Niagara: A History of the Falls (28 page)

Westinghouse fought back with public lectures and pamphlets. He had his eye on Niagara Falls and also on the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago. In 1892, when the Edison company was swallowed up in an amalgamation that became General Electric, the new firm went head to head with Westinghouse’s company in an effort to secure contracts for lighting the exposition and building turbines for Niagara. Westinghouse won. His firm would install all power and lighting equipment for the first electrified fair in history – using Tesla’s alternating current.

Meanwhile, Adams’s Cataract Construction Company was proceeding with its discharge tunnel under Niagara Falls, still not knowing how it could deliver power to Buffalo. The first sod had been turned on October 4, 1890, after Adams got back from Europe. The old bell from the Cataract House, which had once summoned guests to dinner, sounded again after a long silence as six carriage-loads of dignitaries debouched at Shaft No. 1. Captain Charles E. Gaskill, a shaggy Civil War veteran, one-time flour miller, and chief customer of the old hydraulic canal, now president of the Niagara Falls Power Company, gave the opening address. “A great future is in store for us,” he proclaimed. “…  As each year passes we will see great industries located along the Niagara River … adding wealth to this already favored region, making of it the seat of the greatest manufacturing city in the world.”

The magnitude of the undertaking was unprecedented. It was, in the words of one journalist, “a triumph of human enterprise which out rivals some of the bold creations of Jules Verne.” Thirteen hundred workmen were blasting their way, day and night, through the solid rock, 160 feet below the town. The horseshoe-shaped tunnel, eighteen feet wide, twenty-one feet high, and seven thousand feet long, would displace 300,000 tons of rock; it would require twenty million bricks to line it and two and a half million feet of oak and yellow pine to shore it up. This gigantic tailrace would carry off the excess water that the hydraulic canal above the Falls would deliver to turbines in wheel pits 140 feet below the powerhouse to produce 100,000 horsepower of electricity. But the question of how that electricity was to be distributed remained unanswered.

Sir William Thomson’s commission had leaned toward electricity over compressed air as the most attractive method of transmitting power to Buffalo. But Thomson himself stubbornly opposed alternating current. Finally, in 1893, the new Lord Kelvin came round. In October of that year, the Niagara Falls Power Company awarded Westinghouse the contract to build the first two generators at Niagara. As a form of compromise, General Electric was given the contract to build the transmission and distribution lines to Buffalo, using the Tesla patents. George Westinghouse had clearly won the battle of the currents.

The change of attitude towards alternating current was certainly helped by the Westinghouse exhibit at the Columbian Exposition that year. The big fair, which introduced the zipper, Edison’s motion-picture projector, and Little Egypt’s hoochie-koochie dance, was lit entirely by electricity and known as the White City. In the Electrical Building, Tesla himself, clad in white tie and tails, indulged in scientific wizardry, reversing metal eggs at great speed on a velvet-covered table and receiving through his body currents of a potential 200,000 volts – his clothing emitting halos of splintered light that brought gasps from the spectators.

Tesla was now the man of the hour, a brilliant lecturer and a flamboyant personality, hailed by his contemporaries as “the greatest living electrician.” A bulletin announcing a lecture at St. Louis that gave a brief account of his life was so popular it sold four thousand copies on the city streets in a single day, “something unprecedented in the history of electrical journalism.” It was reported that his lecture in the Great Music Entertainment Hall that evening was heard by a larger audience than had ever before been gathered together on an occasion of that kind. Complimentary tickets to the event were sold by scalpers at five dollars each.

Tesla thrilled his listeners by promising a brilliant electrical future. Niagara Falls, he told interviewers, had enough horsepower to “light every lamp, drive every railroad, propel every ship, heat every store and produce every article manufactured by machinery in the United States.” He foresaw a time when “we will be very likely to be able to heat our stoves, warm the water, and do our cooking by electricity, and in fact, perform any service of this kind required for our domestic needs.” Again, these words have a certain resonance for the nuclear age.

