Posted by Tom Napier on March 04, 2012 at 08:22:22 user Didymus.
In Reply to: Re: Beckfoot Lighting and Horning posted by davidm on March 04, 2012 at 08:02:18:
Electricity service would be more a matter of practicality than being "advanced." A row of houses in a village would be easy and cheap to wire up. Connecting Beckfoot to the nearest town with an electricity supply could have required running five miles of poles and wires, not to mention the step-down transformer from the supply voltage to the household 240 volts.
This would have been very expensive and would not even have been possible if the local supply were DC rather than AC. (Technical note: Because of the resistance of the wire the maximum practical distance from DC generator to consumer was about a mile. With AC one can generate and transmit, say, 5500 volts, with negligible losses over twenty miles then step down to 240 V at the house. The suburban house I grew up in had a DC supply until the mid-1950s.)