Everything's Connected

[Tim Strzechowski]

Just got back from a nine-day baseball road trip with the family.  We left on 7/27 and drove to Detroit to see the Tigers play the White Sox, then drove to Cleveland to see the Indians play the Tigers, then to Pittsburgh to see the Bucs play the Rockies.  We finished the road trip with a visit to Cooperstown.

Anyways, part of our trip took us to Niagara Falls, where I was delighted to find a memorial to Nikola Tesla.  When we returned home, I did a quick Wikipedia search on some of the spots we saw, and found this:

[...] "When Nikola Tesla, for whom a memorial was later built at Niagara Falls, NY (USA), invented the three-phase system of alternating current power transmission, distant transfer of electricity became possible. In 1883, the Niagara Falls Power Company, a descendant of Schoellkopf's firm, hired George Westinghouse to design a system to generate alternating current. The world's first AC power generating and transmission plant was built at Ames, below Telluride, Colorado, by Westinghouse, Tesla and L.L. Nunn and proved effective by transmitting AC two miles at a loss of less than 5%. Four years later, by 1896, with financing from moguls like J.P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor IV, and the Vanderbilts, they had constructed giant underground conduits leading to turbines generating upwards of 100,000 horsepower (75 MW), and were sending power as far as Buffalo, twenty miles (32 km) away." [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_falls

It's always fun to stumble onto a Pynchon connection somewhere.

Tim

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