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Aug. 14, 1888: I Sing the Meter Electric

1888: Oliver B. Shallenberger receives a patent for the electric meter. There's no free lunch. You'll get an electric bill.

When Thomas Edison started selling electricity for illumination in 1882, he charged per lamp. He soon replaced that with a complicated chemical ampere-hour meter.

It was an electrolytic jar with two zinc plates immersed in a zinc-sulfate solution. Electricity flowing through the jar dissolved zinc off the positive plate and deposited it on the negative plate. Workers had to remove the electrodes every month and weigh them to see how much zinc had been transferred from one plate to the other.

It was messy, it was inefficient, and it wasn't very accurate. Even though Edison also developed a motor-type meter, his interest in chemistry caused him to prefer the chemical version. Blind spot.

Electrical polymath Elihu Thomson devised a walking-beam meter in 1888. It was a complicated, Rube Goldberg-type apparatus. A heating element in the circuit warmed a small alcohol-filled bottle on a seesaw lever. The alcohol warmed, evaporated and flowed into a matching bottle on the other side. When there was more alcohol in the opposite bottle, it would sink and up start heating up to reverse the process. Each time the bottles rocked, they ticked off a notch on the meter. Not exactly a robust design.

Shallenberger was an Annapolis graduate who left the Navy in 1884 to join the Westinghouse company. He was working on a new arc lamp one day in 1888, when a spring fell out and landed on a ledge inside the lamp. Before an assistant could reach in to replace it, the ever-observant Shallenberger noticed the spring had rotated.

He soon determined that the lamp's rotating electric fields had caused the spring to turn. Shallenberger realized he could use the effect to turn wheels in a meter to measure electrical charge. Not only could he use it, he did ... and built an alternating-current ampere-hour meter in just three weeks.

The Shallenberger meter was a key part of George Westinghouse's AC electrical system. (Nikola Tesla later pointed out to Shallenberger that the induction meter was a type of AC motor.)

The meter went into commercial use within months, selling 120,000 units in 10 years. The ampere is a measure of current, and the ampere-hour a measure of charge. So power companies that used these meters charged by the charge.

Thomson invented a commutator watt-hour meter (that measured the energy consumed), also in 1888, and brought it to market the following year. It worked on both alternating- and direct-current systems, but fell by the wayside in the late 1890s when the induction watt-hour meter came into general use, where it remains to this day.

Source: Dave's Old Watthour Meter Webpage

14.08.2008 06:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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'True Dungeon' Lures Would-Be Dragon Slayers

This week, in a hotel ballroom in Indianapolis, hundreds will die.

They'll come from all walks of life -- wizards and warriors, rogues and rangers. Some will be brought down by insidious traps, others will succumb to deadly spells. A few will merely be beaten to death.

It all depends on how they face up to the imagination of Jeff Martin, the creator of a real-life role-playing adventure called True Dungeon.

Each year at Gen Con Indy, a massive gaming convention held in Indianapolis, Martin and a cadre of volunteers assemble a life-size dungeon, complete with traps, monsters and treasure. More than 3,000 people -- some dressed for the part -- take on the role of a fantasy adventurer and travel through the dungeon each year, attempting to avoid traps, defeat monsters and claim treasure.

From the 6,000 hand-carved stones that make up the walls to True Dungeon's immersive sound effects, Martin strives to provide the ambiance of a classic fantasy dungeon. Some monsters are portrayed by volunteers in makeup, while others are sculpted creations or animatronic puppets. Martin adds more detail and complexity each year, within the limits of the space available.

"Right now we're in a 22,000-square-foot ballroom," says Martin. "The largest ballroom in Indiana actually, and we're squished."

True Dungeon is the closest that most Dungeons and Dragons fans will get to a real-life dungeon-crawling campaign, and in the five years since it first thrilled Gen Con attendees, the walk-through game has become the single most popular event at one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world.

It all started in the late '90s when Martin dreamed up a private event that he put on in a tiny hotel room.

"I was having a weekend get-together with some friends once a year, and I wanted to make it something really cool and special," says Martin. "Eventually it got to the point where I started building whole fake rooms inside of a hotel suite just to increase the fun for my friends."

In time, Gen Con CEO Peter Adkinson made the guest list. "I was introduced by a mutual friend," says Adkinson. "He said, 'You've got to check out what this guy's done.' It was amazing." Adkinson was so impressed that he helped Martin bring his creation to the gaming convention in 2003.

Gen Con veteran Cate Hirschbiel has gone through True Dungeon three times and has tickets for a fourth run.

"It's unlike any other event at Gen Con," says Hirschbiel. "It's such a rush when you play. I'm just pumped up for hours afterwards."

While waiting to enter True Dungeon, players can relax in the starting area, a fantasy tavern complete with cash bar and simulated brawls.

