"Lawrence DčOliveiro" wrote in message
...
| I heard that Tesla wanted mains frequencies to be around 300-400Hz for
| this reason. I think the engineers who built the early power plants
| (Edison?) felt this was impractical because they couldn't build big AC
| generators that could spin that fast.
See the "War of the Currents" for more on Thomas Edison versus Nikola Tesla.
There were some Canadian and US systems (esp. powered from Niagara) that
used 25 cycle but it's pretty much all 50 or 60 Hz now. The higher the
frequency the lighter the magnetics but the greater the losses.
N
http://www.antiquewireless.org/otb/60cycles.htm