by Jill Jonnes
On the hot Friday of August 25—Colored People’s Day at Festival Hall—the great abolitionist and leader Frederick Douglass wearily entreated in this era of Jim Crow, “All we beg is to receive as honest treatment as those who love only part of the country.”34 Over on the South Side of Chicago, a ferocious fire, fueled by two huge coal yards, was roaring its way through 131 buildings, leaving two hundred families homeless. In Freeport, Illinois, yet another bank failed. Seven U.S. deputy marshals traveling the Rock Island Railway were bound for the Sub-Treasury Building on Wall Street, escorting twenty tons of California gold intended to shore up government finances, while at Manhattan’s docks New York police were forcibly dispersing striking longshoremen.
But in Chicago on that very warm, sultry Friday evening, a thousand electrical engineers and scientists were streaming excitedly into the already hot Assembly Hall in the Agricultural Building, interested in but one thing: Nikola Tesla. “The great majority of those who came,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “came with the expectation of seeing Tesla pass a current of 250,000 volts through his body and perform the marvelous feat with lamps lighted through his body that set Paris wild.” Those without seats clamored at the entrance door, vainly offering as much as $10 to anyone who would sell them a ticket. Of course, those who really knew something of electricity now understood that deadliness was measured not in volts, but in amps. Rumor had it that Tesla was on retainer again to Westinghouse for $5,000 a month.
As the electricians in town for their electrical congress waited in the heat for Tesla, they could see up on a platform small cylinders of heavy steel mounted on steel pedestals, all with insulated wooden bases. To the right, a wooden table was stacked with strange mechanical appliances. Even the most eminent confessed they had no idea what many of these objects were. As the crowd settled down, white-haired Elisha Gray escorted Tesla in to a tumult of applause, saying: “I give you the Wizard of Physics!”
Though Tesla (always working long hours) looked gaunt and exhausted, his cheeks hollow, his dark eyes sunken, he smiled demurely and joked that many electricians had promised to speak, but “when the programme was sifted down I was the only healthy man left.” So he was there to lecture on “Mechanical and Electrical Oscillators.” This dry topic encompassed many wonders. Ever the dandy, Tesla was wearing a beautifully tailored gray brown four-button cutaway suit. For those who noticed, his shoes were unusual—thick soled with what looked like cork. The oscillators, he demonstrated, could generate very “precise frequencies that could be used to transmit information or electrical energy. When the oscillator was pulsating at the frequency of light, he could manifest luminescence as well. And mechanically he could create [and send precisely oscillating] pulsations through metal bars, or pipes, and test for harmonic frequencies and standing waves.”35 He had also designed steam generators so tiny, they could fit in the crown of a derby hat. Tesla made objects whirl, flashed huge sparks, lit up all sizes and shapes of protofluorescent lights, and, finally, lit up himself, until he was engulfed in dazzling streams of light. As the streamers of electricity subsided and Tesla was just fine—a living refutation of Edison’s calumnies against his beloved AC—his brown suit continued to emit “fine glimmers or halos of splintered light.”36 The amazed audience burst into furious applause. Tesla had come and conquered!
Despite such transcendent moments within the magical precincts of the wondrous Chicago World’s Fair, outside in the harsh and sobering light of the real world, the Panic of 1893 was turning into the worst economic disaster in decades. The fair certainly felt the stringency, and its directors were even more grateful to George Westinghouse for the $500,000 he had saved them. They always made sure he was paid first, ahead of all other fair creditors. Wrote Francis Leupp, “When the panic was passing through its most acute stage, and the banks were refusing to cash checks because they had nothing to cash them with, the treasury of the Fair handed over … to Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company large quantities of dollars and half-dollars and quarters, which were shipped directly to Pittsburgh, and used to pay off the workmen in the shops at a time when currency was commanding five percent premium.”37 To everyone’s surprise and delight, the Westinghouse Electric Company actually turned a small profit of $19,000 on its fair contract. The publicity for AC electricity was, as Westinghouse had anticipated, incalculable.
