Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future by Rhys Morus Iwan;

Author:Rhys Morus, Iwan; [Iwan Rhys Morus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5780246
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

For some, Niagara seemed to hold out the prospect of practically infinite power. To all intents and purposes, a ‘reliable, uniform water supply, such as is ideally represented at Niagara Falls, is the nearest obtainable approach to perpetual motion’.11 They fantasized about a future in which more and more of America would be powered by its waters. At that moment, profitable transmission might only be possible up to a distance of 150 miles, but ‘150 miles from Niagara Falls in a straight line brings us to within ninety miles of the city of New York.’ Before long, its reach would embrace ‘Columbus, Ohio, touching Washington, D.C., including Philadelphia and New York, and the whole of the states of Pennsylvania, New York, part of Maryland, the northern part of Virginia, and West Virginia, more than two-thirds of Ohio, fully three-quarters of Michigan, beside reaching to Montreal in Canada’.12 Chicago and New England would soon be drawing their electricity from Niagara too.

Niagara occupied a prominent place in the American imagination. Mark Twain placed the Garden of Eden there. Another commentator invoked the ‘sense of power and of mystery’ there, ‘which overcame the mind’.13 ‘Spectators by the million’ had unconsciously ‘revealed something of themselves in various efforts to disclose to others the essential character of the Falls of Niagara, confessedly incomparable with any other natural object.’ This was nature at its wildest, sublimest and most dangerous – so what better expression of American ambition than to make it into a servant. Niagara radiated a sense of power, and it was ‘through this very sense of resistless power that the falls speaks to minds of great dignity and self-restraint’.14 Even Lord Kelvin could wax lyrical about how he looked forward to ‘the time when the whole water from Lake Erie will find its way to the lower level of Lake Ontario through machinery, doing more good to the world than even that great benefit which we now possess in contemplation of the splendid scene which we have before us in the waterfall of Niagara’.15

The machinery that tamed Niagara offered a potent symbol of America’s future power. The powerhouse itself, designed by the architect Stanford White, expressed ‘in its unique and impressive architecture the enormous power to be generated within, and giving in itself some hint of the capacity of man to master the forces of nature’. In the past, thousands of people might ‘have looked upon the Niagara cataract with emotions such as are inspired by no other natural object’, but in the future ‘when the visitor who goes to look upon the sublime cataract discerns how men have at last found a way to take from it some portion of its force, and how the whirl of the wheels of factories, the illumination of cities, the steady motion of vessels upon the artificial waterways are all but responsive throbbings to the thunder of the cataract, perhaps he will consider that a yet finer epic has been written by the energy of those who have been engaged in subduing the forces of nature that they may serve mankind.

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