Empires of Light

by Jill Jonnes

  Adams, president of the newly formed and richly financed Cataract Construction Company, now began his organized and methodical search for a solution to one overarching question: “How can the power at Niagara best be utilized?” Adams hired the jovial and levelheaded Sellers as his main engineer, along with a handful of other prominent scientists and engineers to proffer expert advice. Adams and Sellers then sailed to Europe in early 1890 to seek whatever enlightenment was to be had there, for hydropower was far more familiar to the Swiss, French, and Italians, with their Alpine waterfalls. By May 1890, the two Americans had crossed the English Channel to travel through all manner of remote and lovely mountainous regions, examining water wheels and power transmission. Once back in England, Edward Dean Adams persuaded the eminent Sir William Thomson, a craggy-faced Scottish mathematician and physicist with a wild bushy beard, to formalize the quest as head of an International Niagara Commission. Thomson had earned his knighthood some decades earlier by making a reality of the transatlantic cable and had amassed an enviable fortune serving as the engineer for numerous other submarine cables in places as remote as Brazil. The other Niagara Commission members were a Who’s Who of continental engineering. The whole raison d’être of the Niagara Commission was to invite engineers from around the world to submit their solutions to harnessing Niagara and then transmitting its bountiful energy. The best would be awarded prizes. It was an ingenious way to gather the collective knowledge of the scientific elite.

  Adams, the wise old frog, and Sellers, the genial dean of mechanical engineers, held court (when not out reviewing Alpine hydro projects) at an elegant chandeliered salon in the posh Brown’s Hotel on Dover Street in London. It was there in that June that young Westinghouse engineer Lewis B. Stillwell, also in Europe to survey the state of the electrical art, ventured to first meet Adams and Sellers. He was accompanied by Reginald Belfield, William Stanley’s onetime assistant in Great Barrington and now chief electrician for British Westinghouse. They emerged from this one meeting in Edward Dean Adams’s electrical salon burning to submit an entry to the Niagara competition. When Stillwell returned in the fall of 1890 to Pittsburgh and tried to convince his boss, George Westinghouse famously growled at him, “These people are trying to secure $100,000 worth of information by offering prizes, the largest of which is $3,000. When they are ready to do business, we will show them how to do it.”9 Fourteen proposals were received and various prizes dispersed, but the commission merely learned that there was no obvious solution. Sellers tried to put the best gloss on the situation by reassuring a rather discouraged Adams that it had “brought the scheme before the world with a prestige that cannot be measured by dollars … and won for its management respect, as wise, far-seeing cautious business men and not followers of any one visionary schemer or inventor.”10

  Even as Adams and Sellers and their International Niagara Commission picked the best engineering brains of Europe, the Cataract Construction Company pressed boldly on with its plans to begin excavating the great tunnel. On October 4, 1890, a mellow fall morning, Cataract secretary William Rankine, stylish in his well-cut dark vested suit, high collar, and clipped mustache, returned to Niagara Falls to attend the groundbreaking for the tailrace tunnel at the edge of the New York Central rail yards at Falls Street and Erie Avenue. When the first ceremonial shovel of dirt was dug, the warm autumn air resonated with tolling bells of nearby churches and shrieking mill whistles. At long last, the great Niagara power project was actually launched.

  That lovely October morning marked the start of nonstop work, as 1,300 workmen dynamited, sledgehammered, steam-shoveled, and pounded round the clock to excavate the tailrace tunnel. Teams of mules strained as they moved out wagonloads of rock and debris. But the tunnel the men began digging was not the same design they ultimately built, for Edward Dean Adams and Coleman Sellers boldly abandoned the original plan rooted in the age of steam, a plan that relied largely on 238 water wheels strung along the long canal to collectively provide almost 120,000 horsepower. Instead, by the next summer, in July 1891, the two had committed themselves to a radically revised plan, one that extracted all the hydropower from two massive central stations on each side of a long intake canal right off the river. The water was still drawn off above the falls and still returned to the river via the tailrace tunnel deep under the town. But now it was only a mile long, a third the length of Evershed’s scheme. Edward Dean Adams and Coleman Sellers were deeply influenced in this decision by a Swiss-born Englishman named Charles E. L. Brown, who was working for the Swiss firm Oerlikon but would soon leave to begin his own firm, Brown, Boveri & Company. On February 9, 1891, Brown delivered in Frankfurt a seminal talk titled “High Tension Currents,” describing his highly successful experiments transmitting 100 horsepower of electricity several miles using 30,000 volts. Brown, with a high-domed forehead and rimless glasses, was utterly confident as he declared, “The transmission of electrical energy by means of current tensions of, for example, 30,000 volts is possible, the distribution of energy to great distances by electrical methods is a fact.”11

