NIAGARA AND WHITE COAL
At night I stood upon a steel suspension bridge that hung high above the
mighty river it spanned. Electric lamps shed light even down to the
water, visible as streaks of foam moving in the eddies. A deep bass
drummed unceasing in the ear, and I knew this muffled thunder came out
of the great ghostly cloud lying in the darkness away up stream. The
deep bass was a background of sound for the treble of crickets piping on
the precipitous banks, black with dense vegetation.
Crossing the bridge, you enter the light and bustle of an American city,
with its stores and saloons and hotels, its girls without hats and its
men without waistcoats.
That night, in cosy quarters on the Canadian side, I was lulled to sleep
by the subdued, dull roar, which next morning greeted my awakening. From
the hotel window I had my first glimpse of Niagara Falls—of a section,
rather, for an outhouse obstructed the view. I saw a wall of water
glistening in the sunlight—green transparency the upper part, opaque
whiteness the lower, with a cloud of rolling vapour at the base. From a
balcony I saw all—the straight American falls on the left, the recessed
Canadian falls on the right, and the intervening island. At that
distance Niagara Falls are peaceful and beautiful. Leisurely the water
curves from the top in flashing emerald; slowly and softly it descends
in thick, broken, snowy coils; indolently it evaporates at the bottom
into pale fog.
The American portion seems small beside the far sweep of the Canadian.
Look curiously and you will see one thin thread of water detached from
the main body of the American falls. During the afternoon I was one of a
party of friends on the island, close to the top of that thread.
Entering a house divided into dressing-rooms, we, under instruction,
exchanged the whole of our own attire for strange, picturesque
costumes—enormous boots of felt tied to the feet with string, blue
woollen knickerbockers, a blue woollen jacket, and an oilskin hat that
covered the ears. Others of the party accepted outer suits of oilskins,
so that they looked like fishermen in northern latitudes equipped for a
hurricane. It was a hot afternoon, and I declined to be burdened with
those waterproof additions. “Oh, very well,” said the attendant with
composure; and he went on munching his chewing-gum.
Out in the roadway we stood in a group to be photographed. Two carriages
came to a standstill in our proximity, and the ladies within them
laughed, and laughed yet again, as they gazed upon us. Beginning to
descend a flight of wooden steps, we met an old man coming up, an old
man who, arrayed like my companions in oilskins, looked to have had a
recent narrow escape from drowning. Wet and glistening, he walked with
bent back and heavy footsteps, a saturated moustache assisting his
melancholy aspect. He was, it seemed, to be our guide, and soon we were
following him down the staircase, which was spiral, and contained within
a wooden tower.
At the bottom, thunder stunned our ears, and only by signals and
grimaces could we communicate one with another. The thunder never ceased
as we followed a downward path cut in the rugged cliff. Presently, at a
bend in the path, we saw a frightening sight. I felt like a helpless
insect watching the disruption of the universe. The bottom of that
thread of Niagara Falls was immediately before us, edge on. Oh, the
weight and speed of the endless world of waters smashing down upon the
huge boulders! I strove to look upwards to the full height of that grey
cataclysm; but the spray was blinding.
Following our guide to the right, we soon were upon a rustic bridge
spanning rocks washed by a running riot of waves. The fine rain became a
deluge of great spots of heavy water, which hurt my shoulders like
pellets of lead. Bitterly did I regret my refusal of the oilskins.
Now we were in front of the waterfall, gasping, with bowed heads,
clutching by both hands at wooden rails draped with slimy weed, and
shuffling shamelessly along the deluged planks. So we made our way over
several bridges—shuddering, blinded, deafened; and as we crept up
wooden stairs—a pitiful procession of bent, helpless, suffering men—I
found myself doubting the wisdom of making this excursion when so high a
wind was blowing.
Somehow we gained a footing on another bridge, and when I forced open my
eyes it was to find ourselves between a cliff of rock and a cliff of
water. Still were we bombarded by violent rain; still did thunder numb
our brains; still was my poor body pierced with cold. But chiefly were
our senses afflicted by the wind. In that awful cloister the atmosphere
seemed thin and insufficient, and to be moving so quickly as to leave us
no time to breathe it.
