THE FIRST HUGE RENEWABLE-ENERGY revolution—the one that dotted the US with hydroelectric dams and ultimately made power ubiquitous in every American home— started at a bankruptcy sale. In 1877, Jacob Schoellkopf went to an auction for a waterway owned by the Niagara Falls Canal Company. A succession of entrepreneurs had tried and failed to harness the ferocious power of the falling water. That night he told his wife, "Momma, I bought the ditch." Two years later, Thomas Edison made a light bulb that glowed for 40 continuous hours in his lab. Three years after that, Schoellkopf installed a generator below the falls to power 16 electric lamps above it. Those first lights wowed tourists and gave people a sense of the powerful waterfall's potential. But they didn't reveal how to generate power that could travel long distances, never mind how to make a profit on it. For the next 14 years investors tried to harness the falls (one engineer proposed building a long tunnel beneath them to feed 38 vertical shafts with turbines that could power factories above), but everyone failed. It took Nikola Tesla's invention of an efficient polyphase generator to transmit those electrons—and the sale of his patents to Westinghouse—to make hydro viable. In 1896 the "Cathedral of Power" started sending watts to the towns of Niagara and Buffalo, right next door.
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