Two rivers.. Niagara -- not really a river but more of a strait between two lakes. The famous falls of the Niagara attracted travelers since it was first encountered by European explorers. The city of Buffalo's name is thought to derive from "Beau Fleuve" [sp?]. Small waterfalls and rapids were spread generously throughout the northeast part of America, giving rise to mills and proto-industrialization. By the year 1800, there was hardly a stream in New England unharnessed at several points along its course. A long tradition of "home industries", coupled with investment by merchants looking for alternate sources of income during the years of trade uncertainties around 1812, resulted in the birth of the north's industrialization. While there were waterfalls in the south, and there was capital and merchants looking to invest -- there was a relative lack of skilled labor, and a history of investing in land and slaves for agricultural expansion. As an example of how money was invested, between 1804 and 1808, the slave trading center of Charleston, South Carolina (through which something over 25% of American Blacks originally passed through upon "immigration") received over 200 slave ships, with over 30,000 slaves sold in just those 4 years. During the same period, a roughly equivalent amount of money was being spent in New England in the construction of waterwheels and mill ponds. Early water-powered mill sites tended to be gristmills, grinding corn and small grains, and sawmills, producing lumber. Also common were carding and fulling mills, preparing wool, flax, hemp, cotton, etc, for spinning. After the invention of the spinning jenny, cotton -- from the south -- was spun into yarns almost completely by New England mills. Water-power also began to be used for power-looms. By the middle of the 19th century, manufacturing plants had spread throughout New England. This water-powered industrial complex was firmly rooted before coal began to replace water as the most common source of power. Generally, a mill town would grow up around a waterfall and as the demand for power grew, coal would be used to supplement the water-power -- eventually replacing it altogether. Nonetheless, the spatial distribution of industry was scattered about, with each site relatively small and specialized. This scattering produced a transportation network, with major hubs at places like Boston. North of Boston, and more detached than it is today, was "perhaps the first concentrated industry in the United States" at the town of Lynn, which specialized in making shoes. As early as 1788, travelers remarked on the large number of shoes being made. It appears that one of the early uses of local water-power was in leather tanning. Women there, as in most places, had developed skill in the home industry of making shoes -- which coupled with the leather tanning, resulted in the ability to mass produce and export shoes. In the year 1800, the town of Lynn turned out over 100,000 pairs of shoes, with the local waterfalls providing the power. In any case, the great falls of the Niagara was locked away deep in the interior for many years -- visited in passing only. Until the 1780s, the frontier line had remained stable at Rome, New York, for generations. To the east was the old trading town of Albany / Fort Orange. To the west were the lands of the Mohawk and Onondaga Indians -- the "vanguard" of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. These Indians sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, and were therefore subjected to military attacks -- or perhaps they would have been attacked long before, had not the British forbade it. Military invasion began in 1779, and ended in a series of treaties -- most notably the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794. Those few Indians remaining (many fled to Canada) were put on small reservations, and the land was opened up for settlement. Because the land was so accessible, desireable, and so long off limits, upstate New York experienced a major boom in the 1790s and early 1800s. This process of forcing land cession treaties on Indians and experiencing land booms, as first done on a large scale in upstate New York was later repeated in the Ohio and Indiana regions. Unsurprisingly, the first sites to be snatched up were waterfalls. The two falls of the Genesee River were harnessed, and resulted in the city of Rochester. Niagara Falls, however attractive as a site of beauty, was a bit too large, and anyway, most of it was in Canada. Settlment in the far west of New York state tended to take up the sites of old Indian villages, now abandoned. There were "countless" Indian fields, already cleared of trees and ready for farming. The Iroquois were, after all, "sedentary and agricultural in their unmolested state". For some time, Niagara Falls provoked awe and not a little controversy, rather than just another power-source ready to be harnessed. One issue was the gorge below the falls. Many assumed (correctly) that the gorge had been carved out by the falls as it slowly ate away at the rock and moved "upriver". But this interpretation conflicted with Biblical views. A Mr. Robert M'Causlin observed the falls for nine years and in 1793 wrote "If we adopt the opinion of the Falls having retreated six miles, and if we suppose the world to be 5,700 years old, this will give above 56 inches a year, or sixteen yards in nine years, which I can venture to say has not been the case since 1774." So, in the earlier