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The stuff of the fair may have been dissipated across the globe, but the brilliant, unbounded lights of the Court of Honor would not be forgotten. It seemed that forever afterward, Americans would prize more and more dazzle in their cities, prize electric marquees and electric advertising on an outsize scale made all the more possible by George Westinghouse's next project. Long before the last bits of the White City's plaster were sold off, Westinghouse turned his attention to Niagara Falls, where with the help of Nikola Tesla's dynamos, he would develop the first extensive and practical long-distance power lines.

9. Niagara: Long-Distance Light

BY THE TIME Charles Dickens visited Niagara Falls in 1842, it was already thick with visitors. Taverns, viewing towers, stairways, and hotels sprinkled the banks, but their presence couldn't diminish his astonishment:

I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked—Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water!—that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.... Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind: Tranquility: Calm recollections of the Dead: Great Thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of Gloom or Terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.

Changeless in Dickens's heart, perhaps, but although the State of New York—interested in maintaining the natural beauty and the appeal of the place for tourists—preserved the area directly around the falls from industrial development, Niagara contained so much exploitative potential that it could not possibly remain changeless in the industrial age. Nineteenth-century magnates believed that its power was lying in wait for them, if only they could arrive at a way to harness the force of the water. In the words of inventor Sir William Siemens, "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."

Niagara's 160-foot precipice of dolostone and shale isn't among the highest of cataracts, but with a breadth of more than 3,500 feet, it is second only to southern Africa's Victoria Falls in width. And the lakes that feed into the Niagara River—Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie—contain 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world. When Swedish traveler Peter Kalm encountered the river in 1750, almost all of it rushed over the falls and then through a series of gorges before flowing into the fifth Great Lake, Ontario. "The greatest and strongest battoes would here in a moment be turn'd over and over," he wrote. "The water ... seems almost to outdo an arrow in swiftness.... When all this water comes to the very Fall, there it throws itself down perpendicular! It is beyond all belief the suprize when you see this!...You cannot see it without being quite terrified."

When Kalm visited Niagara, the rugged, lush country—its vines, flowers, mosses, and pines drenched by mists rising from the falls—held few human traces beyond the cold fires of old encampments and the portage and trading paths of the Iroquois. The river, far too vast and swift to navigate, was mostly an obstacle to the tribes in the region, though they sometimes gathered up fish that perished in the roil at the bottom of the falls—the drop being deadly to all kinds of wildlife caught in the currents. Kalm wrote:

Several of the French gentlemen told me, that when birds come flying into this fog or smoak of the fall, they fall down and perish in the Water; either because their wings are become wet, or that the noise of the fall astonishes them, and they know not where to go in the Dark. And very often great flocks of [swans, geese, ducks, water-hens, teal, and the like] are seen going to destruction in this manner;