  Shortly thereafter, in mid-December of that year, Adams and Sellers bravely embraced the age of electricity and invited bids from six companies, three Swiss, including Brown, Boveri, and three American, those being Westinghouse, Edison General Electric, and Thomson-Houston. The Niagara central station powerhouses would no longer turn water wheels attached to shafts and pulleys. Instead, Cataract now planned for ten 5,000-horsepower turbines set deep in each of two central stations, each water-powered turbine to run an electrical generator. The two Niagara stations would generate a mind-boggling 100,000 horsepower, equal to all the central stations then operating in America. Never had electricity been generated on such a scale. Initially, only one powerhouse would be built and only the first three turbines and three generators installed. As the demand for electricity rose beyond 15,000 horsepower, more turbines and generators would be added.

  Under the new Cataract plan, Niagara’s mighty green waters were to be diverted into the powerhouse, funneled into eight-foot-wide penstocks (giant pipes), fall 140 feet straight down, rush around a crooked “elbow,” and then roar into the double wheels of gigantic twenty-nine-ton turbines, the world’s largest. These perpetually whirling turbines in the deepest basements of the central stations would turn attached vertical steel shafts that would twirl the electrical generators up on the main floor. Having powered the turbines, Niagara’s waters would then begin their three-minute journey back to the river, whooshing along at twenty miles an hour through the 6,800-foot sloping tailrace tunnel. The new plan was extraordinary in its simplicity.

  More than two hundred feet under the town of Niagara Falls, 1,300 men and their machines worked steadily, excavating day and night in the dank, close spaces. The tunnel itself was to be a spacious and elegant marvel, twenty-one feet high, with a gently curved roof, and eighteen feet across. Yet in some sections, water was visibly squirting and seeping through the raw tunnel cuts. Eight months and two fatal cave-ins after work began, Coleman Sellers ordered the tunnel shored up with sturdy pine and oak. The tunnel walls would—contrary to initial assumptions—have to be lined. Skilled bricklayers appeared and began to line the tunnel, fitting four layers of hard-burned Buffalo bricks into imported Portland cement. By the time the 6,800-foot tailrace tunnel was triumphantly completed on December 20, 1892, six hundred thousand tons of rock had been hauled out, sixteen million bricks lined the walls, and twenty-eight workers had died. Once the great dynamos were operating, all this would be eternally filled with racing river water. For the last two hundred feet, the curved brick walls gave way to cast iron, and every step brought closer the roar and thunder of American Falls. This immense water tunnel was the largest in the world.

  Adams, Rankine, and the New York money men, in their methodical way, were covering all bases. To ensure that there would be adequate customers for their hydropower (if they could not figure out how to get it cheaply to Buffalo), they had quietly
purchased almost two miles of land along the river and then inland, an L-shaped 1,500 acres where they envisioned dozens of factories powered by smokeless hydropower. And to house a portion of the future workers, the New York men were already planning to construct a small model workers’ town, complete with the electricity that most viewed as a luxury. Adams chose the name Echoata, meaning something akin to “refuge” in Cherokee.

