POWER FROM CALIFORNIA MOUNTAIN- 

 STREAMS 



WALTER J. KEN y ON 



SCIENTISTS warn us that the world's coal supply will last for only a 

 few generations to come, and that, at the present rate of oil pro- 

 duction, this source of artificial light and heat also will fall short 

 within a comparatively brief period of time. With these two staple 

 light, heat, and power producers no longer to be had, what then 

 will be the resources in this direction of the generations to come? 



The answer is already in sight, so far as California is concerned. Con- 

 served by the wonderful device of electric transmission, the falling waters 

 of the Sierran and Coast Range canons become an inexhaustible and never- 

 diminishing store of power, light, and, finally, domestic heat. The theory 

 is so simple that a schoolgirl may understand. A mountain torrent is so 

 confined that its force is expended against a water-wheel. This wheel, 

 small, but moving with tremendous velocity and power, operates a dyna- 

 mo — a machine which makes electricity. This electric current is passed 

 along wires, overland through field and forest, to any locality desired, even 

 though hundreds of miles away. Arrived at the end of its wire, it actuates 

 other machines, which drive the wheels of factories, propel the trolley-cars 

 through city streets and from town to town, light the laborer's cottage and 

 the capitol dome, heat, if need be, the cook-stove and the parlor floor, and 

 thresh the farmer's grain, grind his grist, and light his barn with the safe, 

 uniform, modern light of the electric bulb. All these things the Sierran 

 streams are doing to-day by the wonderful device of transmission; and a 

 thousand further electric facilities they are destined to give the coming 

 man. And then — the imperishable plenty of it all! You burn a pound of 

 coal and that coal is forever destroyed as a source of utility; so with the 

 oil or the wood. But the mountain stream comes down its roaring course 

 forever, its power unabating through the years and centuries and cycles of 

 human time. It cannot be used up, it cannot be destroyed. It is a heri- 

 tage of all the generations to come; something of which we cannot rob 

 them if we would. With coal and oil our regret is for the future — that 

 the supplies in these will inevitably fail. With canon power our only regret 

 must be for the past — that our fathers neither possessed nor dreamt of 

 the talisman which would one day find for their sons a million Titan slaves 

 who serve and ask no wage. 



It is beyond the scope of mathematics to compute the enormous total 

 power available in the California mountain streams. As a tree-trunk is 

 surmounted by major branches, and these again by lesser and less again, 

 so a river system reaches downward from the highlands in many a thou- 

 sand tumbling streamlets, ultimately starting in the everlasting snows. 

 And each canon, gorge, and gulch of this uplifted universe is roaring its 

 song of present or future power for men. Is it a wild optimism to dream 

 that coal will go a-begging long before the mines are emptied of their store? 

 Or even that petroleum will one day cease to pay its haul? 



One of the present working problems in electric science is the leakage 

 of transmitted current. One hundred horse-power transmitted from the 

 power-house is not one hundred horse-power when it arrives at the scene 

 of its work. The wire conveying it offers resistance, and this resistance is 

 a consumer, so that transmitted current is said to "leak," very much as 

 the water in an irrigation ditch suffers a loss in volume on its way. To 

 minimize this leakage is the great remaining problem. 



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