Niagara: A History of the Falls (26 page)

Chapter Seven

1
Harnessing the waters
2
Tesla
3
The golden age
4
Utopian dreams

1
Harnessing the waters

Early in 1890, Edward Dean Adams, president of the newly formed Cataract Construction Company of Niagara Falls, New York, set off for Europe on a journey of inquiry. The preservation movement had barely achieved its goal, and now a new and antithetical campaign – of which Adams was the spearhead – was under way to put the Niagara River to commercial use. His company was proposing to bore a vast tunnel as much as two hundred feet below the streets of the town of Niagara Falls, with a view to harnessing the waters of the cataract.

This was a daring – some would say foolhardy – project. Even though plans had been drawn up and the first sod was about to be turned, nobody had an idea of how any power that was generated was to be transmitted. Would it be by compressed air? By shafts, belts, and cables? By water pressure? Or could that most newly discovered of all scientific miracles, electricity, be brought into play? That was Adams’s task overseas – to study power transmissions in England and on the continent and to plan a sensible course for an enterprise that was operating blindly, albeit decisively, at Niagara.

With his heavy-lidded eyes and his weak chin, partially disguised by a soup-strainer moustache, Adams was not a prepossessing figure. Yet his background in railway reorganization had given him, at forty-four, an enviable reputation in banking and financial circles. He was seen as a financial wizard and fixer who, among his several accomplishments, had just rescued the New Jersey Central from bankruptcy. His company was only three years old, the latest in a long line of enterprises that had been trying to tap the power of the great cataract for a variety of projects, some visionary, some eccentric. One man wanted to employ the Falls’ “inexhaustible” energy to create a City of Fountains at Lewiston. Another wanted to use the tumbling waters to power a single colossal water wheel attached to a drive shaft 280 miles long, to which local industries could be connected. Inherent in all these schemes was the almost unanimous conviction that the Falls, undeveloped by man, represented a terrible waste.

Waste –
that was the key word. As early as 1857, the prospectus of an early, short-lived enterprise, the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Company, had spoken glowingly but with some frustration of “a power almost illimitable, constantly wasted, yet never diminished – constantly exerted, yet never exhausted – gazed upon, wondered at, but never hitherto controlled.” Thirty years later, the inventor Sir William Siemens echoed those sentiments when he declared that “all the coal raised throughout the world would barely suffice to produce the amount of power that continually runs to waste at this one great fall.” To the scientists and engineers it seemed almost appalling that this stupendous 170-foot drop should be nothing more than a pretty cataract for the rubbernecks to gaze upon.

A waste, yes, but how to make use of it? The French had operated small mills using Niagara water above the crest as early as 1758, but it was not until 1847 that Judge Augustus Porter, the owner of Goat Island, came up with a feasible plan to use the drop to turn mill wheels. Porter contemplated an ambitious “hydraulic canal” three-quarters of a mile long. It would start from a point above the American Falls and cut across the neck of land circumvented by the river, running directly through the village before emptying its water over the high bank of the gorge – a miniature Niagara of its own. Such a millrace, Porter predicted, could operate “thirty run of mill stone.”

After Porter’s death in 1853, another entrepreneur, Horace Day, took over and for the next seventeen years worked sporadically on the canal, deepening it, widening it, and lengthening it. He had only one customer: Charles Gaskill’s flour mill. By 1877 he had completed a mile of canal and was bankrupt.

The canal, together with the land and water rights, was put up for auction by the sheriff of Niagara County on May 1, 1878, at the Spencer House in Niagara Falls, New York. Only a few turned up to bid on what was considered a white elephant; the first offer was a mere $5,000. Then, as the bidding dragged on, a Buffalo tanner and miller, Jacob Schoellkopf, raised his hand, and, to everyone’s astonishment, offered $67,000 for the package.

