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By Root 974 0

the flow of current would increase, but the resistance would remain constant. High voltages—too high to run lights or motors—have to be transformed: that is, they have to be stepped up to higher voltages when leaving the generators and entering the lines, then stepped down to lower voltages before arriving in homes or factories. Whereas direct current could not be transformed (transformers rely on an oscillating magnetic field, and direct current flows only one way), alternating current could. Although a transformer for alternating current had already been developed, alternating current was still virtually untested for long-distance transmission. The only proof of its feasibility lay in an experimental system built in 1891 in Germany, which had transmitted power from Lauffen to Frankfurt—a distance of more than a hundred miles—to run machinery and lighting at an electrical exhibition, and at the Gold King Mine in Telluride, Colorado, where a Tesla polyphase motor transmitted power two miles to run a motor in the crushing mill.

In late October 1893, in part because of the success of alternating current at the World's Columbian Exposition, Adams awarded George Westinghouse a contract to build the first generators at Niagara. And Westinghouse turned to Tesla. Niagara had been in Tesla's mind since he'd seen a steel engraving of the falls as a teenager. He later wrote, "[I] pictured in my imagination a big wheel run by the Falls. I told my uncle that I would go to America and carry out this scheme. Thirty years later I saw my ideas carried out at Niagara and marveled at the unfathomable mystery of the mind."

By 1895 Adams had installed, within a cavernous brick powerhouse designed by Stanford White, called the Cathedral of Power, three 5,ooo-horsepower Tesla polyphase motors (those powering the White City had been 1,000 horsepower), each weighing eighty-five tons. They endured countless tests and were repeatedly calibrated and reset, and in August of that year "the inlet gates at the canal opened, the river water flooded into one of the penstocks, the turbine whirled, and so did Dynamo No. 2, flashing alternating current off to the Pittsburgh Reduction Plant [a nearby aluminum manufacturer]." Upon the successful transmission of power, Tesla predicted that "the falls and Buffalo will reach out their arms and will join each other and become one great city. United, they will form the greatest city in the world."

The next year, at one second after midnight on November 16, 1896, the switches were pulled at the power station at Niagara, and the current, stepped up through transformers, ran along twenty-six miles of cable and was then stepped down and delivered to the streetcars of Buffalo. "Electrical experts say the time [it took] was incapable of computation," remarked one reporter. "It was the journey of God's own lightning bound over to the employ of man." Within months, Niagara began to supply current that lit Buffalo's streets, homes, businesses, and industries.

Here was power untethered from its source, freed from the lay of the land and the flow of rivers, abstract and seemingly without limit. "Wherever mankind wishes to go," one observer later wrote, "copper wires can go, too." But the technical ability to send energy across long-distance wires also brought with it all kinds of new challenges. Electric companies would need to refine the process by which they delivered power and adapt to the demands of its users—or force users to adapt to their desires. Societies would need to confront the disadvantages experienced by those beyond the reach of electric power, and people everywhere would have to come to terms with living with the inexplicable. "Yoked to the Cataract!" the Buffalo Enquirer proclaimed, which also meant yoked ever increasingly to something not even the great inventors understood. "What is electricity?" one writer of the time inquired. "That is a question no man can yet fully answer.... The men who make the dynamos and the men who operate them know how to produce electricity, but Mr. Edison himself, standing