The millions upon millions of fair visitors who had flooded into town had shielded Chicago through the summer and early fall from the worst blows of the panic. But by November, Chicago reporter Ray Stannard Baker was writing, “What a spectacle! What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair…. Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation, in one month; depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.” On the last day of the fair, the city’s beloved four-term roguish mayor, Carter Henry Harrison Sr., came into the hall of his home to greet a disgruntled young man seeking a job. Instead of a handshake, he found himself fatally shot in broad daylight. On the heels of that jarring tragedy came the grim, ever growing army of unemployed, swelled by those who had built and then run the fair. Writes Chicago historian Donald L. Miller, “Thousands of them roamed the streets, unable, on some nights, to afford a urine-soaked mattress in a ten-cent flophouse.”38 When Baker the reporter stopped in late at City Hall one night, he was stunned to see every foot of cold stone floor space covered by men sleeping on newspapers, wet, worn shoes serving as pillows. By the end of that terrible year, 500 banks across Gilded Age America had failed, as had 150 railroads and 16,000 businesses. In Chicago, it had been the best of times. Now, as was true across America, it was the worst of times.
Niagara Falls, Prospect Point, 1890
CHAPTER 11
Niagara Power: “What a Fall of Bright-Green Water!”
As the nineteenth century edged toward its final years, the Niagara Cataract was still one of the world’s most celebrated natural wonders, a required destination for every genteel and self-regarding tourist, American or foreign. Visitors to Niagara Falls marveled at the powerful torrents thundering so violently down a 160-foot cliff that the very earth trembled while rainbows danced high above. The Canadians had the more spectacular, broadly curved Horseshoe Falls on their side of Goat Island, while the Americans had to content themselves with the narrower American Falls on their side. The earliest visitors had been uniformly rapturous in praise of all this tumbling, terrifying, awesome beauty. Charles Dickens arrived on the train straight from Buffalo on a raw April morning in 1842. From below the Canadian side, he watched “stunned and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene…. Great Heaven, on what a Fall of bright-green water! … Then I felt how near to my Creator I was standing…. Peace of Mind, tranquility, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness … Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty.”1 He stayed ten glorious days, watching the oxygenated glass-green Great Lakes water crash over the falls on its journey to Lake Ontario, a man blissfully immersed in the sheer natural immensity of water, rumbling earth, mist, and dancing rainbows.
Fifteen years later, American landscape artist Frederic Church painted a vast and idyllic vision of the falls, rendered as if one were wading perilously in at their very top from the Canadian side. Beneath a luminous but glowering sky, Church caught the broad and boiling thunder of the stupendous green falls as it roared into the chasm. The combination of the immediacy and the majestic mesmerized the critics and the public. When Church’s Niagara went on display in New York City in May of 1857, in just two weeks one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line to see it.
This sense of the sacred amid the wilderness that had so enthralled early visitors and that Church had captured so vividly on canvas was, in the years leading up to the Civil War, largely gone from Niagara Falls. The railroads made travel there easy, thus setting off the building of hotels, museums, stables, icehouses, bathhouses, laundries, and curiosity shops catering to the tourist do
llar. A tawdry and aggressive commercialism engulfed both sides of the falls—tacky tea gardens, curiosity shops, huge and unlovely hostels, taverns, and viewing towers. The venal Niagara hackmen, vying loutishly for fares, quickly dispelled any pilgrim’s spiritual frame of mind. Where a Charles Dickens had been content simply to be at Niagara, to literally soak up its sacred aura, others now sought more practical glory there. Most notably were those known as “funambulists,” a Latin word meaning “rope walker.” In the summer of 1859, the Great Blondin in his pink tights had attracted crowds of twenty-five thousand—not to admire the booming and foaming great cataract, but to watch him cross a tightrope strung up below the roaring falls. With each crossing, Blondin added more heart-stopping stunts—carrying his manager across on his back, then a small stove on which he nonchalantly cooked not one but two omelets a hundred feet above the chasm, and finally a table to hold his champagne and cake, as he casually sipped, munched, and balanced on his tightrope.