A self-made man, with a heavy Teutonic face and a short beard, the fifty-eight-year-old Schoellkopf had a history of buying up bankrupt tanneries and making them pay. Now a leading citizen of Buffalo, he determined to use the same techniques to resurrect the bankrupt canal. When the auction continued after lunch, another bidder, emboldened by Schoellkopf’s offer, raised the price. Schoellkopf responded with a successful bid of $71,000.

Off he went to Buffalo to tell his wife, Christina. “Momma, I bought the ditch,” was the way he put it.

She was not entranced, nor was his partner in the milling business, George Matthews. “What’ll you do with all that water, Jacob?” he asked. “You can’t use it and you can’t sell it.” But Schoellkopf knew how to use it. He completed the canal, and by 1882, seven industries, two of which he controlled, were using its power, supplied by water turbines that operated machinery through shafts, belts, and pulleys.

Schoellkopf saw another use for waterpower. Three years before, Charles Francis Brush, inventor of the arc lamp, had installed the first street lighting system in Cleveland. Schoellkopf built a small powerhouse on his canal, installed one of the first Brush generators, and began to supply power for sixteen street lamps in Niagara Falls, New York. That caused a sensation. Railroads ran excursions to the site and torchlight processions celebrated the miracle.

Brighter street lights, however, could not direct attention from the growing number of commercial eyesores taking power from the canal. That alarmed the conservationists while failing to satisfy the engineers. As Professor George Forbes, an internationally known consulting engineer, pointed out, “not only is this hideous in itself, but it is repulsive to the engineer, because of the great waste. They use only a few feet of the fall, and waste over 100 feet.”

Waterpower could be used to drive machinery, but few contemplated converting it into electricity. By the mid-1880s, Thomas Edison’s new invention, the incandescent bulb, was being used to light certain buildings, while Brush’s arc lights were illuminating streets in several major cities. But for the most part (Schoellkopf’s tiny generator was an exception), this power came from coal, not running water, and could be transmitted for short distances only. Hydro power was put almost entirely to mechanical uses. The rushing waters were carried by flumes or pipes to individual shafts known as wheel pits. At the base of a pit, a wooden water wheel (later replaced by a metal turbine) revolved to drive the machinery by a series of belts and pulleys. The system was inefficient because the wheel broke if the water pressure was too great. Gaskill’s flour mill could risk only a twenty-five-foot drop – using only about one-sixth of the potential energy of the available falling water.

With the strip of land along the gorge expropriated for the state reservation and no longer available for industry, some new method of employing the Falls’ power had to be devised. In 1886, Thomas Evershed, the white-bearded divisional engineer of the New York State canal system, came up with the breathtaking solution of boring a tunnel underneath the village to carry water from a point well above the Falls to a discharge point far below. Evershed’s tunnel would be two miles long and at least 160 feet deep. It would make possible an industrial district above the Falls, well beyond the limits of the reservation. Wheel pits would be sunk into the rock at twenty-five-foot intervals and the power “cabled off to any point desired, running any number of mills and factories of any size, from the making of toothpicks, to a Krupp’s foundry.”

The proposal thus continued the traditional “mill over wheel pit” system, in use throughout North America. Evershed planned twelve lateral canals to supply water to 238 individual wheel pits, each driving its own machinery. He proposed dockage, streets, and railroads to accommodate the industrial city of mills (each of five hundred horsepower) that he contemplated upriver from the cataract. It was, as one writer put it, “one of the most daring and colossal, yet practical of modern enterprises.” In one minute, the Evershed tunnel could carry enough water to supply a city of ten thousand with power for fifteen minutes.

But the costs of the project could not at that time be covered by selling the power locally. More and bigger customers were needed. Until power could somehow be transmitted to Buffalo or to some other large centre, Evershed’s plan would not be financially feasible. There was then no certainty that this could be accomplished. Yet such was the optimism engendered by the scheme that a new company was formed to put it into operation, with Evershed as its engineer. In spite of the general ignorance about electrical power, the company in its prospectus was sunnily optimistic: “It is conceded by leading practical electricians that it would be entirely practicable now to light the city of Buffalo (distance 20 miles) with power furnished by Niagara Falls, and the opinion is rife among scientific men that ways will be found in the near future for transmitting this power to much greater distances, and for using it in many new ways.…”

The ways had not yet been found, however, and the company’s cheery futurism was not calculated to attract hard-headed businessmen. The original plan to raise $1.4 million foundered. The very size of the project – one that dealt with hydraulic forces far greater than anyone had ever attempted to harness – frightened off investors. By 1889, the company had become the Niagara Falls Power Company. A sister corporation, Cataract Construction (the two firms had interlocking directorates), was created to build the project. Its president would be Edward Dean Adams, the New York banker and general all-round fixer.