My right arm was clutched by the man ahead. Instinctively I gripped the
man behind. And so we dragged one another through several moments of
amazement, blindness, and repressed fear—suddenly to emerge, with a
chorus of laughter, into dry, still, sunny air. For there was no rain
that day, and no wind—brilliant sunshine pouring from the blue American
sky. The only thunder was caused by water falling 167 feet on rugged
rock in unending millions of tons. We had passed round the base of the
thin, detached thread of the American falls. We had visited the Cave of
the Winds. I should not like to take that heroic shower-bath every
morning.
As we reascended the pathway to the tower—dripping, aglow,
delighted—we turned our heads, and beheld an unbroken rainbow shining
in the clouds of vapour that rolled across the river.
All of that is but one experience of Niagara. Afterwards we went on
board the _Maid of the Mist_, where special clothing was once more
proferred us; and this time I dressed in accordance with suggestion. On
the little steamer’s deck we soon were seated, cowled and habited like a
company of friars, with only our faces showing. The stout little craft
crept cautiously towards the cataract. Soon we were cruising through the
clouds and into the white confusion of eddies, our craft riding
perceptibly deeper in water of a buoyancy reduced by myriad intermingled
bubbles of air. From the _Maid of the Mist_ we saw the might and majesty
of the Niagara Falls from a fresh, if somewhat hazy, point of view.
Niagara is certainly a most unsuitable place for a river. First, there
is that appalling, unavoidable tumble down a precipice; then, when
equilibrium and composure have been recovered, and dignified progress is
resumed between verdant cliffs clothed with flowers and innocence, more
geographical treachery is met with. Out of the left bank a bay has been
scooped, and water entering there is doomed to rush round and round,
entrapped and helpless, carrying branches, leaves, and other floating
objects in a monotony of aimless circles. This is the whirlpool, and
residents of the neighbourhood tell you grim stories of men in canoes,
women in barrels, and derelict human corpses travelling for weary hours
in those dizzy waters, until some chance eddy at last brought them
within reach of rescuing arms.
[Illustration: NIAGARA: ABOVE THE CANADIAN FALLS]
[Illustration: NIAGARA: THE CANADIAN FALLS]
Still lower down, the river knows the grievous disadvantage of a channel
inadequate to its bulk. Forsaking their parallel relation, the banks
deflect in gradually converging lines. At once the water takes alarm.
Its face puckers into wrinkles of distress, then is bedabbled with foam;
and anon the panic-river, blanched with terror, flings itself forward in
delirious haste, white wave climbing over white wave until, at the point
of greatest restriction, one sees high piles of struggling water.
Between the whirlpool and the rapids I noted strong men on the rocky
banks fishing with thick rods in the fierce current. Out on the
Queenston heights locusts droned in the trees on the battlefield, and
wild grapes were growing on slopes that commanded a far view of fair
scenery.
I have concluded my cursory sketch of Canada’s greatest coal
mine—white-coal mine. For a remarkable change has come over the
character of Niagara Falls. In my school-days it was merely one of the
wonders of the world, and of no more practical account than the Sphinx.
Now it is a thing of infinite utility, and has as definite a commercial
value as the bullion in the Bank of England.
In the history of mankind no fact is more quaint, I think, than that the
greatest achievements of civilisation should be dependent, almost
entirely, upon the carboniferous strata in the crust of the earth. Coal,
as a means of producing steam, has long been the vital, indispensable
factor in human affairs. What would become of the world, people have
anxiously asked, when our stock of the grimy mineral should be
exhausted? Nay, against that evil day we have long been eagerly awaiting
the discovery of an alternative source of heat, the automobile almost
suggesting that man has at last put his finger on the substitute. Coal’s
great rival has been found; but it is not oil. It happens to be (and
this is another quaint fact in the history of mankind) the waterfall.
Who would have thought it? Who could have dreamed that water would prove
the substitute—the superior substitute—for fire? It was so natural to
suppose that coal could only be deposed by something that was, at any
rate, inflammable. We failed to remember that steam and the piston-rod
are but means to an end; that end being—power. In the waterfall we find
power ready-made.