times, Niagara Falls was just too big to be put to use. Instead, it inspired rapture, terror, and the sublime. It was remote until the Erie Canal opened in 1825 (the first canal boat carried casks of water from Lake Erie to the Hudson River, dumping the water into the river in a symbolic gesture) -- remote, but famous, and therefore inspiring visions of a fabulous, overwhelming place in the deep wilderness. Coinciding with the canal and the new wave of visitors came the Romantic Era's poetic fascination with death -- and the brink of Niagara Falls was related to death in many poems; and the falls acquired a new layer of mythology relating to visions of the afterlife, heaven, hell, death. In addition, the size of the falls inspired a kind of sublime terror, feelings of "raw nature or chaos", and a sense of "otherness" -- not of this world.. or at least not of the *human* world. All of these symbols were tied up with ideas and dreams of the future of America.. the vast possibilities of the country, the "blank slate" awaiting the right time and person to come along. So in the 1890s, as hydroelectric power began to be seen as a possibility for the falls, all this symbolism became tied up with the various projects. If the brink of the falls was a break in the flow of time, its future rich but obscured in the mist and chaos in the gorge, how appropriate for that very brink to become the future of the falls. Until World War One, visions of the future tended to be highly optimistic and utopian. The hydroelectric projects at the falls in the 1890s were quickly seen as symbolic of the final victory of humankind over nature. In 1904, a poet put it: "With power unrivaled thy proud flood shall speed / The New World's progress toward Time's perfect day." The commonly held view was the same that Niagara Falls had inspired for a century -- that the power of the falls was inexhaustible. Developers could harness the power without limit. The benefit it would provide to people was unimaginably vast. Interestingly, the first town founded on the American side of the falls was named Manchester -- after the British industrial city. The name was changed to "Niagara Falls", but the vision remained -- an industrial metropolis with unlimited power. The village was founded in 1805, but it wasn't until the 1890s that projects to harness the falls actually began to be attempted. Many plans were made, some were begun. Only in hindsight is it clear which ones were wildly utopian and which were practical -- for at the time, all plans were tinged with the image of the falls as inexhaustible, practically magical, and sublime. Naturally, the plans tended to be fabulous, magical, and sublime. Starting in 1875, diversion canals were made to run watermills, but these were relatively small scale. In 1890, construction began on a deep tunnel running from the base of the falls, beneath the town, to a point 2.5 miles distant on the upper river. Water was diverted into a series of shafts, each with a hydroelectric turbine in it. This was the first large scale attempt to generate electricity at Niagara Falls. George Westinghouse received the contract to install and operate the turbines, and he was persuaded by Tesla to use an AC system. The result was the first long distance electrical transmission lines, which began providing power in 1896. There is a large statue of Tesla at the falls today. The so-called Niagara Falls Power Company had more in mind than electricity. They secured large amounts of land for industrial and residential development, calling their electroindustrial utopian city "Echota". Echota was meant to be not only a model of industrial progress, but also of social and aesthetic progress. In a word, the future. There was great excitement as the project continued. Tesla predicted that soon the power generated at Niagara Falls would run streetcars in London and streetlights in Paris. A large mural was painted in the Schoellkopf Power Plant, which the president of the Niagara Falls Power Company, Edward Dean Adams, described: "This allegorical painting tells in vivid and powerful tone, but with errie lightness, the romantic birth story of humanity's modern servant -- electrical power. Torrents of energy tumble into the eddying pool of human waves from which emerge two poles imparting the spark of life to the giant genie POWER." Mural by Willy Pogany, "The Birth of Power". Why a genie? Niagara Falls was magic. Another project began in 1893, by the entrepreneur William Love, who purchased a huge tract of land extended north from the Niagara Escarpment (a couple miles below the falls) all the way to Lake Ontario. His plan was to build a "model city" which was "destined to become one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the United States". He offered "unlimited water" via a canal running from above the falls to far below it, capable of harnessing not only the drop of the falls itself, but also the many rapids in the gorge below. Love predicted his Model City would quickly reach a population of 1,000,000 -- and would be a perfectly planned community -- "the most perfect city in existence". And in 1893 he managed to convince the New York State Legislature, which gave him the right to divert as much water as he wanted. He managed to get about a mile of his canal dug before the depression of the mid-1890s forced him into bankruptcy. Later, Love Canal was used to bury toxic waste.. and still later filled over and a housing development and school built on