58 SELLERS — TRANSMISSION OF ENERGY BY ELECTRICITY. [Feb. 3, 



American Rapids, and above the entrance to the canal that was 

 constructed more than forty years before to carry water from the 

 Niagara river to factories located on the edge of the cliff, where 

 the fall obtainable for turbines was as much as two hundred feet, 

 though only from ninety to perhaps one hundred and twenty feet 

 fall had been used to drive turbines. Mr. Thomas Evershed, when 

 Chief Engineer of the State of New York, conceived the idea of 

 locating turbines in wheel-pits sunk to a sufficient depth upon the 

 level land above the rapids, where, under a head of sixty to one 

 hundred feet, turbines could be operated by water carried to them 

 through short surface canals, while the discharge from the turbines 

 could be carried away by a tunnel serving as a tail race, this tunnel 

 to proceed in a direct line under the city of Niagara Falls to the 

 gorge below the falls. His scheme had been made the foundation 

 of a charter granted to a company to construct the tunnel and such 

 canals as might be needed for power and sewerage purposes, 

 whereby the land on the river bank above the falls might be 

 utilized as a manufacturing area, as at Lowell, Holyoke and other 

 places where industries have prospered through the enterprise of 

 the companies controlling the water privileges. 



To carry out the Evershed plan involved the expenditure of very 

 large sums of money for the tunnel and for surface canals. To 

 effect the purpose, the Niagara Falls Power Company was organized 

 in 1890. The Cataract Construction Company and other allied 

 companies were started at the same time to execute the work, to 

 improve the lands owned or controlled by those interested and to 

 furnish transportation facilities to a large industrial district, where 

 a uniform water power, without fear of low water or freshets, would 

 be obtained. In the first conception of this water-power company, 

 a central station was contemplated from which power might be 

 transmitted to Buffalo and elsewhere, either by electricity or by 

 some of the several modes of transmission of power already used 

 to some advantage in Switzerland and elsewhere, where water 

 power is abundant, coal costly and transmission for a few miles by 

 wire rope or other means had been undertaken with marked 

 success. 



In July, 1890, I was suddenly summoned to London to confer 

 with Mr. Edward D. Adams, the President of the Cataract Con- 

 struction Company, who was alive to the great advantage of long- 

 distance transmission by electricity, his idea being that the central- 



