Hydro-Electric Development in Ontario; A History of Water-Power Administration Under the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Eighth Wonder of the World Revealed at Niagara. In the closing years of the nineteenth century engineers were groping their way towards a comprehension of the possibilities of long distance transmission of the electric current for power, lighting and other kinds of service to the community. Nowhere in America was the progress of electrical engineering followed more keenly than in central Canada, for the reasons outlined in the last chapter. Happily the electrical engineers who were then teaching the people the enlarging uses of electricity were not thwarted by those in the seats of the mighty, as was the case in the infancy of the steam railway, but found willing colleagues among provincial legislators and leaders in commercial life. When it had been demonstrated that power and light could be transmitted from Niagara Falls to Buffalo the possibility of transmitting to Toronto and other Ontario cities "became of general interest, especially while the sufferings of the people from the effects of the Pennsylvania coal strike of the autumn of 1902 were still fresh in mind. The lesson of this strike was all the plainer, from the standpoint of the public interest, since it was a private railway corporation that withheld the coal at mines in the middle of winter, when it was most needed, and it was the private railway corporations that failed to distribute the coal already mined. Coal which in 1901 was sold to consumers in Toronto at less than $5 a ton (the city of Toronto had bought its supply at $3.68) could now be had with difficulty at $10 to $15 a ton, and Toronto and other Canadian cities for the first time were obliged to import two ship loads of Welsh coal at an average of $10 a ton to keep the citizens from perishing. Thiscrisis first directed general attenti...