GENERAL ^{[ ]}

Since the late 1970s, the subminiaturization of electric circuits designed for specific logic functions has led to increasingly powerful and versatile computers, computer-activated sensors, and the organization of these units into vast electronic networks that are imparting to the buildings in which they are installed the character of human nervous systems. As a result, today's building electrical systems are undergoing a veritable revolution in design, construction, and operation.

But these advances have a darker side. For these vast computerized networks are often plagued with mysterious losses of power, voltage swells and sags, overheating, humming, lost data, and nuisance tripping of circuit breakers. Obviously there are two revolutions in building systems going on here: one positive, one negative.

The basis for the negative side is twofold: (1) the larger that a building electric system containing computerized components is, the greater the size difference between its largest feeder conductor (the cable or busway leading from the service switchgear to the first laterals) and the smallest conductors in the computerized units (the microscopic filaments in the microprocessor chips); and (2) the filaments in the microchips are not true conductors but metalloid semiconductors (usually silicon) whose electron flow does not obey the normal ohmic laws of conductivity. These two facts and their deleterious effect on modern electrical systems are explained below.

Every wire has a usually cylindrical volume, equal to its section area times its length , which contains a reservoir of electrons. Obviously a long thick wire, such as a...