it. When toxic waste started to bubble up through the basements of houses and into the school, Love's name did became famous, but not quite the way he had hoped. Also, Model City still exists, but as a tiny hamlet rather than a perfect metropolis. In 1894, the man who would later be famous for razors, Mr. Gillette, published a book called "The Human Drift", in which he projected into the future the trends of increasing concentration of both capital and industry -- concluding that eventually there could be only one corporation and one city in North America, perhaps the world. He called this future city Metropolis, and predicted it would be at Niagara Falls, due to that site's "basically infinite" supply of power. He calculated that Metropolis would eventually contained at least 60 million inhabitants. His vision of Metropolis -- and Niagara Falls -- was "perfectly rational" -- it would replace the chaotic and scattered system of production with a single, logical, orderly system, realizing all the economies of scale by consolidating all industry under a single corporation at a single site. There would be only one steel mill, one shoe factory, one flour mill, etc, for all North America, or even the world. In addition, all the workers would live in harmony in a single logically planned community. Due to all the excess power and automation by machines, people would be free to choose whatever occupation they wanted. In short, centralized, logical industry would naturally result in social harmony and happiness. Further, the falls at Niagara was clearly nature in chaos -- a waste of power. Gillette's vision was to divert all the water and eliminate Niagara Falls completely. The falls would be completely encased in layers of industrial power generators and factories, and the city of Metropolis, with its orderly hexagonal street grid, would be built directly on top. Interestingly, Gillette's metaphor of choice for the victory over nature is a "genie" called "Man Corporate". He wrote, "We have found Aladdin's lamp, let us profit by its possession". In 1896, yet another promoter published detailed plans for covering Niagara Falls completely with a gigantic city and industrial complex, called "The Great Dynamic Palace and International Hall". Such futuristic plans continued to be pushed for many years, until it began to dawn on people -- around World War One -- that Niagara's power was, in fact, limited. After World War One, the utopian visions of a future in which everything is made perfect via industry was hard to believe. A few people saw this darker future even before the war. Jules Verne published his last book in 1905, called "The Master of the World". Most of Verne's books portray an exciting future, but as his life neared its end, he "apparently had some apprehensions about the future". In this last book, a "mad scientist" creates a powerful invention -- a vehicle capable of speeds over 150 miles per hour! He terrorizes pedestrians and motorists for a while before demonstrating that his vehicle is also a boat, capable of similar unbelievable speeds. Then the mad scientist reveals that it is also a submarine. Governments offer to buy the invention, but he refuses, saying that with it, he is "the master of the world". But things begin to go wrong, and soon the mad scientist is being pursued by gunships on Lake Erie. The gunships force him into the Niagara River. Just as the boat reaches the falls, it sprouts wings and takes off into the air! Victory for the mad scientist! He cannot even be stopped by Niagara Falls. But a few pages later, a hurricane does him in. In 1908, H.G. Wells wrote "The War in the Air", in which nations of the world build huge fleets of airships. A German fleet crosses the Atlantic and destroys New York City, and then flies to Niagara Falls to take control of its "enormous power works". Attempts to dislodge the Germans fail, until a united Asian airship fleet crosses the Pacific and attacks the Germans. A huge air battle takes place over Niagara Falls. The German flagship is shot down. It falls into the river and is swept over the falls. The Battle of Niagara, as it is called, spread over the continent, then the world, eventually destroying all civilization. Wells puts a moral on the story -- that human's attempt to achieve mastery over nature will be their own undoing. The image of the German flagship being crushed by Niagara Falls is the key image of nature's victory over humankind. Columbia -- and the Grand Coulee Dam -- and why the airplane construction industry flourished in the Pacific Northwest. Franklin Roosevelt was at the time and today seen as one of the greatest presidents the country has ever had. When he assumed office in 1933, the nation was deep in the Great Depression. Unemployment levels were approaching 25%. The west region of the Great Plains -- once known as "the Great American Desert" -- had experienced a boom time of wheat farming during the unusually wet years of the 1910s and early 1920s, but by 1933 when Roosevelt took office had experienced seven years of hard drought, culminating with many large wind storms in 1933 and 1934: the Dust Bowl. One of Roosevelt's solutions to the depression in general was large public works projects like bridges, tunnels, highways, and parks. Dams and irrigation works took care of both unemployment and the Dust Bowl. The first large dam/irrigation project focused on the region where most of the Dust Bowl refugees ended up -- California's central valley, the