In mid-1892, even before the method of transmission had been approved, Cataract Construction plunged ahead with the design of the generating station a mile and a half above the brink of the Falls. Edward Dean Adams was determined to go first class. The most prominent architect in America, Stanford White, would be given the job – a difficult one, since structures like these had never before been attempted. Adams’s instructions were that it had to be attractive, “artistic in grandeur, dignified, impressive, enduring and monumental … It should express in its design, the purpose of its construction.” By the use of roughly trimmed native stone – “as the old inhabitant had recommended by building his home of that material” – its character would “be defensive against the storms without, and protective of the valuable machinery enclosed therein.”

The company, which had already assembled a considerable acreage of land, now set up a subsidiary to develop a village to house the workers, also to be designed by White. Adams called it Echota, from the name of a Cherokee capital, loosely translated as “place of refuge.” Adams’s plan was practical as well as esthetic. He needed to attract and retain skilled labour. His workers, unlike others in similar communities, would enjoy an unusual luxury. In their neat, shingled houses they would all have electric light.

The pace of development accelerated. The tunnel was finished in 1893. The following summer huge electricity-powered cranes lowered the massive twenty-nine-ton double turbines – the largest of their kind so far produced – into the wheel pits. Tesla’s polyphase motors, also the world’s largest, followed. Stanford White’s handsome powerhouse, capable of delivering fifteen thousand horsepower, was completed in 1895. The following spring the town of Niagara Falls was lit for the first time by electricity.

That summer of 1896, Tesla himself arrived at the Falls accompanied by Adams and Westinghouse. He pronounced the powerhouse “wonderful beyond comparison,” but his sensitive nature was badly shaken by the enormous size of the dynamos. “It always affects me to see such a thing,” he declared. “The shock is severe on me.” As for transmitting power to Buffalo, Tesla was as certain of that as he was of the coming dawn. “The problem has been solved,” he said emphatically. “Power can be transmitted to Buffalo as soon as the Power Company is ready to do it.… It is one of the simplest propositions. It is simply according to all pronounced and accepted rules, and is as firmly established as the air itself.”

Buffalo’s civic authorities were not blessed with this Slavic certitude. When the power arrived at last on November 16, the mayor waited until shortly after midnight before pulling the switch. The quiet ceremony, scheduled for the dark of the night when carping opponents could be deemed to be safely in bed, had gone unadvertised and unnoticed until the city fathers were sure that Tesla’s system would work. But that morning, Buffalo’s streetcars were running on Niagara Falls power, and when Cataract Construction’s “power banquet” was mounted the following January, Tesla was chosen to respond to the mayor’s toast to electricity.

Well he might be, for he had saved the Westinghouse Company from collapse or merger by an act of singular generosity. The House of Morgan, which controlled the General Electric Company, was waging a price war to eliminate “costly competition.” The Westinghouse Company was badly overextended because of the expensive campaign to put the country on a system of alternating current. To fend off GE the firm would have to consolidate with some of its smaller competitors. The stumbling block was the royalty contract with Tesla. His patents covered powerhouse equipment, motors, and every other use of the alternating-current system. Already, it was said, the accrued royalties amounted to twelve million dollars. In a few years, at $2.50 per horsepower, Tesla would become a billionaire, while Westinghouse would sink under the financial burden of the contract.

George Westinghouse himself met with Tesla and asked him to give up his royalties, explaining that he held the fate of the company in his hands.

Tesla asked if Westinghouse proposed to continue his missionary work for the alternating-current system he had invented.

Westinghouse replied that Tesla’s polyphase system was the greatest discovery in the field of electricity and no matter what happened, he intended to continue to put the country on an alternating-current basis.

“You have been my friend,” Tesla told him. “You believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead when your own engineers lacked vision.… Here is your contract and here is my contract – I will tear them both to pieces …”

And so saying, he ripped up the documents and tossed them into the wastebasket.

3
The golden age

The final quarter of the nineteenth century has been called the Great Age of Heroic Invention. It was probably the last time in which a single genius, working by himself in basement or woodshed, could come up with a device or process that would change society. The electric light, the telephone, the motion-picture projector, the gramophone, and the automobile were all products of this yeasty period. Inventors like Edison, Westinghouse, and Bell were popular heroes, to be emulated by younger men. Now, with enormous quantities of raw electrical power available, North America stood on a threshold.

