Library of Congress
View of the Edward Dean Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls , taken from the southeast .
Nikola Tesla and the Westinghouse Corp . on the other . These matters boiled down to a question of whether to use alternating or direct current — AC vs . DC — to transmit power to Buffalo . Adams was in the middle of this technical tussle , and he would make the final decision .
These matters , while interesting , can easily distract from an equally important but largely forgotten story . This issue , one that occupied Adams just as much as the technical matter , was how to arrange the financing of the project in such a way that the company would generate cash flows sufficient to produce a return on the capital raised . Adams knew as well as anyone that for all of Edison ’ s technical successes , his companies in the 1880s were routinely in financial difficulty as they struggled to cover their development costs .
The financial issue weighed on the technical issue . Tesla wrote to Adams during the critical decision year of 1893 that “ what my [ AC ] system has offered was to do away with the commutator and brushes in the generator and the motor … This renders the system simpler .” Tesla went on to critique the idea of DC power , asserting , “ The power you would furnish with such machines would be unavailable for many uses , for instance , electric lighting .” This little passage , added towards the end of a long letter , may have caught Adams ’ attention , because lighting was the feature that would induce the citizens of Buffalo to willingly pay the utility bills that would allow the project to work financially .
The water flow to be diverted and the vertical drop through the penstocks and turbines created potential power that was a quantum leap above that produced by the power stations then in operation — and all without the noxious coal smoke associated with conventional steam power . Ten huge 5,000-horsepower generators were planned for Niagara , potential electrical power far greater than any other single power plant in the United States . Westinghouse commented that the size of the generators was “ far beyond all precedent ” and as such that “ nearly every device used differs from what has hitherto been our standard practice .”
The uses to be made of such power by the citizens of Buffalo were potentially vast , but the price the citizens would be willing to pay was uncertain and would undoubtedly be politically contentious . The Cataract Company therefore directed some of their capital to the purchase of some 1,500
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