Short Circuits #5
Supergrid pylons, chicken-based timer switches, Snowy hits the Daylight contingency and a good podcast
A round up of assorted tasty tidbits that caught our fancy.
Supergrids and chicken switches
Dennis Freedman keeps unearthing glorious videos from the Central Electricity Generating Board archives. His latest find is a video from 1956 showing the construction of electricity pylons – better known as transmission towers this side of the world — as part of the high voltage ‘Supergrid’ construction.
One presumes the CEGB hired custom tailors for those dapper construction worker suits, on account of their massive balls.
Speaking of history, Marcel Podstolski unearthed this absolutely glorious story of chickens-as-sensors from the early years of the previous century.
Say you’re an enterprising and slightly eccentric inventor, looking for a way to switch street lights on in 1915, but timer switches haven’t been invented yet1, what would you do?
One possible solution would be to use a switch which relies on the pressure of chickens roosting for the evening to close it, activating the street lights for the evening.
A ingenious solution, but sadly it appears that the technology never took flight.
When it rains, it snows
Speaking of daylight, Snowy 2.0 is back in the news again for the wrong reasons with tunnelling stopped, but this time it’s not Florence!
Workers walked off the job a week ago citing safety concerns around the refuge chambers — emergency chambers situated along the tunnelling route in case of tunnel collapse or loss of air supply.
It’s hard to tell if Snowy 2.0 is actually cursed, or building big things is just much, much harder than most politicians are prepared to admit. But here’s hoping the safety issues can be resolved satisfactorily and Snowy is completed in this decade.
A good podcast
Speaking of government disasters, the most recent episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast is about the 2008 Kingston fly ash spill disaster in Tennessee.
The podcast is about the aftermath of the disaster which saw a number of workers employed by contractor Jacobs die from various cancers after being (repeatedly) lied to about the toxicity of the fly ash. And their decades long fight to receive any kind of compensation. Spoiler alert — it’s not exactly a feel good story.
Beyond the horrors of what the workers were subjected to (both during the clean up work and in the court cases afterwards), the podcast covers some of the background to the disaster, and the owner of the power station – the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The TVA was one of the biggest single projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and was created as a federal government-owned utility to provide electricity, flood control and economic development in the Tennessee Valley – a region which suffered from extensive poverty and lack of infrastructure during (and prior to) the Great Depression.
The TVA is still the largest public utility in the US and stands out among American utilities as one whose history probably looks most similar to the Australian and British electricity commissions — large centralised organisations providing broad social programs beyond just generating electricity.
Highly recommend 99 PI generally, but this was a particularly good episode.
The Millennial Dictionary suggests time switches weren’t invented for another 30 years.
99PI has been one of my favourite podcasts for well over a decade now! It's one of the best for anyone with a passing interest in design (of all types).
🐔 chickens rule!