One of these lines is of eleven-foot pipe, nearly five miles long; the other is a sixteen-foot pipe, half a mile long. Almost all of the current produced at these plants is transmitted by cable to Salt Lake City, 135 miles away.
It has been said by expert engineers of electrical development that it will be but a short time before the intermountain region will use no coal, that all smoke-stacks and chimneys will be abolished and electricity furnish all the power, heat, and light not only to cities and towns, but to farming communities.
We are on the way. There are some districts now where villages, towns, and farms all use electricity for power and for lighting and cooking. This is notably so in Rupert, Idaho, the home of the famous electric high school, described in "St. Nicholas" in September, 1913.
All through that town the lighting and cooking in even the humblest homes is by electricity. The few small factories use no coal or steam-power. In the mountain region over one hundred cities, towns, and rural communities have electric wires in their houses. All are lighted by them and very many have thrown out coal ranges and cook by electricity.
The region is one of mines everywhere, some of them the largest in the world; and nearly all of them have discarded their gigantic steam-, hoisting-, and pumping-engines for electric motors. There is, it is asserted, more than enough water-power running to waste to do every particle of work now done by steam, horses, and men and women in the region, from impelling the enormous sixteen-wheeled mountain Moguls to rocking the babies' cradles by motor.
Across the northern part of Idaho and Montana, over a wicked country of mountains and cañons, the western division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad runs all its trains by electricity, as you have read in your last month's number of "St. Nicholas," while farther south, across Utah and Colorado, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company completed its plans three years ago for the electrification of its road to Denver; but the scheme of the kaiser to lick the world in ninety days failing, material became too costly to warrant the change from steam to electricity.
But the power is ready or could quickly be made ready. Every year the two great companies which have been formed by the consolidation of numerous small owners of power-plants, are building dams and reservoirs and flumes, getting ready for the not far distant day when steam-engines will have to be looked for in the Museum of Antiques and Curiosities in Salt Lake City.