Niagara Falls — Water, War & Power
Niagara Parks Power Station
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Transcript
The former Canadian Niagara Power generating station is one of the great industrial buildings at the Falls. Construction began in 1901, and generators came online in the first years of the twentieth century.
Water entered near the river, drove turbines deep below the generator floor and exited through a long tailrace tunnel.
The plant eventually operated for about a century.
Niagara was central to the development of large-scale alternating-current electricity. Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse are rightly associated with the AC system used on the American side in the 1890s, but tourist claims about a single inventor “creating Niagara power” oversimplify a huge engineering and investment network.
Power development involved competing companies on both sides of the border, thousands of workers and complex transmission systems.
The power station is beautiful because engineers and architects expected major infrastructure to look civic. It is a cathedral whose religion was electricity.