> They were disposed to adopt 50 cycles, but American arc light carbons then available commercially did not give good results at that frequency and this was an important feature which led them to go higher
If I read your source correctly, there is no real advantage of 60 Hertz or 50 Hertz, and the decision was usually due to circumstantial reasons, like supporting some existing arc-lights or difficulties with induction motors. Induction motors are also the reason why some railways chose to use 16⅔ Hertz, still in use to this day.
In the end, there is no real difference between 50 or 60 Hz, there is no clear advantage to either, especially with modern components. But you do have to choose as the whole network is synchronous.
60 is the easier one, in that you can divide it by 3/4/6/12 and have an integer frequency. Probably the reason why a lot of Babylonian math used base 60, which is where our time and angle measurements come from.
60 is easier to factor, but that's kind of irrelevant when most AC formulas use frequency as a multiplicator. 0.02 is easier to multiply than 0.016667 (though at the end of the day, it doesnt really matter, because pi is used in most of the equations, so it ends up irrational anyway)
Pi (and e) are not only irrational numbers (not fractions) but also transcendental numbers (non-algebraic numbers meaning not roots of polynomials with rational coefficients).
So, even messier for dealing with than, say, square root of two (irrational and algebraic) or square root of minus one (algebraic).
50 and 60Hz were about equal in transmission efficiency but in 1891 Westinghouse engineers decided 60Hz produced less perceptible flickering in light sources.
A better question is why does Japan use Both 60 Hz and 50 Hz in different areas? And that’s really just a legacy from early decisions at different companies when the grid was first introduced, and there’s never been a sufficiently compelling reason for either to swap.
60 Hz is slightly better in terms of flickering, but neither has enough advantages to really be a determining factor on their own.
Isn't this a side effect of one area of Japan building their electrical grid with components from British manufactures while the other used American-made components?
Sir Adam Beck #1 ten 25 Hz generating units were converted
to 60 Hz or modified as follows:
Units 9 and 10 to 60 Hz in 1956
Unit 3 to 60 Hz in 1970
Unit 4 to 60 Hz in 1984
Unit 5 to 60 Hz in 1985
Unit 8 to 60 Hz in 1990
Unit 6 to 60 Hz in 1996
Unit 7 to 60 Hz in 2009
Yep, the government had to go house-by-house, building-by-building replacing all electrically powered devices that could not be adapted. Thankfully it also happened early in the era of electronic devices.
it's substantially easier to run modern electronics off random frequency power than other stuff like an induction motor. A typical power supply is rated for 47 Hz- 63 Hz. But it'll happily run off almost anything higher than 10 hz and lower than 1000 hz.
universal motors in particular do not care at all about frequency
oh wow, 25 Hz was supplied to homes? I know New Orleans still has some pumps that run on some oddball frequency. It's part of the reason why they never work during the storms (when you need them). The "grid" is just a set of colocated generation sets
Things are the way they are because they got that way over time.
Civil infrastructure is legacy systems all the way down. Once a choice is made, it's hard to change. In the city where I am, some of the design decisions date back to the Romans.
"The origins of 60-Hz as a power frequency" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/628099
Better question is why did Germans pick 50 Hz, I'm not aware of any comparable benefits of having lower frequency