The next summer, as the tourist hordes again swarmed north to escape the heat and enjoy the delights of Niagara, Blondin was weekly challenged by a Monsieur Farini on his tightrope—performing headstands above the roaring waters of the gorge, hanging by toes as onlookers gasped on the Maid of the Mist excursion boat below, crossing the wide gorge while covered by a bulky bag, or taking a washtub, lowering it to gather water, and then studiously washing hankies! Finally, the Great Blondin did what even Farini did not dare: He sidled out onto a tightrope high above the gorge balancing on stilts—inspired, one suspects, by the presence of the Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness could only gasp, “Thank God it’s over!” when Blondin returned to the bank to leap gracefully down.2 Stuntmen and daredevils of all sorts would follow, making the falls a mere backdrop. Yet such was Niagara’s reputation that all felt compelled if possible to visit, hoping to recapture the rapturous awe of its great waters.
Then there were the businessmen, practical sorts who from the start had admired the roaring waters but fretted that all that pounding waterpower was going to waste, just tumbling greenly and gorgeously over a 160-foot cliff. One early prospectus in 1857 for water wheels lamented “a power almost illimitable, constantly wasted, yet never diminished—constantly exerted, yet never exhausted—gazed upon, wondered at, but never hitherto controlled.”3 One local entrepreneur diverted Niagara water down a canal and by 1882 had as water wheel customers seven small industries, including pulp and flour mills and an Oneida silver-plating factory. This nascent industrial activity was the galvanizing event in the 1885 creation of the Niagara Reservation, a New York State government preserve that forbade all man-made excrescences on its four hundred acres of state land (three-quarters of it submerged) around Niagara Falls.
The very restrictions imposed by the new Niagara Reservation inspired Erie Canal engineer Thomas Evershed in the winter of 1886 to propose a wildly ambitious dream to harness Niagara Falls: a canal water wheel power system whose intakes would be more than a mile above the falls, well out of sight. There Niagara River water would be siphoned off and surge into a long, broad canal that would diverge off at factory and mill sites to feed some two hundred water wheels. The Niagara water turning each wheel would then discharge straight down one hundred feet into a two-and-a-half-mile-long sloped tailrace tunnel deep below the ramshackle tourist town of Niagara. All the water wheel flow would return to the river through this tailrace tunnel just below the falls. By June of that year, a dozen influential upstate men promised to subscribe to $200,000 in stock in the Niagara River Hydraulic Tunnel, Power and Sewer Company and secured necessary state charters. In early September, the village of Niagara Falls gave permission for the tailrace discharge tunnel to pass far below its streets. Over the next several years, the Evershed group, which never anted up the actual cash for their stock holdings, tempted various investors but failed to convince any to actually finance their grandiose plan.
But the Niagara men did not give up. They drew in New York attorney William Rankine, who had studied law locally before making a name in Manhattan legal circles. On July 5, 1889, the handsome and debonair Rankine delivered, bringing north to the river-cooled Niagara Reservation two highly influential New York money men. The first was Edward A. Wickes, a rather fleshy, porcine Vanderbilt representative. The second man was none other than Francis Lynde Stetson, one of the most powerful attorneys in America. Scion of a distinguished New York legal and political family, Stetson served as a political confidant to New York governor Grover Cleveland in his whirlwind rise to the presidency. Out as president after one term, “the Big One” was now one of Stetson’s law partners. So brilliantly had Stetson represented the railroad interests of the Vanderbilts that since 1887, J. P. Morgan had Stetson’s firm on permanent retainer. So Francis Lynde Stetson was much courted and much feared. Sandy hair side parted, thick mustache topping a skeptical mouth, Stetson always carried about him an aura of intimidating power. His hard-looking eyes appeared as if they easily sized up adversaries.