Once their turn comes up, players are given a chance to practice the particular roles of their character type. Rogues, for instance, have to manipulate a metal bar through a touch-sensitive maze to disable traps, while wizards must memorize the locations of various otherworldly planes of power.

Combat is handled not with swords and shields, but with a game of skill similar to shuffleboard, sliding discs toward a target to see whether they hit the enemy and how much damage they do. Other challenges involve props, such as a spider web that traps adventurers or monsters that menace players.

"We wanted to make it as visceral and real as we could, while still keeping it safe," says Martin. "We try to make everything a real-world challenge instead of rolling dice for combat."

In one past challenge, adventurers entered a room and saw the shadow of an obviously female form behind a curtain. Those who were too busy looking below the neck to notice the snakes in her hair had a chance to be turned to stone when the occupant was revealed to be a Medusa.

The adventurers aren't the only ones enjoying the experience. Lydia Laurenson, a True Dungeon volunteer, played a dark elf priestess in a past dungeon.

"It's the best thing ever," she says. "There was lots of role-playing involved, and I played it to the hilt. I got to be vicious and bitchy but also have fun with it."

For many players, the experience goes beyond the event itself. Players earn treasure tokens that they can keep and bring back next time. They also earn experience points that add to their in-game power in subsequent years.

For those who have acquired enough personal power to make the standard dungeon too easy, Martin provides "nightmare mode," a stepped-up version of the dungeon with fewer clues and more treacherous battles.

Chris Bradley, who played for the first time last year and is coming back for more, sums up True Dungeon's appeal.

"It's awesome," says Bradley. "It's like life-sized D&D."

Gen Con Indy runs Thursday through Sunday at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis.

14.08.2008 06:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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Gallery: Measuring the History of Electricity

: Photo: mtowber/flickr

The invention of the electric meter made it possible to bill customers for electricity, creating the incentive to build out the nation's first network for moving electrons. The Grid, the system of dumb, buzzing wires that allows power to move across the country, is so important, it topped the National Academy of Engineering's top 20 triumphs of the 20th century.

This gallery tours the history -- and future -- of making you pay for juice. Some time within the next few years, you're likely to get a new type of so-called "smart meter" that will mark the first real upgrade to electrical billing since your grandparents were born.

Until the 1870s, electrical power wasn't used for much aside from telegraphs and telephones. But after the Edison's improvement of the incandescent light bulb, power was suddenly much more useful. The problem was, the few metering systems that tinkerers had built up until that time didn't actually work.

So Edison resorted to a low-tech method: He charged for electricity on a per-lamp basis. In modern business model terms, Edison was giving away the blades to sell the razor. He would not have received venture capital for that idea.

: Photo: Great Beyond/Flickr

Throughout the 1880s, various inventors thought hard about the problem of how to measure the flow of electrons through time. Edison himself tried a two-electrode chemical system in which your charge was determined by how much zinc moved from one electrode to another. Workers actually had to weigh the electrodes to determine the price you paid.

Elihu Thomson developed a walking-beam meter that functioned quite like toy dunking birds (left). The heating and cooling of alcohol inside a pair of bottles caused a periodic liquid exchange that caused the bottles to rock back and forth. And that mechanical motion is what the meter measured. It was an excellent hack, but it couldn't scale.

: Iimage: Library of Congress

By 1888, a major, long-lasting dispute within the power industry was on the verge of getting settled. Edison had been promoting the use of direct-current power, despite the difficulty that the technology encountered transmitting electricity over long distances and changing the voltage. Both problems limited the uses of electricity.

George Westinghouse, meanwhile, purchased a patent for a transformer that could increase the voltage of alternating-current power. With a working transformer, his company, Westinghouse Electric, was able to send power over long distances, allowing for larger, centralized power-generating stations. These stations could power factories as well as your great-grandfather's school reading lamp.

But they needed to bill for it. And that's where Westinghouse employee Oliver Shallenberger came in. His design (left) paved the way for Westinghouse to purchase a patent from Nikola Tesla for an improved AC system. The modern electrical grid was about to take root.

: Photo: Library of Congress

With early success fueling investment in the electrical sector, a variety of new technologies began to converge to create the standard model for electrical generation and distribution in the United States.

Through the 1890s, various iterations of the induction watt-hour meter were becoming standard technology. These meters measure the number of rotations that a metal disk makes in response to magnetic flux within the meter. The amount of power is proportional to the speed of the disk's revolution, so the meter can accurately measure a range of energy usage levels. In most places, this is still how your company knows how much power your home or business is drawing.

Meanwhile, transmission-line technologists were steadily upping the voltage of the power lines running from ever-large power plants, like this one, to increasingly large cities filled with more and more electricity users. The higher the voltage, the better the quality of transmission over distance.

By the 1920s, the percentage of two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and three-quarters of factories used electricity to power their motors.

