by Jill Jonnes
Professor Forbes, a tall, supercilious Scotsman with fair hair, a large nose, and a mustache, had very few kind words for his Cataract engineering colleagues. His attitude toward most things American could be summed up in one word: condescension. He preferred to live on the Canadian side of the falls and disdained the nearby town of Niagara Falls as “dirty … [and full of] cheap restaurants, merry-go-rounds, itinerant photographers, and museums of Indians and other curiosities.”1 Forbes clearly gloried in his high-profile, plum assignment as Cataract’s consulting electrical engineer, a man central to the world’s most ambitious, expensive, and closely watched electric power project. Yet he petulantly complained that designing the Niagara dynamo that summer and generally carrying out the technical aspects of his work were made far more difficult by “politics,” which he described as “intriguing, underhand dealing and jobbery.”2 The haughty Forbes was quick to take sole credit for work that was highly collaborative or others’ entirely.
As the August heat clamped down on the eastern seaboard that summer of 1893, Coleman Sellers and Edward Dean Adams felt growing pressure to move ahead. The Cataract investors had anted up $4 million thus far for this vast enterprise, all of which now hinged on a workable AC generator. Niagara was a huge investment of purely private capital, a fact acutely felt as the American economic system was slowly and disastrously imploding. No day of the gloriously lovely summer passed without more terrifying news—bank failures rolled from region to region, farmers in the far West could not ship their crops for lack of credit, railroads slid into receivership. Even the mightiest millionaires had to look closely to their accounts. One associate described how “every morning while in New York Mr. Rankine has submitted to him a statement showing the exact balance in the bank of the Cataract Construction Company, Niagara Falls Power Company, Niagara Falls Water Works Company, Niagara Development Company, and the Niagara Junction Railway Company. When he is here at the Falls this statement is mailed to him.”3 J. P. Morgan wrote a friend in late July that summer, “Everything here continues blue as indigo. Hope we shall soon have some change for the better, for it is very depressing and very exhausting.”4 As the financial markets teetered on the brink, the U.S. Congress convened in emergency session on August 7, and Grover Cleveland, the only president to return to office for a second term after being defeated following his first, urged the legislators to repeal the parity of silver with gold.
Days later, on August 10, 1893, Coleman Sellers, now president of the Niagara Falls Power Company and its chief engineer, wrote both GE and Westinghouse to announce that Professor Forbes had designed a suitable dynamo and transformers. Therefore Cataract was again looking for a firm to manufacture and install its generating equipment. George Westinghouse, still seething from the earlier dismissal, wrote Sellers a stiff reply a week or so later from Pittsburgh, reminding this genial engineer who had seemed to so favor his firm, “We have given several years time to the development of power transmission, and have spent an immense sum of money working out various plans, and we believe we are fully entitled to all the commercial advantages that can accrue to us … we do not feel that your company can ask us to put that knowledge at your disposal so that you may in any manner use it to our disadvantage.”5 Nonetheless, Westinghouse relented. After all, this was still the great Niagara Falls power project, his dearest electrical dream, a world showcase for alternating current. He had pushed forward through far worse. Then, of course, there was the work this would guarantee for his men, at this grim time when every factory was watching its orders plummet.
