The conscious reader 12th edition preview

Cohn investigates major challenges and major breakthroughs but also the hidden aspects of our electricity infrastructure, both technical and human. To do so, she consulted sources that range from the pages of historical trade journals to corporate archives to the papers of her father, Nathan Cohn, who worked in the industry from 1927 to 1989-roughly the period of key power control innovations across North America. She focuses on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid-in fact made up of four major networks of interconnected power systems-paying particular attention to the work of engineers and system operators who handled the everyday operations. In this book, Julie Cohn tells the history of the grid, from early linkages in the 1890s through the grid's maturity as a networked infrastructure in the 1980s. The grid connects nearly every living soul on the continent Americans rely utterly on the miracle of electrification. The North American power grid has been called the world's largest machine. The history of the grid, the world's largest interconnected power machine that is North America's electricity infrastructure. The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified World.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Edited by Louis Galambos and Geoffrey Jones. At a moment when energy issues loom large on the nation's agenda and our hunger for electricity grows, The Grid is as timely as it is compelling.Д¬ambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise. As we get more and more dependent on electricity to perform even the most mundane daily tasks, the grid's inevitable shortcomings will take a toll on populations around the globe. The Grid is the first history of the electrical grid intended for general readers, and it comes at a time when we badly need such a guide. And these two combined don't even compare to the 2001 outage in India, which affected 226 million people. Just look at the colossal 2003 blackout, when 50 million Americans lost power due to a simple error at a power plant in Ohio or the one a month later, which blacked out 57 million Italians. Things can-and do-go wrong in this system, no matter how many preventive steps we take. Constructed of intricately interdependent components, the grid operates on a rapidly shrinking margin for error.

At times, it almost seems alive, like some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big cities and the most remote rural areas. It reaches into your home, snakes its way to your bedroom, and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow. Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy of Engineering, the electrical grid is the largest industrial investment in the history of humankind.

Yet the system is built in such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its collapse. The electrical grid goes everywhere-it's the largest and most complex machine ever made.

The conscious reader 12th edition preview