You're joking, but that's kinda how it's done. This motor, for instance:
is 1500 HP and is powered by 4160 volts/3 phase. It drives a wood chipper which will eat a handful of fully-grown trees at a pop without breathing hard. It is fed from semi-trailers of logs via crane and dumps chips directly into railcars.
Here's a closeup of the commutator:
That's something like 500 kCM wire, 4 feeding each phase. I cannot imagine how big that wire would need to be if this were 480v or 220v.
Working on this, in fact, just being in the same building with it, will make you have a new respect for lockout procedures. If anyone is interested, alignments on this are a bear.