So George Westinghouse dispatched a couple of his top engineers, one of these being Lewis Stillwell, to Niagara Falls on August 21 to see just what Professor Forbes had come up with. As the two men came off the train, the resort was jammed with tourists in a holiday mood, enjoying the merry-go-rounds, clambering about the falls and the Cave of the Winds, riding the Maid of the Mist. The engineers’ mood was nowhere as jolly. The Scotsman’s dynamo design, they would soon conclude, was so hopelessly flawed that they could not consider constructing it. After studying the blueprints thoroughly, they told Coleman Sellers that “mechanically the proposed generators embodied good ideas … [but] electrically it was defective and if built as designed … would not operate.”6 Historian Harold Passer summed up the flaws in Forbes’s generator as these: such low frequency—162⁄3 cycles a second—that it would cause noticeable flickering in lights; worse yet—for a project aimed at providing industrial power—it would be “too low for satisfactory operation of most polyphase power equipment [notably the all-important rotary converter to change AC to DC]. The Westinghouse engineers also sharply criticized the high-generating voltage [an unheard-of 22,000]. The insulation problems would be difficult to solve and perhaps impossible.”7
The haughty Professor Forbes seemed to have forgotten during his delightful summer sojourn in Niagara the whole point of AC. Letters were exchanged and a negative report made to George Westinghouse. Then on September 15 two top Westinghouse engineers, one again being Lewis Stillwell, returned once more to the ramshackle precincts of Niagara, where the last tourists still lingered on in the chill of early fall. The engineers met first with Sellers and other Cataract experts and once again talked about the shortcomings of the Forbes dynamo. They then proceeded to Professor Forbes’s office, where, Sellers later related, “Professor Forbes discussed some of the questions raised and declined to take up others, stating that he had fully considered the subject and was sure he was right.”8
Coleman Sellers and Edward Dean Adams well knew that they could not move forward without George Westinghouse and his patents and know-how. (Adams seemed to view GE’s bid merely as a means to keep the overall price down.) And now the top Westinghouse engineers had returned from repeated Niagara inspections of Forbes’s dynamo blueprints oozing contempt for Cataract’s design. Soothing ruffled corporate feathers was, however, Adams’s forte. He had made his name as an attorney bringing together angry and fractious railroad investors and railroad officers and convincing these hissing rivals to agree on their joint salvation. So in early October he proposed a dinner in a comfortable private dining room at the venerable Union League Club, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive men’s clubs, formed during the Civil War to support the North. That evening, the millionaires and engineers gathered in their formal dinner clothes and over many sumptuous courses reviewed every contentious aspect of the proposed Cataract dynamo contract with Westinghouse.
By the time the cigars and brandy were served, the two sides had come to terms on everything but frequency, with Cataract clinging loyally to Forbes’s too low frequency of 162⁄3 and Westinghouse insisting it could not guarantee any dynamo of less than 30 cycles. Decades later, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme wrote, “There was more or less of a deadlock on the question of frequency…. [We] did not wish to build such a machine, due to the great probability of complete failure from the operative standpoint.”9 As the dinner broke up, Adams pulled aside Lewis Stillwell, the chief Westinghouse engineer. Could they compromise at 25 cycles? The eventual answer turned out to be yes. On October 27, 1893, three days before the Chicago World’s Fair was coming to a triumphant end, George Westinghouse finally had in hand the coveted contract that had slipped away from him earlier in the spring. He and Nikola Tesla would finally show the world what real electrical power could be.
By the end of that year, 1893, the whole Westinghouse camp was united on two matters: perfecting the generators for Niagara Power House No. 1 and visceral dislike and distrust of Professor George Forbes. In the wake of the professor’s misguided dynamo design, they doubted his electrical competence and viewed him as a decided impediment to their job. Nor did they appreciate his condescension. The ever genial Coleman Sellers found himself uncomfortably in the middle, for in December of 1893, George Westinghouse announced in his usual definite and decisive way that he and his men simply would not work with Professor Forbes (soon to return from a Christmas dash across to Great
Britain). Westinghouse now saw Forbes as “a possible rival in dynamo design” based on a lecture Forbes had delivered, and he had no intention of providing the professor any edge. Sellers wrote a rather anguished private memo to Adams about this “very delicate matter” right after Christmas and blamed Forbes for being away “when the most important measures are to be decided.” He wanted Adams to be fully aware of the “absolute unwillingness” of Westinghouse to have dealings with Forbes.10
