NIAGARA AT THE BATTLE FRONT 



By William Joseph Showalter 



NIAGARA FALLS, held in rever- 

 ence for its beauty by generations 

 of nature-loving Americans, has 

 enlisted for the war and is doing its bit in 

 the cause for which the people of the 

 United States have pledged anew their 

 lives, their fortunes, and their sacred 

 honor. 



Aided by science, it has transformed 

 the silvery sheen of its whitened waters 

 into the fateful furies of the artillery 

 duel and the infantry charge. The placid 

 flood of the upper river has become 

 hardness in steel, speed in manufacture, 

 healing in antiseptics, whiteness in linen, 

 cheapness in automobiles, durability in 

 machinery. 



It has lengthened the lives of big guns ; 

 it has multiplied the power and the num- 

 ber of shells ; it is standing guard over 

 every mile of war-carrying railroad track, 

 and is protecting every engine axle and 

 car wheel from failure in the rush of 

 material to the front. Aye, who knows 

 but that the very scales of victory will be 

 turned by the weight it throws into the 

 balance? 



The story of Niagara's role in the battle 

 of the nations is an epic in the history 

 of war. 



Twenty-seven years ago certain manu- 

 facturers, seeing the tremendous amount 

 of power running to waste where the 

 waters of Superior, Michigan, Huron, 

 and Erie leap from lake level toward sea- 

 level, undertook the installation of a great 

 hydro-electric plant at Niagara. Later 

 other power-developing interests entered 

 the field, and then began a legislative and 

 diplomatic war between those who would 

 utilize some of the power of Niagara and 

 those who would keep it untouched by 

 the unsentimental hand of commercialism. 



Finally the governments of the United 

 States and Canada made a treaty regu- 

 lating the amount of water that could be 

 diverted for power purposes. Canada 

 has used her share to the last second-foot, 

 but the United States has never permitted 



the utilization of a considerable share of 

 her allowance. 



A VAST ELECTRICAL LABORATORY 



But for the part used there has been 

 rendered by the users one of the most 

 remarkable accounts of stewardship in 

 the history of commercial progress. The 

 cheap power obtained made Niagara a 

 laboratory where great ideas could be 

 transformed into nation-benefiting enter- 

 prises. 



When Niagara power was first devel- 

 oped, efforts to make artificial grinding 

 materials were proving a failure because 

 of a lack of electric current at a price the 

 new venture could afford to pay. Those 

 who backed the process thereupon went 

 to Niagara Falls, set up a plant, and 

 founded the artificial abrasive industry. 

 How much its success means to America 

 cannot be overestimated. 



Take the grinding machinery out of 

 the automobile factories, remove it from 

 the munition plants, eliminate it from the 

 locomotive works, car foundries, and ma- 

 chine shops of the country and you would 

 paralyze the nation's whole industrial 

 system. And that would have happened 

 ere now had not Niagara's artificial abra- 

 sives stepped in to save the day when the 

 war shut out our natural supply of em- 

 ery and corundum from Asia Minor. 



There is not a bearing in your auto- 

 mobile but is ground on Niagara-made 

 grindstones ; crankshafts are roughened 

 and finished with them, pistons and cylin- 

 ders are made true, camshafts likewise, 

 and a hundred critical parts of every car, 

 whether of the cheapest or the most ex- 

 pensive make. It would be impossible to 

 build anything of tool steel on a commer- 

 cial basis without Niagara's abrasives. 



NIAGARA SHAPES AND HARDENS OUR 



SHELLS 



No shell goes to Europe whose nose 

 has not been ground into shape on Ni- 

 agara-made grindstones. Likewise it is 



4i3 



