MINERAL ORES AND WATER POWER 



power should be sold to farmers and to municipalities 

 at the lowest possible rate. Power for industry was to 

 have secondary preference. This restriction then ap- 

 peared to be reasonable but, from subsequent develop- 

 ments, it appears that Congress should cancel this 

 proviso in order that the energy created by the Tennes- 

 see River may be used primarily to furnish jobs for the 

 people of the Tennessee Valley. If TVA power might 

 be sold to industries in quantities they need and at 

 prices they can pay, the opportunity would be created 

 for these people to employ many skills at wages that 

 would immediately raise the per-capita income. 



Throughout the Valley it is a threadbare joke that 

 Muscle Shoals is the only place on earth where you can 

 shoot quail from paved sidewalks. These relics of a city 

 that never existed save in the fertile imaginations of real 

 estate promoters date back a dozen years before the 

 TVA was created. Those concrete strips across the open 

 fields are no criticism of the Authority, but they should 

 be a warning. They are monuments to an industrial 

 mistake. 



Years before 1918, when the Government built the 

 first power plant at Muscle Shoals, the same mistake 

 had been made by one of the country's great hydro- 

 electrical pioneers, Jacob F. Schoellkopf, who was a 

 courageous, far-sighted, rugged individualist, the very 

 antithesis of the starry-eyed visionary. Yet when he 

 harnessed the power of Niagara Falls, he dreamed of 



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