: Image: Edison Electric Institute

During the Great Depression, the government began to regulate private utilities and push for getting electricity to rural areas far from urban centers through agencies like the Rural Electrification Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Edison Electric Institute Bulletin had a special issue in 1942 on "entering the seventh decade of electric power." By this time, almost all Americans had access to cheap and reliable electric power, but many could remember a time when they didn't.

The horsepower available to factory workers had increased from about 3 in 1914 to 6.5 in 1942, with most of the increase coming from purchased electrical power. As one professor chillingly put it, engineering advances had made 6 billion "manpower" available to the country, "equivalent to 50 slaves for each man, woman, and child."

: Photo: Library of Congress

With most of the metering and transmission infrastructure in place, all electrical companies had to do was make as much power as cheaply as possible. And that's all they did. Innovation in transmission and metering largely stopped. This 1940s meter technician would probably understand most meters in use today.

Most capital investment went to building power plants that could exploit the nation's ready source of cheap energy: coal. In 1949, only 84 million tons of coal wer used for electrical power production. By 1970, coal consumption by the power industry had nearly quadrupled to 320 million tons per year. Last year, American utilities burned about 1.05 billion tons of coal to make electricity.

: Photo: Slightlynorth/flickr

The golden age of cheap power came to an end some time in the last decade. Coal, which made electricity cheap and abundant, also happens to generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. It's widely expected that the next president will sign a law that will tax carbon dioxide emissions, as is already the case in many places around the world.

The specter of energy regulation and rising natural gas, coal and petroleum prices has raised interest in new emission-free technologies like wind turbines and solar power. But the adoption of these technologies isn't as simple as it sounds. Both wind and solar -- which are abundant and clean -- will require substantial changes to the nation's transmission and billing systems.

Wind and solar, unlike coal, do not produce power at the same rate at all times. If they are adopted at scale, the grid infrastructure and the meters like this one will have to be much more flexible than what we built 100 years ago.

Power generation has been centralized since the very early days of the industry, but now, wind and solar open the possibility to generate power right on or near your home. But to make economic sense, we need meters and grid tie-ins that can easily accomplish this type of "reverse billing".

: Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

So, we find ourselves in a new era of electric meter innovation. A host of companies is trying to find just the right mix of features that will satisfy utilities and provide consumers with more flexibility in how they make, buy and use power.

Like everything else in the internet age, electricity-billing systems are about to make the transition from a centralized, one-way mode of operation to two-way systems that are connected to the internet. In addition to the back-end differences, the next generation of meters has received a facelift that will let consumers see their energy usage in near real-time.

Of course, people have been talking about "smart meters" for years. But after years of delayed rollouts, utilities finally appear ready to scale them up.

This electronic meter from Tendril is slated for a massive rollout with five major utilities that the company says will reach 2 million homes.

14.08.2008 03:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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Get Started With Firebug, Firefox's 'Killer App' for Web Developers

On the surface, the Firebug extension for the Firefox browser is a simple page inspector. But lift the the hood and you'll find a powerful code debugger and a variety of site-testing tools. Best of all, Firebug is just as extensible as the browser it plugs in to. Web developers can start cleaning up their code by following Webmonkey's introductory guide to all things Firebug.

14.08.2008 02:30:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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Go From A2B on an Electric Bike, Praying the Battery Doesn't Die

Ultra Motor joins the e-bike peloton with a 73-pounder that goes 20 miles on a charge and costs $2,500.

13.08.2008 23:16:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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Stream Your Music Library to a Stereo with Squeezebox

In the old days, the closest you would get to streaming your music from one room to another would be to turn the volume all the way to 11. These days, we have devices like Squeezebox to network your music collection and make it accessible to any stereo in the house.

13.08.2008 23:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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Experts Accuse Bush Administration of Foot-Dragging on DNS Security Hole

The internet remains vulnerable to a spoofing attack recently discovered by security expert Dan Kaminsky. The only real solution is to digitally sign the DNS root zone, but security experts say politics in the Department of Commerce are slowing the effort and endangering the trustworthiness of the net.

13.08.2008 21:45:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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The Military Wants to Control Your Mind

The military is studying ways to use neuroscience to gain an advantage, including mind reading, mind control and brain enhancement.

13.08.2008 21:16:08 - Wired: Top Stories

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Disqus Poised to Rule the World of Blog Comments

The blog-commenting system Disqus, which merges the worlds of web publishing and social networking, is quickly gaining kudos in the blogosphere. A new version released Tuesday adds some attractive new features, like tighter integration with WordPress and the ability for commenters to track replies or follow friends.

13.08.2008 21:00:00 - Wired: Top Stories

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34,520 People (and Counting) Want a Chevrolet Volt

The Volt's No. 1 fanboy has compiled a list of prospective buyers in 60 countries who together would spend $258 million to have one of the range-extended electric vehicles in their driveways.

13.08.2008 20:48:34 - Wired: Top Stories