Niagara 1895: the first big alternating-current power plant, and 32 kilometres to Buffalo

The plan to use the waterfall took shape in 1886. The engineer Thomas Evershed proposed a hydraulic canal and a brick-lined tunnel 7 500 feet long, or 2 300 metres. The Niagara Falls Power Company was founded at the same time. A new firm, the Cataract Construction Company, led by Edward Dean Adams, set up the International Niagara Commission in 1890. The commission came out in favour of electricity, but it could not point to a specific solution. In 1892 the company hired George Forbes as technical consultant. In May 1893 he persuaded it to build a system based on three-phase alternating current.

Westinghouse Electric took the subcontract. It supplied generators of 5 000 horsepower, or 3.7 megawatts, at a frequency of 25 Hz, based on the work of Nikola Tesla and Benjamin G. Lamme. The turbines were built to a design by the Swiss firm Faesch and Piccard by the I. P. Morris company of Philadelphia. The power plant went into service on 25 August 1895. The transformer house, put up from locally quarried limestone, was designed by the office of McKim, Mead and White.

Tunnel, bricks and the toll of lives

Water from the generators drained away through a tunnel 7 000 feet long, with a cross-section of 18 by 21 feet. Construction took more than three years and used more than 16 000 000 bricks in a four-layer lining. It cost the lives of 28 workers. The Niagara Power Station number 1 eventually reached 50 000 horsepower, or 37 megawatts. Ten generators of 5 000 horsepower each worked there, with a rotating outer field and a vertical shaft, split into two banks of five with independent switchboards. The current left at a voltage of 2 000 volts, and transformers raised it to 10 000 volts for the area around the waterfall and to 20 000 volts for distant Buffalo, Lockport and Tonawanda. The plant became the model for a second, similar station built in 1904, and the original Westinghouse generators ran until the plant closed in 1961. The whole complex was named after Adams in 1927.

The war over current

It did not happen without a fight. In 1886 Westinghouse's firm introduced the alternating-current system with transformers, and at the start of 1888 the Edison Electric Light Company began to claim publicly that high voltages were dangerous and that the solution itself infringed its patents. In the spring of 1888 a press storm broke out over fatal accidents on overhead high-voltage lines. That same year Westinghouse's engineer Oliver B. Shallenberger developed an induction meter using a rotating magnetic field, which gave the company a way to bill for electricity consumption. In July 1888 Westinghouse paid a substantial sum for a licence to Tesla's American patents on the three-phase induction motor. In 1892 the merger of Edison Electric with Thomson-Houston created General Electric and ended the "war of the currents". A year later Westinghouse won the tender to power the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and then most of the contract for the Niagara power plant, partly sharing it with General Electric.