By that September of 1889, with summer gone and both Stetson and Wickes asking again and again for postponements and concessions as they considered financing the Evershed plan, the enterprising William Rankine went himself to see J. Pierpont Morgan. The Niagara project would require very large infusions of capital. It had been more than a decade since Thomas A. Edison had installed the first incandescent lights in Morgan’s cigar smoke–wreathed Wall Street office. Since those days, Morgan had been steadily amassing financial power and personal girth. In the office, he was as ferocious as ever, and his famed glare dared visitors to notice an unfortunate development of middle age: a reddened, pitted nose, progressively more inflamed by acne rosacea. Morgan, who liked to be surrounded by the aesthetically pleasing, showed a marked partiality for hiring young, handsome partners willing to work at a killing pace. Rankine came to Morgan’s office and tried—to no avail—to entice the participation of the great Wall Street financier in this “floundering power enterprise.” But Rankine was not one to be deterred. The next day, he reappeared and sought Morgan out again. “Mr. Morgan, you seemed interested in our project until we invited you to join us. Is there some feature we could change which would make it satisfactory?”
Said Morgan, “Your scheme is all right but you have no man to run it.”
Replied Rankine, “Whom would you suggest?”
“Well, there is Adams. If you can get him, I’ll join you.”4
So it was that Edward Dean Adams came to Niagara.
Edward Dean Adams was a low-key New York investment banker renowned for his ability to revive and reconfigure crippled railroad companies. Naturally, Morgan, whose financial forte was just this, viewed Adams as a most valuable asset. A short man, Adams looked somewhat like a wise old frog with his heavily hooded eyes, weak chin, and mouth lost in a huge dark clump of mustache merging into an odd little chin tuft. While unimpressive in appearance, Adams was a full-fledged Boston Brahmin and descendant of two presidents. He had received a scientific and military education at Norwich College, then attended MIT. In 1878, he had become a partner at the exclusive Winslow, Lanier & Company in New York, where he was much admired as a brilliantly effective executive and attorney, a man who knew how to make things happen and get things done. In later years, the grateful stockholders of the American Cotton Oil trust bestowed a solid gold vase upon him as their rescuer from corporate ruin.
Adams had been a major stockholder in the Edison companies since 1884, and he was indeed quite interested in Rankine’s proposition to take over the stymied Niagara power project. He, like others, wondered whether the new technology of electricity might not play an important role. Adams, who lived with his wife and children at 455 Madison Avenue in a mansion not far from Morgan, immediately consulted one of America’s grand old mechanical engineers, Coleman Sellers of Philadelphia. On the last day of September 1889, Adams wrote to Sellers that while he knew that electricity had moved forward “with great rapidity,” he was quite uncertain if it warranted “the investm
ent of a large amount of money,” and “I desire your advice.”5 He sent Sellers the Evershed prospectus, and by October 5, Sellers was writing that this huge project based on powering hundreds of time-honored mill wheels did indeed seem financially feasible, but he cautioned Adams to seek further advice from engineering experts in various fields. As for electricity, Sellers lamented the paucity of experience with long-distance transmission, telling Adams, “Large amounts of power have been cheaply sent short distances say two or three miles, and small amounts of power have been sent very much farther than is now under consideration.” But nothing like the 100,000 horsepower envisioned at Niagara had been sent as far as the distance between Niagara Falls (population 5,000) and Buffalo (population 256,000)—twenty-six miles.6 For surely Buffalo and its thriving industries were the likely consumers of Niagara power if its form was to be electrical.
By December, Coleman Sellers, a vigorous sixty-two-year-old with a cropped snow white beard and big handlebar mustache framing a jolly countenance, had journeyed up to Niagara Falls himself to survey the actual site and to confer with many of the Niagara men promoting the plan. He gave particular attention to the quality of the rock near the falls, for that would be paramount in excavating the long tunnel under the town. On December 17, 1889, he sent Adams a seventeen-page report that included actual figures and various proposals to reduce costs, concluding that the project was indeed feasible. He ended by noting it had been “one of the most interesting engineering problems ever given me to consider.”7 Sellers’s enthusiasm sold Adams, and with Adams sold, so were the other New York financiers. A syndicate of 103 men, “one of the most powerful combinations of New York capitalists … ever … formed,”8 invested a total of $2,630,000 in the Cataract Construction Company. This formidable new firm would transform Niagara’s sublime and mighty flow of tumbling water into the riches of usable power. While the original Niagara men had little to offer monetarily, it was considered good local politics to retain them all on Cataract’s board.
