I've been reading a book called Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, and it got me interested once again in the history of air conditioning and refrigeration. Like many things, the people who are credited with “inventing” are the ones dogged enough to make an idea commercially successful, not the idealists forever tucked away in the […]

Why is it called single-phase 240 when there are two opposing phases (or legs)? I wondered why we called two 120v opposing legs “single-phase 240” for years. Then someone pointed out to me that a typical “single-phase” pole transformer only has one power leg entering and two coming out. That freaked me out. How can […]

“Isaac Newton” by paukrus is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician born in a small Lincolnshire village called Woolsthorpe in 1642. His father died before he was born, and his mother remarried when Newton was three years old. He stayed with his maternal grandparents thereafter, and his […]