  Season after season, as the tunnel had been pushing steadily forward under the village of Niagara Falls, Adams and Sellers had continued their methodical consideration of the electrical state of the art. At any inkling of advance, Cataract dispatched experts to report back. Meanwhile, the fight between AC and DC had been raging year after year. No one group—besides the antagonists themselves—could have followed this bitter electrical battle more avidly than Adams and Sellers and their experts. For who else had so many millions of dollars already riding on the future of electricity and, especially, the future of electrical transmission? The initial financing of $2.6 million had expanded steadily as expenses relentlessly mounted. Within their own Cataract ranks, the AC-DC debate was also being fought. Sir William Thomson remained an ardent and determined foe of AC. As of January 1891, so were most of the experts on the International Niagara Commission. Coleman Sellers would later describe them as “strongly antagonistic to an alternating current transmission.”12 Yet they also knew that despite all the arguments and accusations, alternating current was winning in the lighting marketplace. A February 1891 issue of Electrical World showed there were only 202 Edison central stations, all DC, naturally, versus almost 1,000 AC central stations installed by Westinghouse and Thomson-Houston.13 Coleman Sellers retained an open mind and a propensity toward AC. The truth was, Sellers said in a July 1891 lecture at the Franklin Institute, “the progress of invention is going on so rapidly that we are at a loss to know what particular line should be pursued.”14

  In April 1892, having failed to persuade Charles Brown to set up in Niagara Falls, Adams and Sellers engaged George Forbes, a rather supercilious Scottish electrical engineer. Tellingly, his was the one entry in the original International Niagara Commission competition that proposed using alternating current. Professor Forbes’s first official act was to dismiss the two DC designs submitted to Niagara by Edison GE and Thomson-Houston. In his report a month later, Forbes wrote, “I do not consider that these designs have sufficient merit to induce you to accept any delay in the hopes of getting something more perfect in this direction.”15

  Certainly, one of the most potent arguments against AC was the lack of a workable motor. In February of 1892, William Stanley, who had six years earlier set up the first working AC system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, reminded others rather snidely that “a commercial AC motor … is a thing unknown to the practical engineer.”16 Or as Edward Dean Adams put it, at this juncture “the Tesla motor was still a prophecy rather than a completely demonstrated reality.”17 How could Cataract profess to be planning a power plant—as opposed to a lighting plant—if its electricity could not run motors? But this greatest of stumbling blocks was about to be surmounted. Very quietly and out of the limelight, the Tesla single-phase AC motor was finally distinguishing itself as a working commercial reality.

  The proving ground for the Tesla AC motor was notably tough: the rugged and arcticlike San Juan Mountains of Telluride, Colorado. There, the owners of the financially ailing Gold King Mine had to find cheap energy or close. Having heard of Tesla and his AC system, they inquired of the Westinghouse Company in the spring of 1891 if electricity could be generated three miles away down in the valley, where a 320-foot waterfall could operate a water wheel. If a water-powered generator could indeed transmit electricity twelve thousand feet up the mountain to run a motor in the stamping and crushing mill above the timberline, the mine might be saved. The mine was quickly running out of nearby wood, and importing coal was too expensive. Westinghouse sold Gold King Mine a single-phase alternator (the phrase then for an AC generator) early that summer, and by June it was housed in a wooden shack next to the falls and its new water wheel. From this shack, 3,000 volts of electricity traveled on $700 worth of copper wire strung up and across three miles of steep, hardscrabble mountain terrain. At the mill the electricity was stepped down to power a 100-horsepower single-phase Tesla motor. The question was—would it run reliably? So all that summer, fall, and winter, and all through 1892, the Westinghouse engineers were delighted as the simple power system and the sturdy motor hummed steadily along, surviving the mountain’s usual severe electrical storms, high winds, blizzards, and avalanches. The Tesla AC system had passed its first real job with flying colors.

  In June of 1892, a jubilant Charles Scott, the young Westinghouse engineer who had assisted Tesla when he’d first come to Pittsburgh, announced this first successful commercial use of the whole Tesla system, including the long problematic induction motor, in the Electrical Engineer. “The aggregate time lost … was, by actual count, less than 48 hours during three-fourths of a year…. This success is confirmed in a substantial way by the immediate extension [expansion] of the plant. A 50 h.p. motor is now being installed at a mill a few miles from the Gold King … work in this field is fast passing from experimental investigation into practical electrical engineering.”18 At long last, the Tesla motor had arrived, operating off a Tesla-designed generator. In the same triumphant article, Scott also described how for two years a forty-foot waterfall on the Willamette River had powered a big Tesla AC generator, which sent electricity thirteen miles to their electric lighting central station in Portland, Oregon. Here at last the Tesla polyphase system had begun in the smallest of ways to fulfill its long touted promise. But above all, there was now a working Tesla AC induction motor, albeit single-phase. The last great AC hurdle had been overcome.

