Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [61]
The Europeans and Americans who settled northern New York in the eighteenth century, like the area's native peoples, found the power of Niagara far too great to exploit. As they cleared the woods and planted fields and orchards, they instead dammed small area streams and rivers for their sawmills, gristmills, and carding machines. The one village—a tavern, a blacksmith, and a handful of homes—along the river above the falls, where a narrow canal fed a small sawmill, then a gristmill, burned to the ground during the War of 1812. A new community, eventually called Niagara, established itself on the ruins of the old town, and several small mills there were driven by water channeled through a canal.
More extensive exploitation of the power of Niagara would prove to be an extraordinarily complex undertaking that would take almost a decade of concerted effort, enormous capital, and an investment in untried technologies. It began in 1886, when Thomas Evershed, the divisional engineer of the New York State canal system, conceived a plan to build a waterwheel power system at the falls upstream from the preserved land. He envisioned a series of lateral canals, which would turn numerous waterwheels in an industrial complex of mills and factories. A two-and-a-half-mile tunnel that ran directly underneath the town of Niagara would return the water to the river just below the falls. But even if Evershed could sell power to several hundred businesses clustered near the falls, it wouldn't carry the cost of the endeavor. To make a profit, he would have to find a way to transmit Niagara power over twenty miles to Buffalo—a city, then, with a population of a quarter of a million people—where it could provide electricity for manufacturing, the trolley system, and public and domestic lighting. At the time, neither alternating current nor direct current could send electricity over more than a few miles.
Evershed had trouble attracting investors to his risky endeavor, and three years later, finding himself strapped for funds and unable to raise money, he turned over the project to Edward Dean Adams, a New York banker. Rather than building a series of lateral canals, Adams envisioned constructing a central station along the falls, from which electricity would be sent to industries in the area and then eventually to Buffalo. Although the plan was just as untried as Evershed's, Adams was a respected financier and managed to attract the interest and investments of some of the richest businessmen of the time, including J. P. Morgan, John Astor, and William Vanderbilt.
In October 1890, Adams began work on the tailrace, which would carry water away from the turbines and would be necessary for any approved design. Everything about the endeavor was massive: "Thirteen hundred workmen were blasting their way, day and night, through the solid rock, 160 feet below the town," notes Niagara historian Pierre Berton. "The horseshoe-shaped tunnel, eighteen feet wide, twenty-one feet high, and seven thousand feet long, would displace 300,000 tons of rock; it would require twenty million bricks to line it and two and half million feet of oak and yellow pine to shore it up." Yet even as construction was proceeding, Adams had no solid idea as to how to transport the power over a long distance. He conducted an international competition of electricians and engineers in an attempt to find a means for transmission. Plans proposing the use of alternating and direct current were submitted, but no feasible proposal came of the challenge.
To efficiently and cost-effectively transmit power over long distances, any system would have to rely on high voltages: