Hydroelectric power
Falling water turned into electricity: a river drives a wheel or turbine, the turbine spins a generator, and the current runs down wires to homes and factories. One of the oldest bulk sources of electric power, and still one of the cheapest.
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✦ Attendez, vraiment ?
The first hydroelectric central station in North America opened on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, on 30 September 1882 — just 26 days after Edison's coal-fired Pearl Street station in New York. It had no way to measure or regulate its voltage: it rose and fell with the river's flow, so when the water ran high the light bulbs simply burned out, and the operators judged the voltage by how bright the lamps were glowing.
Ce que c'est
Hydroelectric power is the water wheel married to the dynamo. Water held behind a dam or diverted through a channel falls through a height — the "head" — and its weight, turned to motion, spins a turbine; the turbine turns a generator; the generator makes electricity. Nothing is burned and nothing is used up: the same water flows on downstream, and the sun lifts it back into the hills as rain. The only ingredients are gravity and a river that keeps running.
Pourquoi cela a compté
Every other early power station burned fuel — Edison's Pearl Street plant, opened weeks earlier, ran on coal. Hydro showed that a river alone could light a town, with no coal to haul and no fire to tend. Where a good head of water existed it was the cheapest electricity there was, and it ran day and night for free once the works were built. That made electricity thinkable in places with fast rivers but no coalfields, and it set up the great dam projects — Niagara, Hoover, and their kind — that would later power whole regions.
Ce que cela a débloqué
Appleton proved the principle, and within four years dozens of hydro projects were announced across North America; by 1900 falling water supplied more than 40 percent of United States electricity. Once transformers let that power travel (see the Lauffen–Frankfurt line and the power grid), the biggest rivers became the biggest power stations, and hydroelectricity remains the largest source of renewable electricity in the world — the direct descendant of a paper-mill wheel in Wisconsin.
Version minimale viable
A water wheel or small turbine under a head of falling water, geared or belted to a dynamo, feeding a few buildings over copper wire — the whole of the Appleton plant, which put out about 12.5 kilowatts, enough for roughly 250 of the day's dim lamps.
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Sources
- — American Society of Mechanical Engineers, *Vulcan Street Plant* National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark citation (1977)
- — Engineering and Technology History Wiki, 'Milestones: Vulcan Street Plant, 1882'
- — David E. Nye, *Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology* (1990)
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