After a February 6, 1894, meeting in Manhattan with George Westinghouse and two of his engineers, Edward Wickes reported to Adams that the Pittsburgh magnate was unyielding on Forbes. It created, he conceded, “considerable difficulty. We must get along the best way we can.”11 The upshot was that Coleman Sellers largely sidestepped Forbes from that time forward. Professor Forbes, whose dynamo design had been thoroughly lambasted by American engineers when he presented it at various engineering forums, did not appreciate his diminished Cataract status. (Charles E. L. Brown, head of the Swiss firm Brown, Boveri, formally accused the Scotsman of copying the unique umbrella-style-design dynamo he had submitted to Cataract in late 1892.)12
In a parting shot at Cataract for trifling with him, Professor Forbes penned a subtly poisonous article on Niagara for Blackwood’s, an English magazine, the next year. Predictably, he portrayed himself as the presiding engineering genius behind the great power project and the Americans largely as annoying ignoramuses. Forbes wreaked some measure of revenge when he airily explained, “I had at times great difficulty in keeping the president and vice presidents in hand…. Most of them began to think they knew something about the subject…. All this was generally amusing enough, but became almost tragic at times when I found them endangering the whole work. On such occasions I would write to my millionaires and tell them that if they did not do what I told them they would be personally answerable to the directors and shareholders for any disaster that might occur.”13
All through 1894, the engineers at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company were engaged in the mammoth yet delicate task of fine-tuning the designs and starting to build the first two of Niagara’s 5,000-horsepower generators, completely new kinds of machines five times bigger than those at the World’s Fair, which themselves at 1,000 horsepower had been considered behemoths. The third would be finished only when the first two had been shown to work properly. In its report on the contract, Westinghouse emphasized the great novelty of almost all the machinery: “The switching devices, indicating and measuring instruments, bus-bars and other auxiliary apparatus, have been designed and constructed on lines departing radically from our usual practice. The conditions of the problem presented, especially as regards the amount of power to be dealt with, have been so far beyond all precedent that it has been necessary to devise a considerable amount of new apparatus…. Nearly every device used differs from what has hitherto been our standard practice.”14 The original intended size and scale of the generators had to be reduced to ensure that they could be hoisted onto a railroad flatcar and transported safely to Niagara.
Westinghouse Tesla Polyphase System exhibited in the Electricity Building at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. While General Electric dominated the exhibits, Westinghouse won the big lighting contract.
COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The Tesla polyphase exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 showed how alternating current worked and included the twirling Egg of Columbus. Few appreciated its epochal importance.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
This 1893 photo shows a few of the thousands who labored to excavate the Niagara Falls Power Company’s mile-long tailrace tunnel under the town of Niagara Falls. A mile above the famous falls, river water was drawn off to power the Westinghouse AC dynamos, and then roared out through the tunnel just below the falls.
COURTESY OF NIAGARA MOHAWK, NATIONAL GRID USA SERVICE COMPANY, INC.
One of first Westinghouse Niagara Falls Power Company generators being built in Pittsburgh in 1894.
COURTESY OF NIAGARA MOHAWK, NATIONAL GRID USA SERVICE COMPANY, INC.
The first three Westinghouse dynamos in Stanford White’s “Cathedral of Power” at Niagara Falls in a photo taken April 6, 1896.
COURTESY OF NIAGARA MOHAWK, NATIONAL GRID USA SERVICE COMPANY, INC.
The plaque on one of the Westinghouse dynamos shows the tremendous importance of the Nikola Tesla AC patents.
COURTESY OF NIAGARA MOHAWK, NATIONAL GRID USA SERVICE COMPANY, INC.
A 1903 photo of the famous Niagara Falls ice bridge, when the falls and the river below froze into a strange and beautiful arctic landscape.
COURTESY OF NIAGARA FALLS PUBLIC LIBRARY
Nikola Tesla in the lab he set up in Colorado Springs in 1899 to study electric energy by generating millions of volts. This is a double exposure.
COURTESY OF THE NIKOLA TESLA MUSEUM
George Westinghouse (left) with Lord Kelvin, long in the anti-AC camp, when he visited the Westinghouse Company in August 1897.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
The Westinghouse country estate, Erskine Manor, in the Berkshires. They always liked to have family and friends in residence.
COURTESY OF THE GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE MUSEUM
Starting in the 1890s, Nikola Tesla lived in the Waldorf Astoria, Gotham’s most luxurious and socially elite hotel.
COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower and power plant in Shoreham, Long Island, was to serve as the heart of his World System of Power. Lacking sufficient money, he never finished it and got it operating.
COURTESY OF THE NIKOLA TESLA MUSEUM
The white pigeon that was Nikola Tesla’s great love in his final years.
COURTESY OF THE NIKOLA TESLA MUSEUM
Thomas Edison taking a nap. He needed little sleep and preferred to doze in his laboratory.
COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, EDISON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
After his second marriage, Edison lived with his family in Glenmont, a beautiful estate near his West Orange laboratory in New Jersey.
COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, EDISON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
As the hard times sank in across the nation, unemployed men who had tramped from place to place upon rumors of work began to form “industrial armies,” groups intent on pressuring the government to create work for them. Without a job, how were they to live? And anyone could look around and see only crushing unemployment. All spring the coalfields had been racked by strikes as 170,000 angry miners whose wages had been slashed closed most of the nation’s bituminous mines. When some state militias marched in to reopen the mines, there were murderous clashes. Public backlash doomed the strikers. While those coal miners returned sullenly to the pits for lower wages, trouble flared in Chicago. The great Pullman Palace Car Company, which manufactured every railroad’s sleeping cars, fired half its workforce and cut wages by a fourth. But the company did not reduce rents comparably on its overpriced company housing, where all operatives were required to live. When three unionized workers protested, George Pullman fired them, laid off all his workers, and closed the entire plant. For two months Pullman rejected any arbitration. At the end of June, his employees union, the American Railway Union, vowed its members would not serve on any train with a Pullman Palace Car until the company accepted arbitration. With so much anger and misery festering, the strike spread like wildfire, and within a couple of weeks the heartland’s rail system shuddered to a halt. Factories went dark for want of coal. A badly ailing economy was dealt a debilitating blow.
President Grover Cleveland, who abhorred anything that smacked of “socialism,” had resisted fashioning any federal solutions to nationwide want and misery. But he did not hesitate to call out the militia to break the strike. On July 5, as the soldiers marched in, Chicago, ju
st a year earlier the proud host of the World’s Fair, was engulfed in deadly riots and rampant looting. The violence spread elsewhere. With that, even the most liberal sympathy for the strikers evaporated. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was invoked to jail union leader Eugene Debs and others, and gradually calm returned. But not prosperity. Many Americans had come to view the nation as in a struggle for its very being, pitting the greedy rich against the ordinary folk. The North American Review decried the new “plutocracy … their octopus grip is extending over every branch of industry; a plutocracy which controls the price of bread we eat, the price of sugar … the price of the oil that lights our way, the price of the very coffins in which we are finally buried.”15 It had been a very grim year.
Despite the nation’s labor strife and abysmal economic state, Edward Dean Adams had forged resolutely ahead with the complex Niagara Power infrastructure, readying the site for the day the electricity finally began to flow, a date that was being pushed back continually. Cataract’s new far-flung industrial domain at this stage included not just the unfinished powerhouse and the smaller transformer building, but a dock for Great Lakes ships to unload and a huge swath of rough reclaimed land created with tunnel debris. All of this was then connected by the company’s railroad, seven miles long. Then there was Cataract’s workers’ village, Echoata, with sixty-seven modest two-family houses with trim lawns designed by renowned New York architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White. Adams had pressed White to find time in his overloaded schedule to serve as the architect for Power House No. 1, the gigantic but simple “cathedral of power” constructed with chiseled Queenston quarry limestone, as well as for Echoata. The powerhouse was two hundred feet long, sixty-four feet wide, and forty feet high, topped by a slate-and-iron roof, a building whose plain exterior gratified the Brahmin sensibilities of Edward Dean Adams. Tall, graceful windows kept the powerhouse interior aglow with lambent natural light. Deep in the basement, the three powerful turbines sat unmoving, awaiting Westinghouse’s dynamos and Niagara’s roaring green waters. As at the World’s Fair, the switchboard was a huge marble affair set up on a railed platform.