WITHIN THE POWER-HOUSE
And yet if you will turn aside from the canal and enter one of the long, low buildings that flank it on either side, you will soon be made to feel that the metaphor was amply justified. Little as there was exteriorly to suggest it, you are entering a fairyland of applied science, and within these plain walls you shall witness evidences of the ingenuity of man that should appeal scarcely less to your imagination than the sight of the cataract itself in all its sublimity of power.
For within these walls, by a miracle of modern science, the potential energy which resides in the water of the canal is transformed into an electrical current which is sent out over a network of wires to distant cities to perform a thousand necromantic tasks,—propelling a street car in one place, effecting chemical decompositions in another; turning the wheels of a factory here and lighting the streets of a city there; in short, subserving the practical needs of man in devious and wonderful ways.
Even as you gazed disdainfully at the stagnant canal, its waters, miraculously transformed, were propelling the trolley cars along the brink of the cliff over there on the Canadian shore, and at the same time were turning the wheels in many a factory in the distant city of Buffalo. After all, then, the quiet pool of water was not so prosaic as it seemed.
As you stand in the building where this wonderful transformation of power is effected, the noble simplicity of the vista heightens the mystery. The most significant 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 ceaselessly active, as unwearying as Niagara itself, whose power they symbolize; and, like the great Falls, they murmur exultingly as they work.
VIEW IN ONE OF THE POWER HOUSES AT NIAGARA.
Each of the top-like dynamos generates 5000 horse-power.
The giant tops which thus seem to bid defiance to the laws of motion are in reality electric dynamos, no different in principle from the electric generators with which some visit to a street-car power-house has doubtless 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 extends 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 generator 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 where the turbine wheel is in operation. As we pass down and down, our eyes all the time fixed on the vertical revolving shaft, which is visible through a network of bars and gratings, it becomes increasingly obvious that to speak of this shaft as standing in "a hole in the ground" is to do the situation very scant justice. A much truer picture will be conceived if we think of the entire power-house as a monster building, about two hundred feet high, all but the top story being underground. What corresponds to the ground floor of the ordinary building is located one hundred and fifty feet below the earth's surface; and it is the top story which we entered from the street level, thus precisely reversing the ordinary conditions.