Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [29]
At first, all seemed to be going well. The papers carried photos, not just drawings, of the construction of the plant by the Los Angeles Wave Power and Electric Company. The entity pumped its stock offering in the selfsame papers, trying to gain the technological potential high ground. However, the question remained: Should wave motors be clumped with the great inventions of the era—airplanes, cars, the Westinghouse airbrake, electricity—or the flops of the past like alchemy, perpetual motion, and patent medicines?
One article in the magazine Overland Monthly was clear on its take. Journalist Burton Wallace wrote,
Wonderful as are the wireless telegraph, the Bell telephone, and the Mergenthaler typesetting machine, which set civilization forward nearly a century within the past decade, there comes now a remarkable invention, made practical and put into operation for commercial use at Los Angeles. It is called the Starr Wave Motor.
The company played on the environmentally benign aspects of wave power. Notably, it did not create the smoke or soot associated with coal and oil burning. One December 1907 ad trumpeted these benefits:
A SMOKELESS CITY. Many things have been written and said of the natural beauty and charms of Los Angeles. Some unpleasant experiences have been had and unkind things said about our smoke nuisance.... Some of our citizens are now so aroused that they declare Los Angeles must be the first model and ideal smokeless city of this country.”23
Starr went on to declare that by December 1908, “Los Angeles will be a smokeless and sootless city, clean pure. It will be made so by all the power and heating plants being supplied with power and heat from the ocean waves by the Starr Wave Motor.”
Things did not quite go according to plan, however. By October Starr had been forced out of the company and was recuperating in a mental hospital from a nervous breakdown. The company’s secretary told the Los Angeles Times that the enterprise was broke. “It was impossible to sell any stock because the plant had not started and produced electricity as promised,” he said.24
Eventually Starr wrested back control of the company, but it didn’t matter. In February of 1909, a mere two weeks after Starr had lauded the company’s prospects again, the $100,000 Redondo pier and motor sunk “like a lump of sugar when dropped into water.”25 And by May of 1909 one thousand shares of Starr motor company stock of “par value” of $1 each could be had for $0.65.26
The Encyclopedia Americana’s 1920 edition summed up the experience of the Starr wave motor and all the rest from the period: “The history of all other devices that have been tried is more or less similar,” the wave motor entry declared, “and educated engineers have come to regard the wave motors as akin to the perpetual motion delusion.”
The California wave motor story, then, is essentially and deeply one of failure. Unlike windmills or solar hot water heaters, wave motors proved technical failures. They generally didn’t work at all or only worked for a short period of time. Still, other attempts at creating wave motors have been made throughout the years. More than a thousand patents exist for devices to convert wave power into usable energy. But the enthusiasm for wave motors that swept California in the two decades around the turn of the century has never been matched.
However, the prize has not gone away. Figuring out how to capture the ocean’s awesome energy would still change everything, as the inventors at the time believed.