San Joaquin Valley. The Central Valley Project began before the Dust Bowl, and was "the biggest water project in history" even then. It was to be funded by the State of California, and would capture almost 70% of the water runoff in the state. But when the economy collapsed, California could not pay for it. In 1935, FDR turned the project over to the federal Bureau of Reclamation. With the great plains destroyed and hundreds of thousands of "Okies" making their way to California, the dams began to go up as quickly as possible. The project, the largest water project in history, would irrigate 1-3 million acres (depending on various factors), and provide jobs for 100,000 people. These were impressive figures, but even so, they fell far short of what was needed. FDR could see that the Central Valley Project would not be enough even before the project was officially underway -- and so he announced that the next such project would be on the Columbia River. By then, wheat farming had spread through eastern Washington's Palouse region. Due to the glacier-made loess soil, wheat could be grown even in what at first seemed extremely dry conditions. So in the late 1800s, wheat farming slowly spread until the limits were found -- the large areas in the center of the state where it really was too dry to grow wheat, even on the rich loess soil. In many places, the giant floods of the ice age had scoured away not just the soil but the very bedrock, creating giant gashes, dry canyons called coulees. Farming was obviously impossible on the exposed rock, but all around and intermeshed with the "scablands" and coulees were areas of rich loess soil, wanting only sufficient water to become productive agricuturally. And gosh, flowing through it all was the giant Columbia River. Everything was there -- excellent soil, a huge river, and giant coulees -- empty of water but clearly able to hold vast amounts as resevoirs. All that was needed to put the parts together was a dam -- a very large dam. No one had ever dammed a river as large as the Columbia. It was larger, in volume and flow, than the Colorado, or the Snake, or the Rio Grande, or the Klamath -- in fact it was twice as big as all of those rivers combined! At the Dalles rapids, it had an average flow above 200,000 cubic feet per second -- one of the largest rivers anywhere with enough of a drop in elevation to create rapids. And conveniently, the rapids at the Dalles were in a confined canyon, making the site ideal for a hydroelectricity producing dam. "Ideal", but still way out of proportion: in 1933, a hydroelectric dam at the Dalles would be able to produce more electricity than was used by the whole country west of the Mississippi. The Bonneville Dam was going up downriver, for just this purpose. So the idea of building a dam at Grand Coulee for producing electricity was seen by many people as "insane". But to FDR an insanely colossal project was just the thing: it would be a purgative of national despair during the Great Depression, it would employ tens of thousands, and create farmlands for tens of thousands more. The original plan (and funding from Congress) was for a "low dam" (less than 300 feet high), that would be able to produce electricity and control flooding, but unable to get water into the giant, waiting resevoir of the Grand Coulee, to irrigate the dry loess plains. After a giant foundation was built, large enough, oddly, to support a 550 foot "high dam", the project was changed from a low to a high dam, and appropriate money acquired from a Congress that would not have funded a high dam project unless it was already so deeply invested in it. The original funding was the largest single sum Congress had ever granted -- $63 million. A high dam would have required $270 million. Did the Bureau of Reclamation and FDR trick Congress into funding a high dam? Those involved claim they were not being tricky, although "it does appear that way". A high dam would fulfill the giant irrigation goals that FDR had already put into motion in California and envisioned as the future of the Columbia. A high dam, however, spelled doom for salmon. The Columbia was by far the largest salmon run river -- more salmon than in all the rivers of Oregon and California combined. The low dams already built had reduced the salmon run, but did not present unpassable barriers to the fish. And fish ladders were being built, if slowly. At Bonneville Dam -- a "low dam" -- fish ladders were eventually built, at a cost over 25% that of the dam itself. A high dam at Grand Coulee would present to salmon a completely hopeless obstruction. And fish ladders would have be run for many miles, cut into the sheer canyon walls -- costing more than the dam. No one even suggested fish ladders at Grand Coulee. But, as Marc Reisner puts it, even if the high dam spelled doom for most of the Columbia's salmon, it performed a miraculous and totally unforeseen service: "It probably won the Second World War". Today large public works projects take a terribly long time, requiring endless legal issues and battles -- so it is hard to imagine the projects of the 1930s. In 1936, the four largest concrete dams yet built were all being built at the same time -- Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee. Many more dams were built after these four, but none as large or... aesthetic. Hoover Dam became the epitome of dam beauty. Shasta Dam is run down now, but was larger and nearly as majestic as Hoover when built. Hoover Dam is