Adams inherited Evershed’s unsolved problem. The village of Niagara Falls had a population of about five hundred. Who, then, would use all the power, and how could it be transmitted? Could Buffalo, with a population of 255,000, be reached by any of the known methods? Would electricity come into its own at last?

The one man who might provide the answer was the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison, the greatest inventor of his day. It was Edison who designed and introduced the electrical distribution system for incandescent lighting by direct current. Edison, who was, of course, aware of the Niagara scheme, was about to return to the United States from a European sojourn. The promoters couldn’t wait. In September 1889, the inventor received a terse cable from Niagara: “HAS POWER TRANSMISSION REACHED SUCH A DEVELOPMENT THAT IN YOUR JUDGEMENT SCHEME PRACTICABLE?”

Edison cabled back from Le Havre: “NO DIFFICULTY TRANSFERRING UNLIMITED POWER. WILL ASSIST. SAILING TODAY.”

But neither Edison nor any other engineer who examined the Evershed plan could agree that the scheme made sense commercially. Power could certainly be transmitted to Buffalo, but at prohibitive cost. No way could be found to transmit heavy loads cheaply over long distances. Nor had anybody yet devised a method of reducing the voltage – of transforming it – to a safe and useful pressure once it reached its destination.

Cataract Construction was operating on pie-in-the-sky. As Dr. Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, said that same September, “something new … must be developed in order to meet the requirements of such a problem as you propose.” Indeed, the problem was daunting. Adams and his colleagues were proposing to develop hydraulic power on an unprecedented scale when the use of such power was still relatively unexplored. They had no experience to go on, no examples to follow. They didn’t yet know whether electricity could or would be used – or whether they would have to fall back on cable drive, compressed air, or water pressure.

In spite of that problem, they were determined to forge ahead, blindly but optimistically, and build Evershed’s discharge tunnel under Niagara Falls. Micawber-like, they were convinced something would turn up.

Adams left in February to study the science of power development and the art of transmission in Europe. He visited Switzerland, Germany, and France, all of which had made some progress in transmitting electrical power by direct current. The possible value of alternating current was also being argued and championed as a more effective method of transmitting energy over longer distances.

Adams soon realized that a simplification of the Evershed plan was not only necessary but also feasible. Instead of building a costly series of lateral canals, each transmitting power to one mill or factory, it would be more practical to concentrate the source of the power at a single spot. It could then be transmitted from a central station to individual industries and “enable the mill owners to be as perfectly independent as if they each had their own wheel beneath their mill as originally planned.”

The Cataract president was also proposing something that had never before been attempted – a prestigious competition among the world’s biggest engineering firms for the biggest power development in the world. To mount it, he selected Sir William Thomson – the future Lord Kelvin – the world’s most famous physicist. Thomson and four leading scientists from Great Britain, France, Switzerland, and Germany would form the International Niagara Commission that would, in turn, select up to twenty-eight such companies to be invited to compete for a series of prizes to be awarded for projects dealing with the development, transmission, and distribution of the Falls’ power.

That set off a whirlwind of activity. Fifteen European and five American companies took up the challenge and jumped into the competition, which was due to close January 1, 1891. Long before that, however, Adams’s company took a bold step forward. It started to build a discharge tunnel – a tailrace to take away the waste water – before knowing how the power would be distributed. It was a considerable gamble, for no existing system seemed adequate to the size of the project. The company’s directors were simply assuming that one would be found.