Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  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.

  The results were startling. Even before moving to Niagara Falls, Hall’s Pittsburgh Reduction Company was able to offer aluminum for less than a dollar a pound. In little more than a decade the price would drop to eighteen cents. In a single flash of inspiration, a youth only a year past voting age had given Niagara Falls its first major industry and made the United States the largest aluminum-producing country in the world.

  Hard on the heels of Hall came another inventor, the immaculate and methodical Edward Goodrich Acheson, a self-taught chemical wizard who had just discovered how to make silicon carbide, or Carborundum. Next to diamond dust, it was the hardest abrasive known to man. Acheson had been forced to drop out of school at the age of seventeen, but what he lacked in formal training he made up in reading and in enthusiasm. He read everything, from the Alger-inspired Try Again, or the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West to early works on metallurgy. Like Hall, he devoured the Scientific American. Edison was his
hero; chemistry and electricity were his passions. He was scarcely out of school before he had patented a rock-boring machine for coal mines. That was the first of sixty-nine patents that he would take out in his lifetime. George Westinghouse bought several and thus helped him on his way.

  Acheson went to work for Edison at Menlo Park and later in Europe. He saw the need for a new abrasive – diamond dust was horribly expensive – and when at last he set out on his own, he began a series of experiments, hoping to find one. He soon noticed that clay got harder after being impregnated with carbon, and he wondered whether or not a mixture of the two might be fused if subjected to several thousand degrees of heat.

  In March 1891, using a small iron crucible, Acheson carried out his experiment, thrusting a carbon rod, connected to a generator, into a mixture of clay (aluminum silicate) and carbon. The results were disappointing; apparently nothing had happened. But Acheson took a second careful look and saw a few bright specks attached to the rod. He stuck one of these on the tip of a pencil and drew it across a pane of glass. To his astonishment and delight, it cut the glass like a diamond.

  By 1892, Acheson’s Carborundum Company was making about twenty pounds of the product a day, and the price was dropping. But Acheson realized that if he were to succeed he must make much larger quantities for sale at a much lower price. The abrasive had been selling for $576 a pound – half the price of diamond dust, but still prohibitive. Acheson was determined to bring the price down to eight cents a pound. For that he would need substantial amounts of electrical power, and that was available only at Niagara Falls.

  Without telling his board, he signed a contract with the Niagara Falls Power Company for one thousand horsepower a day, with an option for a later amount up to ten thousand horsepower. It was a daring move. Acheson was contemplating increasing production by a factor of twenty at a time when his original plant at Monongahela, Pennsylvania, could sell no more than half the Carborundum it produced. No wonder, then, that when he finally told his board, the directors resigned on the spot.

  The mass walkout did not faze him. He pressed on, thinking big, planning the largest electric furnace in the world. It was scarcely in operation before he made a second spectacular discovery. Engaged in some high temperature experiments on Carborundum, he accidentally produced graphite and gave Niagara Falls another industry.

  The example of both Hall and Acheson, who signed up for Niagara power even before the Cataract company had developed it, brought a flood of electro-chemical and electro-metallurgical firms to Niagara Falls, New York, seeking cheap and plentiful power. Thus was established a symbiotic relationship between the power companies and the chemical industry. Without power, the industry had no future, but without industry, the companies had no customers. It had once been assumed that Buffalo would be the major customer. Now it was clear that the industry would concentrate on the spot, as close to the power source as possible, just as Evershed had contemplated.

  Jacob Schoellkopf’s foresight in snapping up an apparently useless hydraulic canal was paying off. By 1896 he had completed a second generating plant, this one at the water’s edge in the Upper Great Gorge. Rivalling the newly opened plant of Niagara Power (to be named for Edward Dean Adams), it had the largest penstocks in the world and took advantage of the full drop of 210 feet to produce 34,000 horsepower. Hall’s Pittsburgh Reduction Company contracted for half its output.

  By the end of the nineties, the availability of cheap power had brought eleven major companies to Niagara. By 1909 the number had risen to twenty-five. Jacob Schoellkopf did not live to see the dawn of the new century, but so great was the demand for power that his successors started work almost at once on an addition to the river plant with four times the original capacity. In 1918 Schoellkopf’s Hydraulic Power Company merged with Niagara Falls Power. Though the name Niagara Falls Power Company was retained, Jacob’s sons and grandsons controlled the new consolidated enterprise.

