy will require?

You might be interested in this thread.


Bill
 

Faraday Cage

The idea being the South has 20 unblockaded years to adopt the picturesque technology of electrification.
 
The idea being the South has 20 unblockaded years to adopt the picturesque technology of electrification.


Faraday Cage,

Electrification is only "picturesque" when you don't live next to the power plant or under the transmission lines.

Again, how have all those millions of kilometers of wire been made? Not mention all the other heavy equipment.


Bill
 

Faraday Cage

It's a general working theory that it takes 20 years from something (from the train to the internet) to go from rare toy to developed industry/infrastructure.
 
It's a general working theory that it takes 20 years from something (from the train to the internet) to go from rare toy to developed industry/infrastructure.


Faraday Cage,

That's a "general working theory" from the mature Industrial Age and your "precocious electrification" scenario occurs well before that age has even begun.

Rules of thumb are notoriously sloppy, especially with regards to technology. Look at steam engines, they'd been in operation for over a century before their numbers and uses took off in the 1840s.


Bill

P.S. I'm not even going the touch your ideas that, after an 1830s POD, among other things Willie Nelson and Bill Clinton are going to show up.
 
Interesting idea, but once you get 30-40 years beyond the POD, particularly with a different Civil War killing some but sparing others, you're not going to get Willie Nelson or Bill Clinton.
 
The idea being the South has 20 unblockaded years to adopt the picturesque technology of electrification.

Sorry, but this verges on ASB territory. The south has no copper of its own (and in that time, copper mining was just beginning in the US on Michigan's Upper Peninsula in response to the demand for wire for telegraphy). Moreover, the south was overwhelmingly agrarian, so there would be no driving force for electrification, even if Faraday somehow preceded what were Tesla's technological developments in OTL. If anything, the north should benefit far more, yielding greater/more efficient industrialization, which could mean an earlier end to the Civil War and perhaps a Lincolnesque reconstruction.
 
Perhaps the increased demand for copper wire to fuel AC means increased development of US copper reserves and more copper imports from abroad?

Those things will have effects of their own.

Of course, getting a workable AC unit using 1830s tech--even if it's just a "rich man's toy"--is going to be tricky.
 
Who invents the transformer? The mercury vapor valve? And how do they do so with 1830 - 1850 materials technology?

You can use bees wax, fabric or paraffin as insulators. The devices will be large and inefficient, but will provide the incentive for faster developments in industrial chemistry.
 

Faraday Cage

Faraday Cage,

That's a "general working theory" from the mature Industrial Age and your "precocious electrification" scenario occurs well before that age has even begun.

Rules of thumb are notoriously sloppy, especially with regards to technology. Look at steam engines, they'd been in operation for over a century before their numbers and uses took off in the 1840s.


Bill

P.S. I'm not even going the touch your ideas that, after an 1830s POD, among other things Willie Nelson and Bill Clinton are going to show up.


That's what High Historical Inertia means (low butterflies). It's a no Weirdness, High Inertia (like timelines where Vinland has it's own Ben Franklin of sorts) scenario where the counterfactual trends like Hipbillies are set off by a Point of Divergence, the Faradayan AC (which I heard somewhere was a possibility, something that very well could have happened).
 
You can use bees wax, fabric or paraffin as insulators.


Mark,

A device using beeswax or paraffin that performs the same AC-DC rectification as the mercury vapor valve? So, but no.

The devices will be large and inefficient...

Neither large or inefficient. Try impossible instead.

... but will provide the incentive for faster developments in industrial chemistry.

A failure to achieve the AC-DC rectification required for industrial sized electrical motors will spark innovations and advances in an entirely different industry? Sure. Whatever.


Bill
 
That's what High Historical Inertia means...


Faraday Cage,

So High Inertia is another term for Lazy Thinking?

Any 1830s POD would result in an entirely different Civil War, let alone the birth of Willie Nelson or Bill Clinton.

Industrial useful AC power in the 1830s/40s era is borderline ASB. Having Nelson and Clinton still born after an 1830s POD is definitely ASB.


Bill
 
When we mean AC, do we mean "alternating current"?

When I first looked at this thread, I thought it meant air conditioning. I guess my brain mustn't have been working too well that day.
 
Mark,
A device using beeswax or paraffin that performs the same AC-DC rectification as the mercury vapor valve? So, but no.

I do not suggest that a crude device takes the place of the mercury vapor rectifier. That rectifier was invented in 1902; the AC induction motor was patented in 1888. So, there is time for developments in AC without large scale industrial rectification.

The issue with this thread is that it starts with a plausible statement: Faraday invents/develops AC. Then it moves into a time line of "historical inertia" that is ambitiously implausible.

Let's start with the premise of Faraday and AC. Suppose our POD is in the 1830's when a young and creative lab assistant works with Faraday. I will nickname the assistant "Sherlock" because he is wise beyond his years. Sherlock has the curiosity and creativity of Nikola Tesla, but is constrained by the science of his time. Suppose Faraday and Sherlock work together to produce of working AC components, using the materials available at the time. The devices are not yet industrially practical, but prototypes make their way to demonstrations in London, Paris, Boston, etc. by the 1850's.

I can not see an impact on the American Civil War, and I certainly do not see the electrification of the American South. But I can see a chain of inventions and refinements that can shave 20-30 years off of the deployment of electricity in science and industry.
 
When we mean AC, do we mean "alternating current"?

When I first looked at this thread, I thought it meant air conditioning. I guess my brain mustn't have been working too well that day.

I believe the first artificial refrigeration was actually invented before 1850. It utilized a compressed air/brine system that was far too inefficient to be practical, but it did work.
 
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