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| Subir Roy: The cobweb of wires is clearing |
| Subir Roy / New Delhi Sep 09, 2009, 00:45 IST |
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You know how well planned or chance-created and chance-directed a city is from how much of its wires hang out. When a large village ‘organically’ grows into a small town, its wiring is all over the place. Usually the first to arrive is the power line, strung out from pole to pole, with lesser lines looping into houses. Close on the heels come telephone lines, similarly strung out over poles. You know the difference between the two from the fact that birds rest on one and not the other.
But a planned city is different. Its power and phone lines are usually in its bowels, neatly tucked away and unseen, so that streets have a clear view, unimpeded by the jumble of wires that the non-sahibs among towns have to live with. I grew up in Kolkata where the puccca sahib CESC ran a most efficient distribution system that remained unseen and transformer bursts were unheard of. The state-owned telephone lines similarly remained unseen, though often unheard.
We, the locals, were a little proud that Kolkata, or Calcutta then, was a neat creation of the sahibs, as was Mumbai or Bombay. The overgrown village of Delhi, leaving aside the parts that Lutyens designed, was at the other end of the spectrum, its innards hanging out and lights and phone lines blinking every time there was a storm.
It is when I first visited Tokyo that I realised that there could be an exception to the rule that a modern urban space was as built up above the ground as underneath. Tokyo, which buzzed with the latest electronic gizmos, nevertheless had a maze of exposed wires strung along its many narrow streets. But it redeemed itself by still offering the most reliable power and phone services.
When Kolkata declined, what was supposed to remain under the surface, like storm water, ventured overground and a nemesis of sorts came when its much vaunted power system simply abdicated, driven away by hours of power cuts. The only consolation was that all over the country something similar was happening. As urban India grew, it did so in the most haphazard fashion, with turned out wires and overflowing gutters to boot.
This progress with a queered pitch got worse when cable TV came, adding to the jumble and jungle of wires visible all round. If the phone and power lines followed at least some discipline by keeping to the side of the roads, the cable of cable TV had no such compunction, jumping from roof to roof and sneaking in and out of windows. About the same time, as the power shortage got worse and air-conditioners grabbed a chunk of the load, transformer bursts and snapped wires with accompanied accidents proliferated across India. Urban India had, it seemed, permanently lost its way.
But then the goddess of knowledge and the god of technology brought deliverance in small measure. The phone wires stopped growing although the number of phone subscribers jumped. The wireless mobile phone had arrived all over the country. Kolkata, where phone connections regularly went kaput every time it rained and water got into the cable ducts, breathed a sigh of relief.
Great as this was, technology decided to be kinder still. Cable TV is now rapidly giving way to the dish antenna and Direct to Home (DTH) broadcasting. Soon, going by the way DTH broadcasting is spreading even to the countryside, the tangled mess of wires delivering cable TV will be swept away much like the cobwebs that are cleared when home owners wake up to their carelessness.
But technology is not satisfied even with such progress. The day of wireless power supply is coming! It has still not arrived, except in very small ways, but there is no question which way the wind is blowing. Eventually, you will not even need to recharge your wireless phones. Wireless energy transmission, still mostly residing in laboratories, will come in three avatars — short, medium and long range.
In the short range, transmission takes place through inductive coupling. By passing current through a wire you generate a magnetic field which creates current in another wire passing near it. The RFID (radio frequency identification) tag or electric toothbrush, both now a reality, use this technology.
Medium-range energy transmission, thought up by a group of engineers at MIT, takes place through resonant induction, and works upto about 7 feet. For this the principles of magnetic induction and resonance are combined and power is transmitted between two resonating coils. Everything resonates and energy transmits between resonating objects, as when an opera singer shatters a glass by striking a powerful note. Await the day when a coil hanging from the roof will power all the devices in a room and you will throw away both wires and batteries.
Now come to the marvel of long-range energy transmission through microwave -— by sending energy through the atmosphere via microwaves. Transmitting power through space may one day exit from between the covers of science fiction novels and become a reality.
All this is quite far away but wireless power will come one day and clear away the remaining cobwebs that still clutter our vision. But no solution is in sight for the clutter and confusion in the wires within our brain that is home to so much muddled thinking.
subir.roy@bsmail.in
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