THE UTILIZATION OF NIAGARA. 225 



and the side walls are of solid masonry 17 feet high, 8 feet at the base, 

 and 3 feet at the top. The northeastern side of the canal is occupied 

 by a power house, and is pierced by ten inlets guarded by sentinel gates, 

 each being the separate entrance to a wheel pit in the power house, 

 where the water is used and the power is secured. The water as quickly 

 as used is carried off by a tunnel to the Niagara Eiver again. 



The massive canal power house is a handsome building, designed by 

 Stanford White, and likely to stand until Niagara, spendthrift fashion, 

 has consumed its way backward, through its own crumbling strata of 

 shale and limestone, to the base of it. This building is outwardly of 

 hard limestone, and inwardly of enamel brick and ordinary brick coated 

 with white enamel paint. It is 200 feet in length at present, and has a 

 50-ton Sellers electric traveling crane for the placing of machinery and 

 the handling of any parts that need repair. The wheel pit, over which 

 the power house is situated, is a long, deep, cavernous slot at one side, 

 under the floor, cut in the rock, parallel with the canal outside. Here 

 the water gets a fall of about 140 feet before it smites the turbines. The 

 arrangement of the dynamos generating the current up in the power 

 house is such that each of them may be regarded as the screw at the 

 end of a long shaft Just as we might see it if we stood an ocean steamer 

 on its nose with its heel in the air. At the lower end of the dynamo 

 shaft is the turbine (fig. 2, PI. IX) in the wheel pit bottom, just as in the 

 case of the steamer shaft we find attached to it the big triple or quad- 

 ruple expansion marine steam engine. Perhaps we might compare the 

 dynamo and the turbine to two reels, stuck one on each end of a long 

 lead pencil, so that when the lower reel is turned the upper reel must 

 turn also. You might also compare the dynamos to bells up in the old 

 church steeple, and the turbines to the ringers in the porch, playing 

 the chimes and triple bob majors by their work on the loug ropes that 

 hang down. The wheel pit which contains the turbines is 178 feet in 

 depth, and connects by a lateral tunnel with the main tunnel running 

 at right angles. This main tunnel is no less than 7,000 feet in length, 

 with an average hydraulic slope of 6 feet in 1,000. It has a maximum 

 height of 21 feet, and a width of J 8 feet 10 inches, its net section being 

 3SG square feet. The water rushes through it and out of its mouth of 

 stone and iron at a velocity of 2Qh feet per second, or nearly 20 miles an 

 hour. 



More than 1,000 men were employed continuously for more than three 

 years in the construction of this tunnel. More than 300,000 tons of 

 rock were removed, which have gone to form part of the new foreshore 

 near the power house. More than 16,000,000 bricks were used for the 

 lining, to say nothing of the cement, concrete, and cut stone. The 

 labor was chiefly Italian. The brick that fences in the headlong tor- 

 rent consists of four rings of the best hard-burned brick of special 

 shape, making a solid wall 16 inches thick. In some places it is thicker 

 than that. Into this tunnel discharges also by a special subtunnel the 

 SM 96 15 



