Running Tales on Frequency and Folklore

I often receive letters from college professors expressing some learned opinion or setting forth some arcane theory. Usually, because of the esteem in which I hold academics, I publish their notions without checking them out for veracity, even when they are subject to such a check. (Sometimes the opinions of college professors float free in the void, beyond measurement or authentication.)

The other day I published without verification a charming story from Donald Ward, who identified himself as a UCLA professor, about a power shortage endured by customers of the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. “above the Tehachapis” in 1948.

Because of a severe drought, Prof. Ward recalled, PG&E; sought to save power by reducing the frequency from 60 to 59 cycles per second, with the immediate result that all electric clocks in their service area began losing one minute an hour, 24 minutes a day, thus throwing daily life into a helter-skelter.

Now David J. Simmons of Ridgecrest accuses me of demonstrating that “it is possible to write a column about the general lack of understanding of our technology and illustrate that lack at the same time.”

Simmons says he finds Ward’s story “doubtful in the extreme.” First, he says, all generators in a power distributing system run at the same frequency, whether or not one wants them to. Thus, to lower its frequency, PG&E; would have had to isolate its system from any other system it was connected to and bought power from.

Second, he says, it is not likely that reducing the frequency would have had the desired effect. “The power that a utility generates is only under their indirect control, being more a result of the work that customers are doing such as lighting, running machines, pumping fluids or what have you. . . . In fact, lowering the frequency might very well decrease both efficiency and power factor, which would require more, not less, from PG&E.;”

He adds: “I don’t know how PG&E; actually did meet their shortage, but I’ll give pretty long odds that it wasn’t by changing their frequency.”

I phoned Prof. Ward. “It absolutely happened,” he said. “I was there.” I asked him what department he was in at UCLA. He said Germanic languages and folklore.

I phoned a friend at the Southern California Edison Co. who put me in touch with Bill Myers, Edison historian and author of “Iron Men and Copper Wires,” a centennial history of the company. He said Prof. Ward’s recollection was probably “close to the mark.” His records show that PG&E; did have a severe power shortage that summer.

He says Simmons was quite right that many factors affect the power available within and also the frequency of a power system, and that they are not easily, if at all, controlled by the utility.

But he points out that PG&E; was probably not connected with any other hydroelectric power source in 1948. “Forty years ago, power systems were small enough, and regulating devices were much less sensitive, so that wild swings in voltage, power output, and frequency were quite possible. . . .”

However, he adds, no one at PG&E; would have consciously decided to lower the frequency of the power grid. “They could (and apparently did) decide to ‘shave the voltage’ for brief periods of the day, causing what East Coast residents may recall as a ‘brownout.’ If the power supply situation became serious enough, it is possible that the electrical frequency of the entire PG&E; system, normally at 60 cycles per second (or hertz), could have declined to 59 c.p.s., or even lower.

“This lowering of the system frequency would be unintentional and inadvertent, and would have happened only as an unplanned, and unwanted, side effect of the power shortage. . . .”

He recalled that years ago Edison transmitted power at 50 cycles, and that new customers were puzzled to find that their electric clocks and phonographs ran slow.

Finally, I called PG&E; in San Francisco, and a man named Ron Rutkowski said PG&E; has no records of any such incident in 1948, and none of its present employees has any recollection of it. He says they believe that lowering the frequency would have resulted in “severe machinery damage.”

So is it history, or is it folklore?