White Gold and Black
The determined harnessing of water in California began with the Forty-niners, who washed away the hills of gold and silted up the rivers with the help of 5,000 miles of sluices and aqueducts. The prolific waters of the Sierra also powered mining operations and machinery and stimulated the imaginations of engineers and entrepreneurs who looked upon the rapidly growing cities on the coast. How to bring the power from the hills, where it was wasted, to the population centers, where it was wanted?
The first of the many technologies that affected the transmission and efficient exploitation of the strength of the Sierra streams was a waterwheel developed by a California metallurgist named Lester Allen Pelton. Pelton found that he could increase the speed and efficiency of conversion of the power of falling water by directing it against the edges of the buckets on the standard wheels in use in the mines. A Pelton wheel weighing only 220 pounds could supply 125 horsepower. Its basic design may still be discerned in modern turbines.[10] As this persistence suggests, Pelton did not chance on his invention. When he began his experiments in 1878, he procured the latest instruments and instructions for hydraulic investigation; he was no ordinary millwright, but an accomplished, although uncertified, engineer.[11] The Pelton Water Wheel
[9] Brooks, Telephone , 262; Reich, American industrial research , 166–70; Macomber, Jewel city , 152; Todd, Story, 4 , 184–6 (quote).
[10] Durand, Mech. eng., 61 (1939), 447–51; Wilson in Williams, History of techn., 6 , 207; Smith, Sci. Am., 242:1 (1980), 138–48.
[11] Constant, Techn. and cult., 24 (1983), 194, and Soc. stud. sci., 8 (1978), 183–210.
Company of San Francisco, established in 1888, became a world leader in the design and manufacture of hydraulic machinery. Its exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition so impressed officials from Columbia University that they bought it outright for their School of Mines. All, that is, except a turbine turned by a wheel twenty-six feet in diameter (plate 1.2), rated at 20,000 horsepower and made for a PG&E project on the Yuba River. "No single unit greater than half the big turbine had been used in Europe. . . . The place [the Pelton exhibit] was haunted every time the Palace [of Machinery] was open by civil engineers from all quarters of the globe."[12] The Pelton Company developed a general expertise in metal working on a large scale. Lawrence was to commission it to machine the magnet of his first big cyclotron.
At the time the Pelton Company was founded, the first steps had been taken, in Europe, toward bringing power from the hills to the plain. In 1886 Italians transmitted electricity from Tivoli to Rome, a distance of 17 miles; five years later the Germans managed 100 miles; and in 1892 a plant in Southern California joined the game, providing power at long distance—some 28 miles—for the first time in the state. This success was noticed. According to the San Francisco Call , "the air of California, and the whole Pacific Coast for that matter, has all at once become filled with talk about setting up water wheels in lonely mountain places and making them give light and cheaply turn other wheels in towns miles away." California soon outdistanced Europe. In 1903 the San Francisco Bay Area derived electricity from the Electra powerhouse on the Mokelumne River, a distance of 142 miles. The power pressed at 60,000 volts, twice the maximum potential that General Electric and Westinghouse thought feasible. The line ran through forests and valleys before leaping the Carquinez Strait—4,427 feet at the mouth of the Sacramento River—and so was a triumph of civil as well as electrical engineering. By World War I, California had more high-voltage transmission systems than any other region in the world.[13]
The men who designed the system's lines, tunnels, dams, and stations were engineers from California's new universities. The
[12] Coleman, PG&E , 114–5; Todd, Story, 4 , 177–80 (quote).
[13] Coleman, PG&E , 102, 107, 143–8; Hughes, Networks , 263–6.
great Electra project of 1903 employed several electrical engineers trained at Stanford and two graduates in civil engineering from Berkeley. One of the Stanford men became chief of hydroelectric and transmission engineering of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which consolidated the Electra operation and most other hydroelectric power systems in Northern California. The men who supplied the capital for the plants that captured the power of the Sierra streams understood the importance of high technology in their enterprises. In the disposition of their wealth they did not neglect the institutions that taught and advanced electrical engineering and the physical sciences on which it grew.
This patronage intensified with the discovery of a new source of energy. Unlike the yellow gold that enriched the Forty-niners, black gold could not be pulled from the ground, washed off, and traded. The successful extraction, refining, and marketing of petroleum depended on continuing advances in geology, chemistry, physics, and their applications. The Union Oil Company, which pioneered in the oil fields of Southern California, set up a geological department under an engineer from Stanford in 1895. He made a success of his assignment and diminished the guesswork in petroleum geology. Union Oil also had a chemical laboratory, which worked, also successfully, to separate fuel oils and asphalt from California crude. The business proceeded so well that in 1917 California petroleum provided a third of the oil and gasoline used in the United States, and between a quarter and a fifth of world consumption.[14] In California oil mixed with water, science with technology, private greed with public service, to create a power system that, by the early 1920s, was serving over 80 percent of the state's population. That number far exceeded the fractions served elsewhere in the country, "especially the extreme East."[15]
A standard form of the patronage of science and engineering by the power brokers of California was service as trustees (a preliminary step to generosity as donors) of the state's educational institutions. An obvious geographical alignment developed: oil barons
[14] Taylor and Welty, Black bonanza , 82, 197, 231–2; Norberg, Chemistry ; Goodspeed, NRC, Bull., 5:6 (1923), 30.
[15] Forbes, Men , 135; Electrical world, 81:4 (1924), 203 (quote).
of Los Angeles and officers of the Southern California Edison Company helped to create Caltech from the carcass of a trade school during the 1920s; PG&E gave early and sustained support to the University of California.[16] The link brought the power companies more than good press and trained recruits. PG&E gave the University money to fit out railroad cars with an exhibition of new techniques for farming and husbandry; the company coupled on its own cars, filled with electric agricultural equipment, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. A decade later the University exposed itself more fully by opposing a bill that would have enabled municipalities to combine to develop water power for their own use. Many of the state's farm bureaus—in contrast to the agricultural lobby—unaccountably declared that the proposed legislation went against the public interest. "The mystery was traced down, and in every case it was found that the treacherous resolution had come from the [bureau's] 'experts'—university men, appointed by university regents in the interest of their privately owned power companies."[17] No fewer than ten regents were implicated. It is dangerous to play with electricity.