  As the Cataract Construction Company pushed steadily ahead upstate at Niagara Falls, New Yorkers in Manhattan were reveling in what was shaping up to be one of the city’s juiciest, messiest scandals ever. It had all begun the previous month when the thickly bewhiskered Reverend Charles Parkhurst stood in his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and accused the city’s Tammany mayor and police department of being part of an “official and administrative criminality that is filthifying our entire municipal life, making New York a very hotbed of knavery, debauchery and bestiality.” Hauled by the Tammany DA before a grand jury to prove these intemperate charges of vice run amok amid police complicity, Reverend Parkhurst had to admit he could offer none. The good reverend emerged from this public humbling determined to gather the necessary evidence. He hired Charles Gardner, a private detective, who agreed to lead Parkhurst and two others on a tour of Manhattan’s darkest dives.

  Disguised as “toughs,” the foursome rode the Third Avenue el from 18th Street down to Franklin Square and began their education in Manhattan lowlife, starting off with “a whisky saloon, an opium den in Chinatown, a stale beer dive in the Italian section, and other horrors…. In a Tenderloin house, five girls stripped and did a ‘dance of nature.’ … At Scotch Ann’s Golden Rule Pleasure Club on West 3rd … they found it subdivided by partitions into cubicles … in which sat a boy with a painted face.”19 As an appalled Parkhurst and his two companions toured every kind of beer-soaked dance hall, cheap saloon, and sleazy brothel, they became astonished, genteel witnesses to a large and rowdy underworld thriving on illicit gambling, cheap liquor and beer, and organized, commercial sex catering to every kind of appetite. Gardner also had his own detectives out gathering affidavits. So when Reverend Parkhurst mounted his pulpit a mere month later on Sunday, March 13, 1892, he possessed documented evidence that Tammany was “rotten with a rottenness that is unspeakable and indescribable.” He had proof that 254 saloons and 30 brothels had been roaring with business just the previous Sunday. In the ensuing months, a grand jury handed down a few placating indictments, but little would change immediately. The urban poor (and a certain number of their better-off confreres) wanted jollity a
nd dazed forgetfulness, be it craps, bawdy dance halls, or cheap, quick sex, for theirs were hardscrabble lives. And there were great sums to be made, as Tammany showed, in organized vice. A few outraged citizens were, for the moment, but an annoyance.

  While Reverend Parkhurst was roiling the murk of the Manhattan underworld to little avail, George Westinghouse was informing Edward Dean Adams that he would indeed bid on the Niagara contract. That done, Westinghouse turned his attention to his ongoing crusade to best GE for the Chicago World’s Fair lighting contract, “the largest electrical project ever undertaken” up to that time. While Parkhurst achieved little but frustration, Westinghouse emerged from his battle in mid-May with his lowball contract in hand. Westinghouse then concentrated full bore throughout the second half of 1892 on building the fair system, knowing that if it worked, it would well serve his pursuit of the Niagara contract. Since most of the Chicago World’s Fair AC electricity was for lighting, the young Charles Scott proposed they stick with the tried-and-true single-phase for the tens of thousands of incandescent “stopper” lights. But Westinghouse said, “No, they have been telling me that the two-phase is the right system and I want to find out whether it is or not.”20 So the Westinghouse engineers dedicated themselves to creating commercially viable two-phase, something possible only because they finally conceded what Nikola Tesla had insisted on in 1888—AC induction motors could not function if the frequency was too high. As Charles Scott so dryly put it, “Commercial circuits were single-phase at a frequency of 133 cycles. Strenuous efforts to adapt the Tesla motor to this circuit were in vain. The little motor insisted on getting what it wanted, and the mountain came to Mahomet. Lower-frequency polyphase generators inflicted obsolescence on their predecessors in a thousand central stations—such was the potency of the Tesla motor.”21 Without these new AC generators, the new AC motors would not be an option for Westinghouse customers.