I have concluded my cursory sketch of Canada’s greatest coal mine—white-coal mine. For a remarkable change has come over the character of Niagara Falls. In my school-days it was merely one of the wonders of the world, and of no more practical account than the Sphinx. Now it is a thing of infinite utility, and has as definite a commercial value as the bullion in the Bank of England.
In the history of mankind no fact is more quaint, I think, than that the greatest achievements of civilisation should be dependent, almost entirely, upon the carboniferous strata in the crust of the earth. Coal, as a means of producing steam, has long been the vital, indispensable factor in human affairs. What would become of the world, people have anxiously asked, when our stock of the grimy mineral should be exhausted? Nay, against that evil day we have long been eagerly awaiting the discovery of an alternative source of heat, the automobile almost suggesting that man has at last put his finger on the substitute. Coal’s great rival has been found; but it is not oil. It happens to be (and this is another quaint fact in the history of mankind) the waterfall.
Who would have thought it? Who could have dreamed that water would prove the substitute—the superior substitute—for fire? It was so natural to suppose that coal could only be deposed by something that was, at any rate, inflammable. We failed to remember that steam and the piston-rod are but means to an end; that end being—power. In the waterfall we find power ready-made.
To convert mechanical energy into the electric current and utilise that current for practical purposes of illumination, was a great achievement, now more than thirty years old. To convert mechanical energy into the electric current, dispatch that current to a distant point, and there re-convert it, without serious leakage, into mechanical energy, was a far greater achievement, now about fifteen years old. Just exactly how it all happens I will not attempt to explain, there being many things concerning electricity that are not known to science, as well as many things that are known to science but not to me.
In visiting the power-houses at Niagara I went behind the scenes, so to speak, and saw everything. Also I saw nothing—energy being invisible. A power-house is a shining palace of repose and polished machinery. Each gallery of dynamos is a cloister of peace, where a poet might compose verses to his lady’s eyes. Huge turbines hum softly in the trim wheel-pit—so deep, so quiet. The giant generator slumbers in a death-like stillness only to be attained by machinery revolving at the pace of twenty-six miles a second. At Niagara one stands in the clean presence of a volume of power measurable by the united strength of a million men.
White coal gives forth no smoke, dirt, or smell—which reminds me of an instructive personal experience.
I was at Hamilton, a city of between seventy and eighty thousand inhabitants, and situated amid delightful scenery at the western end of Lake Ontario. With its hills and magnificent views, Hamilton suggests a small Edinburgh, and (because of its tree-planted avenues and public gardens) an Edinburgh built on Garden-City lines. The train had lately taken me through the orchards and vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula, and here, in the market-place of Hamilton, I found glowing produce from that region—tons of peaches (selling for a few cents the large basketful), and great consignments of apples, pears, plums, and other fruits, massed with pyramids of vegetables and glorious clusters of flowers, so that, in passing along the bustling avenues, I walked amid the most seductive perfumes.
“This, then, is the Fruit City?” I suggested to the resident of Hamilton who accompanied me.
“That is a new name,” he replied, “for the Birmingham of Canada.”
At this I could not help laughing as I looked around at Hamilton, a city bathed in unpolluted sunshine and almost innocent of factory chimneys.