NIAGARA IN HARNESS 



thing that strikes the eye is a row of great mushroom- 

 like affairs, for all the world like giant tops, that stand 

 spinning and spinning. These great tops are about a 

 dozen feet in diameter. They are whirling, so we are 

 told, at a rate of two hundred and fifty revolutions per 

 minute. Hour after hour they spin on, never varying 

 in speed, never faltering; day and night are alike to 

 them, and one day is like another. They are as cease- 

 lessly active, as unwearying as Niagara itself, whose 

 power they symbolize; and, like the great Falls, they 

 murmur exultingly as they work. 



The giant tops which thus seem to bid defiance to the 

 laws of motion are in reality electric dynamos, no dif- 

 ferent in principle from the electric generators with 

 which some visit to a street-car power-house has doubt- 

 less made you familiar. The anomalous feature of 

 these dynamos in addition to their size is found in 

 the fact that they revolve on a vertical shaft which ex- 

 tends down into a hole in the earth for more than a 

 hundred feet, and at the other end of which is adjusted 

 a gigantic turbine water-wheel. Water from the canal 

 is supplied this great turbine wheel through a steel tube 

 or penstock, seven feet in diameter. As -the turbine 

 revolves under stress of this mighty column of water, the 

 long shaft revolves with it, thus turning the electric gen- 

 erator at the other end of the shaft the generator at 

 which we are looking, and which we have likened to a 

 giant top without the interposition of any form of 

 gearing whatever. 



To gain a vivid mental picture of the apparatus, we 

 must take an elevator and descend to the lower regions 