In a single decade, Niagara Falls, New York,
né
Manchester, became the centre of the electro-chemical and electro-metallurgical world. It began in 1893, when Charles Martin Hall announced that he was moving his Pittsburgh Reduction Company to the Falls. The manufacture of aluminum as a commercial product requires enormous quantities of electric power. Hall’s first contracts with the Niagara Falls Power Company called for an immediate fifteen hundred horsepower with the option of buying one thousand more.

A few short years before, aluminum had been one of the rarest of all manufactured metals. Now, at Niagara, Hall was proposing to produce one thousand pounds a day. His company would shortly change its name to Aluminum Company of America – ALCOA. Its product would have an extraordinary influence on both industry and everyday life.

Hall was a prototype for the nineteenth-century inventor – an enthusiastic and curious young man who worshipped George Westinghouse. In 1886, when he hit on the discovery that made him famous, he was just twenty-two. His twin dreams, to make a great scientific breakthrough and to grow rich as a result, exactly fitted the ethos of the times.

As a boy he had had an abiding curiosity about how things worked. Using chemicals taken from the kitchen shelves, he carried out experiments in the woodshed, or in a cupola above the family home in Oberlin, Ohio. He read everything that had been published about Westinghouse, but then, he read everything that dealt with science, from an old chemistry book of his father’s to the
Scientific American
, at that time the Bible for young men of a scientific bent.

Aluminum had been isolated as an element in 1825. A strong, light metal that didn’t tarnish, it could have a hundred uses if only a way could be found to produce it cheaply. It was the third most abundant element in nature; as a French scientist had said, “every clay bank is a mine of aluminum.” Yet it was being extracted only in tiny quantities. In the early 1880s when young Hall was attending Oberlin College, it was worth fifteen dollars a pound. When his professor, F.F. Jewett, asked the class if any of them had actually seen a piece of aluminum, Charles Hall was the only one to raise his hand.

Jewett then turned to the class and said, “If anyone should invent a process by which aluminum could be made on a commercial scale not only would he be a benefactor to the world but he would also be able to lay up for himself a great fortune.” In the America of that day, as the hugely successful Alger books made clear, anything was possible. Hall turned to a classmate and whispered, “I’m going for that metal.”

Starting in 1881, Hall began an intermittent series of experiments hoping to find a cheap method of separating aluminum from clay. First, he tried heating the clay – aluminum silicate – with carbon. It didn’t work. Then he tried to fuse the mixture by exposing it to burning charcoal and potassium chlorate. That didn’t work. He tried heating calcium chloride and magnesium chloride with clay, hoping that aluminum chloride would distil off. That didn’t work either.

He kept on trying. In 1884 he achieved a higher temperature using another homemade furnace and bellows. He tried experimenting with various catalysts at these higher temperatures, again without results. All this time he had been completing his
studies at Oberlin College. After graduating in 1884, he set up a laboratory in his woodshed. He abandoned the idea of reducing aluminum silicate chemically and hit on an alternative plan. “It looks as though electrolysis would be my only hope,” he told his sister, Julia.

He secured a single-burner gasoline stove and wrapped a cylindrical iron shell lined with fire-clay around it. In the centre of this shell, above the burner, he placed a fire-clay crucible.

Now he had to find a solvent for the alumina clay. He had decided that water wouldn’t work because the aluminum, if produced by electrolysis, would immediately react with it. The chlorides hadn’t worked, so he experimented with a variety of fluorides. These didn’t work either. Some wouldn’t melt; others wouldn’t dissolve the alumina. Finally he tried a double fluoride, sodium aluminum fluoride, known as cryolite. To his elation, it not only melted to a red-hot fluid but when pinches of alumina were thrown in, the clay dissolved “just like sugar in water,” in Hall’s ecstatic phrase. With a borrowed battery, he passed an electric current through the solution. What he achieved was pure aluminum.