To convert mechanical energy into the electric current and utilise that
current for practical purposes of illumination, was a great achievement,
now more than thirty years old. To convert mechanical energy into the
electric current, dispatch that current to a distant point, and there
re-convert it, without serious leakage, into mechanical energy, was a
far greater achievement, now about fifteen years old. Just exactly how
it all happens I will not attempt to explain, there being many things
concerning electricity that are not known to science, as well as many
things that are known to science but not to me.
In visiting the power-houses at Niagara I went behind the scenes, so to
speak, and saw everything. Also I saw nothing—energy being invisible. A
power-house is a shining palace of repose and polished machinery. Each
gallery of dynamos is a cloister of peace, where a poet might compose
verses to his lady’s eyes. Huge turbines hum softly in the trim
wheel-pit—so deep, so quiet. The giant generator slumbers in a
death-like stillness only to be attained by machinery revolving at the
pace of twenty-six miles a second. At Niagara one stands in the clean
presence of a volume of power measurable by the united strength of a
million men.
White coal gives forth no smoke, dirt, or smell—which reminds me of an
instructive personal experience.
I was at Hamilton, a city of between seventy and eighty thousand
inhabitants, and situated amid delightful scenery at the western end of
Lake Ontario. With its hills and magnificent views, Hamilton suggests a
small Edinburgh, and (because of its tree-planted avenues and public
gardens) an Edinburgh built on Garden-City lines. The train had lately
taken me through the orchards and vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula,
and here, in the market-place of Hamilton, I found glowing produce from
that region—tons of peaches (selling for a few cents the large
basketful), and great consignments of apples, pears, plums, and other
fruits, massed with pyramids of vegetables and glorious clusters of
flowers, so that, in passing along the bustling avenues, I walked amid
the most seductive perfumes.
“This, then, is the Fruit City?” I suggested to the resident of Hamilton
who accompanied me.
“That is a new name,” he replied, “for the Birmingham of Canada.”
At this I could not help laughing as I looked around at Hamilton, a city
bathed in unpolluted sunshine and almost innocent of factory chimneys.
“Birmingham,” I pointed out, “is a manufacturing centre.”
“Exactly,” said my companion; and he went on to tell me of Hamilton’s
four hundred large factories, which annually produce I don’t know how
many million dollars’ worth of cotton goods, farm implements, boots,
furniture, and goodness knows what.
Still was I mystified when dinner-bells rang in the part of the city
whither we had wandered, and from out great buildings there poured
swarms of high-spirited toilers, who mounted their thousands of bicycles
and swept hungrily over the hill.
I began to understand. The machinery in those factories was worked by
the water plunging down the Niagara escarpment, over forty miles away.
This was a sunny, white-coal Birmingham. I prefer it to the smoky,
black-coal Birmingham.
When I first crossed the Atlantic, some nine years ago, the Americans
were deriving light and power from Niagara, but the Canadians had merely
begun preparations to that end, preparations which, by the way, provided
a touch of romance. For a temporary breakwater had been constructed some
distance above the Falls, thus laying bare a strip of the river bed, and
on that area of polished rock, which during countless ages had been
swept by a terrific force, little toddling children were engaged in
innocent frolics.
Driving last year amid smiling homesteads, I saw the great steel cable
which, suspended from a succession of lofty metal towers, transmits the
power of the falls to municipalities of Western Ontario, a share even
going to Toronto, which is more than eighty miles from the famous
cataract.
The palatial power-houses, the illuminated cities, the smokeless
factories, the superb systems of electric tramways—all combine to make
a strong appeal to the imagination. Yet Niagara, with its yield of
400,000 horse-power, is but a sample of the Dominion’s unnumbered
sources of force. Note this portentous fact—Canada’s supply of
white-coal, which is fifty per cent. cheaper than black coal, greatly
exceeds that of any other country. In Ontario, prospectors have surveyed
readily-available sources to the extent of 3,500,000 horse-power. Some
idea of British Columbia’s wealth of waterfalls is conveyed to everyone
who travels through that glorious region. Quebec measures its available
horse-power by tens of millions.
“When all the coal on the earth shall have been consumed by our
machines,” said M. Fabrèques, an eminent French engineer, “Canada will
be mistress of the world.” At the time those words were written,
water-power and fire-power stood, or were supposed to stand, on an
economic equality. The superiority of white-coal has since been
demonstrated.
Thus to the future expansion of Canada’s manufactures, who so rash as to
prophesy a limit?