Wouldn't using AC to power a lamp result in flickering?

[anorlunda]

I think the silicon-iron alloys used then could have worked well at twice that frequency which would have been both good news and bad news. The good news would have been smaller lighter transformers and the bad news would have been a mains hum becoming an unpopular bumble-bee buzz everywhere.

The other bad news would be the series reactance of all transmission lines.

The Russians did a study in the 70's. They concluded that if everything started from scratch, 100 Hz would be the optimum. But nobody cared about the study because there is no thought of starting from scratch.

 

[AirSeeder]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold

I could see flicker on Apple II monitors, back in the day, if I sat sideways to the monitor and stared straight ahead. This was with 60 Hz Canadian power. Point 5 in the Wikipedia article probably explains it.

 

[John Green]

I remember reading an article back around 1962 or 63 in Electronics Illustrated magazine detailing how to build a light communications project using an ordinary incandescent flashlight (PR-2 bulb) buck boosted by an audio amplifier, My brother and I cobbled together a home built amplifier and tested it using a telescope and a cut open transistor as the photoelectric element. we were able to transmit recognisable music several hundred feet. I was very surprised at the frequency response of the system,

 

[george brack]

I remember many years ago (60's) at a large engineering works that machine shops had to be wired in 3 phase when lit with fluorescent lights with no adjacent
light on the same phase.This was to prevent a stroboscopic effect on rotating machinery which could make a fast rotating chuck on a lathe for instance appear stationary or slow moving.

 

[Mark Harder]

I once wired a resistive optical sensor in series with a 1.5V battery and the microphone input of a cheap tape recorder to search for any interesting sounds ambient light might make. It was in a city, so no matter where I pointed the thing, all I could hear was the '60 cycle' (actually 120 Hz) hum. I thought that surely the filaments of incandescents would stay hot between the half-cycles and average out the oscillating current. But turning on the indoor lights created the loudest buzz of all. Replacing the optical sensor with a plain resistor eliminated the buzz, so the source of the hum was not currents induced by the home wiring.