big. Shasta Dam is larger by half. Grand Coulee is bigger than both together. Many of the workers who built Grand Coulee came after finishing Hoover. "When they worked on Hoover they thought it made everything else look like nothing. When they say what we were going to build [at Grand Coulee] they said it made Hoover look like nothing," said Phil Nader, the director of the project. The phrase "largest in the world" became tedious and repetative -- largest mass, largest crest length, largest concrete mixing plant, largest spillway, largest generators, largest powerhouse, penstocks, pumps, reservoir, largest amount of lands irrigated, largest concentration of brothels within 5 miles, etc. Grand Coulee Dam is about the size of the Golden Gate bridge -- not quite as tall or long, but completely solid and, at the base, five times as wide. It was an era when people just went and built things without any idea of just how it would be done, without special studies, commissions, environmental impact statements, alternate plans, etc. It was finished in 1941, just in time for World War Two -- a war won not so much by military strategy but by overwhelming industrial production. It was also a war in which airplanes proved decisive. The critical industrial material, therefore, was aluminium (and, later, uranium/plutonium). Aluminium production requires electricity, and large amounts of it. In the late 1800s, it was so expensive to make, it was worth almost as much as gold by weight. In the USA, the production of aluminium was basically a monopoly of the Aluminium Company of America, or Alcoa. Their only serious competitor was Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world's leading producer of aluminium shortly after seizing power -- "for reasons the Allies did not immediately discern". When Bonneville Dam began to produce electricity, the government tried to lure Alcoa to the area by offering bargain rates, but Alcoa declined. After Pearl Harbor, however, the government did not feel it had the luxury of persuasion, and so built the aluminium plants itself. When the war began, the USA had no military to speak of -- did not have enough rifles to equip even a single regiment. But by 1942 the USA had something no other nation had: a huge surplus electricity. By June of 1942, almost all the power of Bonneville and Grand Coulee were being used for war industry -- mostly airplanes. More than half of the 60,000+ planes built and used by the USA in the war were built with Grand Coulee power alone. By the middle of the war, almost half the aluminium production in the USA was located in the Pacific Northwest. American planes were being shot down almost as fast as they were being built, but German planes were being shot down in equal numbers -- far beyond the ability of the German industry to replace them. Not only did they lack sufficient bauxite, they seriously lacked the electricity required. In 1940, as Grand Coulee Dam was nearing completion, it was widely believed its power would "go begging for a hundred years". Its production was simply far too large. Two years later, Grand Coulee was running at and beyond its full capacity and it still was not enough to meet the potential of aluminium and airplane production. Two of the giant turbines were still being built and would not be ready for "several weeks" -- which was too long. So the Bureau of Reclamation took 2 generators about to be installed in Shasta Dam and put them into Grand Coulee instead -- nevermind they were completely inappropriately designed for the system there -- they were made to work. After the work engineers had to invent and build giant excavation machines to get them out. The six non-Shasta generators were built by Westinghouse and rated for a maximum ouput of 105,000 kilowatts each -- the equivalent of a good-sized oil plant at the time and enough power for run something like, say, Duluth. For the entire war, all six ran at 125,000 kilowatts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The engineers knew they were overheated, and that history itself depended on them. None failed. by the end of the war, Grand Coulee was producing 2,138,000 kilowatts, the biggest single source of electricity in the world. It was so much power, two generators were eventually devoted completely to powering Hanford's plutonium facilities. The amount of electricity used by Hanford's 8 plutonium producing nuclear reactors is still classified -- estimates range around 15-20 megawatts each, or up to 160 megawatts altogether. Why was Hanford sited in Washington State? Why did the airplane industry thrive in the Pacific Northwest? Simply because there was no other place that could provide anywhere near as much electricity so quickly. Dam data from the Atlas of Oregon: Columbia Dams to Canada: 1. Bonneville 1938 Corp of Eng 1,224 MW 2. The Dalles 1957 Corp of Eng 2,080 MW 3. John Day 1968 Corp of Eng 2,480 MW 4. McNary 1953 Corp of Eng 1,120 MW 5. Priest Rapids 1961 Grant PUD 907 MW 6. Wanapum 1964 Grant PUD 1,038 MW 7. Rock Island 1933 Chelan PUD 623 MW 8. Rocky Reach 1961 Chelan PUD 1,347 MW 9. Wells 1967 Douglas PUD 774 MW 10. Chief Joseph 1961 Corp of Eng 2,069 MW 11. Grand Coulee 1942 Reclamation 6,465 MW Snake Dams 1. Ice Harbor 1962 Corp of Eng 603 MW 2. Lower Monumental 1975 Corp of Eng 810 MW 3. Little Goose 1970 Corp of Eng 810 MW 4. Lower Granite 1969 Corp of Eng 810 MW 5. Hells Canyon 1967 Idaho Power 450 MW 6. Oxbow 1961 Idaho Power 220 MW 7. Brownlee 1959 Idaho Power 585 MW Prairies