  Most of the companies lured to Niagara by cheap power were new firms that would soon merge with others to become industrial giants with names like Union Carbide, Anaconda, American Cyanamide, Auto-Lite Battery, and Occidental Petroleum. They gave the world acetylene, alkalis, sodium, bleaches, caustic soda, chlorine – a devil’s brew of chemicals produced by electrolysis or electrothermal processes. Ironically, the very waters that produced the new power – so clean, so serene – were themselves poisoned by the residue of the chemical boom, while their surroundings were infected by contaminants that would lie dormant and undiscovered for more than half a century.

  No such paradox was apparent at the time. The flamboyant Tesla had declared publicly that Buffalo, Tonawanda, and Niagara Falls would merge into the greatest city in the world – a statement that fuelled the boosterism that had seized the region. “NIAGARA LEADS THE WORLD,” the Niagara Falls Gazette trumpeted. In the machine age there was little place for the sublime. The hum of Tesla’s great motors took precedence over the roar of the cataract. In the minds of many, the Falls were obsolete.

  One who held to this view was Lord Kelvin himself. Kelvin echoed the hopes of the electrical industry when he stated baldly in 1897, “I do not hope that our children’s children will ever see Niagara’s cataract.” As far as he was concerned, the Falls could be shut down. He believed that “the great power of the waterfall of Niagara is destined to do more good for the world than even the great benefit which the people of today possess in the scenic wonders of this renowned cataract. The originators of the work thus far carried out, and now in progress, hold a concession for the development of 450,000 horsepower from Niagara Falls. I do not believe that any such limit will bind the use of this great natural gift, and I wish that it were possible that I might live to see the future’s grand development.”

  4

  Utopian dreams

  “Humanity’s modern servant,” as Edward Dean Adams called electricity – “the giant genie” – had changed the course of history, heralding a newer and brighter era. Nature at her most awesome had been subdued. The harnessing of her power touched off a wave of optimism about the future. Niagara’s mighty forces would benefit humanity not only materially but also morally. Electricity was clean and pure, a symbol of peace and harmony, in contrast to coal – grimy and corrupt, hidden in the murky bowels of the earth. The Columbian Exposition – the famous White City – pointed to Utopia.

  The first of the Utopians was a flamboyant entrepreneur named William T. Love, who in 1893 proposed to build a “Model City” at Niagara. This carefully planned community would be big enough to hold a million people, with thousands of acres set aside for parkland that was advertised as “the most extensive and beautiful in the world.”

  Hyperbole abounded. Love’s metropolis, according to his brochures, would be “the most perfect city in existence.” It was destined, indeed, “to become one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the United States,” backed as it was by unlimited power from the Falls. And like the Falls, which dwarfed everything around them, the Model City would dwarf all previous developments. “Nothing approaching it in magnitude, perfection or power, has ever before been attempted.”

  Love literally beat the drum for his project, hiring brass bands and choruses to sing its praises, producing pamphlets trumpeting the advantages of cheap and sometimes free sites, and free power for new factories. He even managed to address a joint session of the New York State legislature (an uncommon privilege), which gave him, in effect, carte blanche to expropriate and condemn property and divert all the water he needed from the Niagara River for his power project. The centrepiece of his plan would be a seven-mile, navigable power canal, bringing water to a point above the Model City, where the drop to the river would provide 100,000 horsepower.

  Love actually laid out streets and built a few houses and a factory before he ran out of money. The depression of the nineties was blamed, but one cannot escape the conclusion that Love’s reach was far beyond his grasp, and that depression or no depression his
grandiose real-estate scheme would have foundered. He had managed to dig no more than a mile of his proposed canal, which lingered on, long after his death, a soggy monument to his failed ambitions. Over the years rains filled the ditch; children used it as a swimming hole in the summer and a skating rink in the winter. More than eight decades after his vision, Love’s canal was once more in the headlines, a symbol not of the purity of Niagara’s power but of its corruption. Utopia had become purgatory.

  One year after William Love proposed his Model City, another idealist, a one-time bottle-cap salesman and smalltime inventor, proposed his own version of Utopia at the Falls. His name was King Camp Gillette, and what he envisaged was a mammoth city that would make Love’s look like a village. It would not be just another city; it would be the only city on the continent, housing almost the entire population of the United States and feeding on the Falls’ apparently limitless power. Gillette called it Metropolis, and, as he described it, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Fritz Lang’s film of the same name, produced thirty-two years later.

  Gillette’s detailed plan for Metropolis, published in a 150-page paperback book entitled The Human Drift, might have been dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic save for one thing. The following year, 1895, he had a second intuitive flash and invented the Gillette Safety Razor. With his picture on every package of blue blades – curly black hair, drooping moustache – he soon became one of the most widely recognized human beings in the world.

  One of the huge apartment building in Gillette’s Metropolis