Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [33]
Even in 1899 one board member for a New York elevated rail company made the case for compressed air. Several major railroad companies in other cities had told him “some wonderful things relative to the experiments with compressed air.” Compressed air was cheaper per mile than steam or electricity and “was more effective.” In response, he stated,
This matter of electricity seems to me to be rather uncertain. No one seems to know so very much about it. We have 300 engineers on the road now to whom we pay $3 a day apiece. They know how to handle steam, and if put on electricity we may have to educate them all over again. With compressed air the handling is simple and not dangerous.... I think compressed air is the coming motive power, and so do many members of the Manhattan Board of Directors.21
But it did not happen. Electrical innovation had kicked into high gear and Americans were fascinated by this new power. They wanted their country’s name to be written in bright lights—bright electric lights.22 Although compressed air remained an important industrial tool in shops and factories around the world, it never regained its position as a competitor with electricity after the turn of the century.
Out in California, in July of 1895, Sacramento became the recipient of electric power transmitted down twenty miles from a generating station on the American River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The Niagara Falls project, noted above, is often considered the defining moment for electrical transmission, but the Folsom Dam and Powerhouse, built by jailbirds from Folsom County prison, sent electricity nearly as far as the Niagara-Buffalo connection—were completed a year earlier. The Folsom project was considered a monster success. It lit up 12,662 incandescent lamps, 582 arc lamps, provided power for 35 streetcars, and 537 horsepower worth of motors in breweries, mills, and shops.23
Though compressed air advocates stuck around, the short, intense battle between power transmission options was already being decided in favor of electricity. The impending success of the project brought out the entrepreneur in the post-gold California spirit. The San Francisco Call wrote in June 1895 that
a new kind of “hustler” has arisen, and within the past three or four months he has been rapidly multiplying and filling the earth. He is the promoter of new electrical enterprises, and especially the promoter of schemes for long-distance transmission of electric power. The air of the whole Pacific Coast has all at once become filled with talk about setting up water wheels in lonely mountain places and making them give light and cheaply turn other wheels in towns miles away.24
Within five years, exactly such transmission lines had been hustled into place. Electric power transmission lines ran to Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento. Around the country, the same thing was happening. The great centralization of the American power system had begun. It would continue unabated for the next eighty years until the great energy rethink of the 1970s. The country’s electric grid now extends 157,000 miles across the country, mostly in three large networks: the Eastern, Western, and Texas Interconnections.25
III.
What Might Have Been
chapter 10
The National Electric Transportation System That Almost Was
ON AUGUST 31, 1894, two young men rolled their new electric car onto what passed for a road in Philadelphia. It would have been hot and sticky outside, a Friday at the end of a long summer that had seen an intense heat wave suffocate the city for most