The Aesthetics of Power: High-Voltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape

Abstract

The Aesthetics ofPower: High-Voltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape EUGENE LEVY In the summer of 1966, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the leading trade association of private electric utilities, allocated $400,000 and commissioned Henry Dreyfuss and Associates, one of America’s preeminent industrial design firms, to design a number of “aesthetic” high-voltage transmission structures that would be “universally acceptable to the industry and to the public.”1 By taking this action, the industry indicated that it knew it had, at the very least, a public relations problem with existing transmission systems and their lattice steel towers striding along the horizon, lines looping over highways and overarching cornfields and deserts. It would be an understatement to say that these structures were not widely ap­ preciated by mid-20th-century Americans. There are some 400,000 miles of transmission lines in the United States today, twice the number of miles of the early 1960s. These lines link generating stations, the source of electric power, to local distribution systems that bring power to users. Our houses run on a mere 120 volts, with an electric stove or dryer drawing 220/240 volts, but that is stepped down greatly from what is carried by electric transmission systems. Such systems transmit anywhere from 69,000 volts (69 kV) to 765 kV and up. In 1960, only a few lines transmitted as much as 345 kV, but the situation was changing rapidly. In 1963, one major electric utility announced plans to build a thousand-mile 765 kV line, and federal officials were predicting that by 1967 more than 3,000 miles of 500 kV lines would be operational.2 All these Dr. Lewis professor of history at Carnegie-Mellon University. He thanks Steven Fenves, Granger Morgan, and David Hounshell of Carnegie-Mellon, Russell Flinchum of the National Design Museum, and the Technology and Culture referees for valuable suggestions. 1 Robert N. Coe, “Esthetic Designs for Transmission Structures: A Progress Report on an EEI Research Project,” Edison Electric Institute Bulletin, August 1967, p. 242. 2New York Times, April 27, 1963, p. 63; Federal Power Commission, National Power Survey, 1964, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1964), p. 151.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3803-0002$02.00 575 576 Eugene Levy efforts meant larger plants generating more electricity to send over greater distances at higher voltages. Unfortunately for the electric utilities industry, however, efforts to expand transmission systems coincided with a rapidly increasing interest in environmental issues that in the 1960s focused in part on restoring natural beauty to the American landscape. “In destroying our landscape,” Peter Blake hotly charged, “we are destroying the future of civilization in America.”3 Such prose might have been passed off as overwrought, but a number of electric utilities, trans­ mission structure manufacturers, and Electrical World and Electric Light and Power, the industry’s leading trade publications, took the criticisms seriously enough in the early 1960s to begin efforts to im­ prove both the appearance of those structures and the way the pub­ lic perceived them. Midway in this process came EEI’s decision to enlist Henry Dreyfuss, a founder of industrial design in America, for the formidable task of making transmission structures “universally acceptable.” The Dreyfuss designs, as well as their reception both inside and outside the industry, are best seen in the context ofindus­ trial design as the first generation of modernist practitioners gave way to the uncertainties of what is rather lamely labeled “postmod­ ernism.” The tale of the electrical power industry’s efforts to make highvoltage transmission structures aesthetically acceptable thus encom­ passes three overlapping “histories.” The first is the story of that industry’s passage from the best of times, in the 1940s and 1950s, to an era of turmoil beginning in the mid-1960s; the second, that of increasingly active environmental groups eager to prevent what they saw as the trashing of the landscape. Finally, there is the history of industrial design as it moved into the postmodern era. The inter­ action of these histories reveals basic conflicts in American ideas of nature and beauty as they relate to 20th-century technologies...