Pair of Threes

To help you 'over the hump', today I bring you what I feel is a very interesting picture.



What we've got here is a pair of towers that are relaying wires between high tension lines and some sort of power station or transformer (not visible in the image). This is a very interesting pair to me... the insulators (I think that's what they are... the things that look like roto-tiller blades) connecting the wires to the poles are one of my favorite visual motifs in high tension transmission wires, and they're clearly visible here. Interestingly, the two towers are not identical, the one on the right seeming to connect the wires downward through a trio of very interesting looking connectors. They look like the type of thing one sees on the equipment in old Frenkenstein movies.

This brings me to an revelation that I've had in just the half a week I've been shooting images. There is something going on with the number three in all of these transmission towers, both low and high voltage. The wires tend to travel in sets of threes, sometimes with additional single wires joining them (as in the wires extending from the very top of the towers in today's picture. I can't recall learning specifically about this in physics, but I think the wire triplets have something to do with a triple phase shifted alternating current that is used in power transmission. I'm not quite sure how that would work but I think the link must be there.