Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall by Daniel Macfarlane

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall by Daniel Macfarlane Donald C. Jackson (bio) Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World's Most Famous Waterfall By Daniel Macfarlane. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020. Pp. 274. With a natural discharge averaging about 200,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) and plunging some 150 feet over a sharp precipice in the Niagara River north of Buffalo, New York, Niagara Falls stands as one of the world's greatest visual wonders. And for historians of electric power, Niagara Falls is also renowned in the development of high-voltage, polyphase alternating current (AC) technology. Bringing together these environmental and technological perspectives, Daniel Macfarlane presents a captivating enviro-tech story documenting how, via "remedial works" that include an upstream diversion/control dam and a shortening of the rim at Horseshoe Falls, the sublime falls waterscape has been sublimated into a human-fabricated hydropower system. The goal of engineers has been to draw as much energy as possible from the Niagara River while maintaining sufficient flow so that a diminished falls does not disappoint tourists and honeymooners. As Macfarlane explains, "[twentieth century] technocrats concealed the industrialization of Niagara's waterscape by helping the Falls resemble their past appearance." Simply stated, modern-day "Niagara Falls is in fact quite unnatural" (p. 9). [End Page 288] First publicized by Euro-Americans in the seventeenth century, Niagara Falls began to flourish as a tourist destination after completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The falls flowed largely unimpeded until the advent of electric power technology in the 1890s brought about huge diversions into the penstocks of the Adams Power Plant along the American shore. Macfarlane ably discusses Niagara Falls' importance in AC innovation, but he wisely notes that "Niagara's firstness does get exaggerated … for example, framing Niagara Falls as the birthplace of hydroelectricity was good for Westinghouse and bad for General Electric" (p. 37). For the record, America's first commercial three-phase AC transmission line reached Redlands, California, in the fall of 1893 using GE equipment—power generated at Niagara Falls using Westinghouse AC technology did not come online until August 1895. With the coming of World War I, industrial demand for Niagara power grew, and, with the falls sited astride the Canadian-U.S. border, Macfarlane is drawn into the complicated story of international diplomacy and treaty-making that continues to guide how Niagara River flow is controlled and distributed. As part of this exploration, the publicly owned Canadian authority Ontario Hydro is contrasted with the privately owned U.S.-based Niagara Falls Power Company and other local electrochemical enterprises; in the 1950s, the Robert Moses–controlled Power Authority of the State of New York (PASNY) became a major player in a politically charged, high-stakes hydropower chess game. Contemporaneously with the arrival of PASNY, engineers constructed elaborate-scale models of the Niagara River so that "remedial works" in the streambed could be designed to maximize power generation and (hopefully) ensure enough flow over the falls to placate the tourist industry. Among the book's highlights is Macfarlane's chapter on how hydraulic modeling of the riverscape in the 1950s helped engender a protocol wherein discharge over the falls is reduced from 100,000 cfs during the day to 50,000 cfs overnight (when tourists are asleep) and then brought back to 100,000 cfs the next morning. Another highlight describes how the PASNY power plant and pumped storage unit encroached on the Tuscarora Nation Indian Reservation and how, at Moses's behest, PASNY legally battled the tribe to force it to relinquish its land with minimal compensation. In sum, Macfarlane has crafted an exemplary work of scholarship drawing from an expansive range of primary and secondary sources. Utilizing dozens of photographs and maps to supplement the voluminous written record, he offers an insightful narrative analyzing how, for more than a century, actors on both sides of the Canadian-U.S. border have sought to preserve a sense of the natural fallscape while simultaneously maximizing hydropower. In telling this story, he reminds us that much of what we think of as...