SPECIAL WATER POWERS

[Extract from address by Owen D. Young, chairman of the board of directors of the General Electric Co.. delivered at the annual convention of the National Electric Light Association at Atlantic City, N. J.. May 18, 1926]

There is a class of water powers which, in my judgment, must be separately considered. No suggestion has yet been made which adequately meets their needs. Where vast rivers either on international boundaries or within the United States require development for several purposes, such as navigation, irrigation, and flood control as well as for power, there arises a new kind of question which is wholly unrelated to the old controversy of Government versus private ownership. The discussion of this question has been clouded by the old animosities. The private ownership people feel that if the Government has anything to do with the development of power in these composite situations, it will be merely the starting point from which the advocates of public ownership will advance their operations. On the other hand, the public ownership people feel that the privately owned companies which seek to throw dams in these great rivers, and incidentally perforce take over the effective navigation, irrigation, and flood control are so entrenching themselves in purely public operations as not only to make all thought of public ownership impossible, but to create instruments of oppression rather than of service.

Much has been made of the question as to whether these dams should be built and owned by the Government. If the dams really serve the great purposes of navigation and flood control, which are clearly Governmental activities, then it seems to me public ownership of them can not be objected to. Personally, I prefer that the construction and ownership of such an enterprise be in the hands of a public corporation, the stock of which should be Government owned, with the provision that that corporation finance the enterprise with its own securities. Our experience with the War Finance Corporation, which is a wholly public concern, and with the farm loan banks and the Federal reserve banks, which certainly have a large public character, leads me to believe that we can obtain men of technical qualification and high purpose, free from political bias, to administer these enterprises in such a way that development can be most advantageously achieved with justice to all interests, both public and private alike. The alleged fear of tax-exempt securities is nothing more than a firecracker thrown by the roadside designed to scare the horse.

As an observer of the world's economic development, I speak with great pride in the achievements of the light and power industry of the United States. To my knowledge no industry has made such rapid advance since the Great War and none has achieved a more useful or helpful result. It is the ambition of every foreign country to have the benefit of such a development. It lies at the root of labor troubles and of social peace. To the extent which we may substitute great supplies of cheap inanimate power for that generated by the muscles of human beings, we shall not only relieve the exertion of workers, but we shall increase their output, which is the only way of advancing wages and living conditions. We must aim to make human beings directors instead of generators of power. We must aim to make the earning power of human beings so large as to supply them not only with a living wage, but a cultural wage. No man is free until want is removed from his door and until his intellect may be developed to take advantage of all the opportunities which may be available and are guaranteed to him in a free country. Let no man think that power supply is remote in its reactions on human welfare.

THE POSITION OF THE NATIONAL LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS

HISTORICAL STATEMENT

The program of work of the National League of Women Voters is made up of items adopted by vote of State delegates assembled in national conventions. The vote of one convention supersedes the votes of previous conventions.

In 1921 the national convention passed a resolution as follows:

"That the Government be urged to take the necessary steps to increase the production of nitrates and other necessary chemical elements needed in agriculture by the completion and utilization of plants already in process of construction."

In 1922 the national convention reaffirmed this stand and added, "and in the event of the refusal of Congress to approve such Government operation, the Government be urged to accept the offer which best safeguards this great asset still owned by the people.'

The 1923 convention put on its national legislative program:

"The enactment by Congress of legislation to increase the production of nitrates and other necessary chemical elements needed in agriculture by the completion and utilization of the Muscle Shoals plant under conditions which best safeguard the public interest."

The 1924 convention reaffirmed the action of the previous year.

The 1925 convention adopted the item:

"Development of Muscle Shoals as a national asset through legislation which will (a) provide wide and economical distribution of electrical power, (b) provide for production of chemicals and agricultural fertilizers, (c) serve the people's interest and safeguard their perpetual rights."

PRESENT POSITION

The 1926 convention (the last convention held to date) adopted the item: "Development of Muscle Shoals as a national asset through legislation which provides for the continuation of Government operation as required by the national defense act of 1916 through a nonpolitical governmental corporation: (a) To produce nitrates for national defense.

"(b) To experiment with production of cheap fertilizers.

"(c) To insure the development of the Tennessee River system as one project

for hydroelectric power production and flood protection.

แ

(This stand on Muscle Shoals is not to be interpreted as indorsement of the principle of Government operation in general.)"

ELECTRIC POWER AND THE PUBLIC WELFARE

[An address by Ann Dennis Bursch, delivered at the seventh annual convention National League of Women Voters, St. Louis, Mo.]

FOREWORD

At the seventh annual convention of the National League of Woman Voters, Mrs. Bursch read a paper on "The electric power revolution," before the open conference of the living costs committee. So much interest was awakened and so many requests for copies were received that Mrs. Bursch was asked to revise it for publication. It is with gratification that the living costs committee presents this delightfully human discussion of electric power with the hope that it will prove helpful in the study of this subject.

LOUISE G. BALDWIN, Chairman.

WOMEN'S SPECIAL INTEREST IN ELECTRIC POWER

The living costs committee of the League of Women Voters has added to its recommendations for study "The most effective utilization of the electric resources of the country from the standpoint of the public welfare."

That women should be showing such an interest in the way in which electric power is being developed, engineered, and financed seems to cause some surprise-and, shall we say, some amusement? The ablest engineers, the cleverest financiers already have power development well in hand. Why should we concern ourselves about it?

Because, we answer, here for the first time in history is something that can do household drudgery better than we can. Electric power is a servant that we can put to the hardest household tasks with a clear conscience. Women have revolted against domestic service. We wish to employ electric power in their stead, provided it can be hired at a wage we can afford, and can be persuaded to take a place in the country.

Therefore women have a definite expectation of benefit from the electric revolution now in progress, which they never reaped from the revolution that brought about the age of steam.

STEAM-A CENTRIPETAL FORCE

The steam revolution was purely industrial. It replaced man power with the power of steam-driven flywheels, belts, pulleys, and shafting. It had a great effect upon domestic and agricultural life, but that effect was destructive. Before steam came, weaving, spinning, tanning, and baking were household occupations, carried on at home and on the farm. Mary's little lamb furnished Mary with a coat and the family with shoes and blankets between its school days and the day when it became leg of mutton and tallow dips-all without leaving the place of its birth.

But the steam engine arrived, with mechanical power to turn all the looms that could be harnessed to its flywheel by leather belts. Weavers and spinners followed their machines perforce into the mill. Hand industries became lost arts. Mass production became the rule. Great mill towns grew up, in which there was work for all the family,-old and young and very young. So the family left the farm for the town.

Mill-town living conditions were, still usually are, bad. Social engineering had not been considered by any but the dreamers when steam began to rule. People's lives were caught and whirled around in the machinery by the burly, crippled old giant with whom they worked. For steam is, at best, only a deformed giant with very short arms and legs. Its work has to be carried to it. Its helpers must live huddled close up to it.

Therefore we call steam a centripetal force. The social results of steam power are crowded factories, congested industrial cities-and outside, a depopulated country.

ELECTRICITY EC UALS LIGHT, HEAT, POWER

Imaginative engineering minds (the dreamers again) began to play with the idea that electricity too might be made to work, instead of playing around the horizon as heat lightning, or roaring in the heavens as it struck blindly at houses, men or trees. Finally they caught that giant-a much more nimble and versatile giant than steam! They transformed its energy first into the power of many home-dipped candles. The kilowatt-hour 1 became a new light unit.

It was only the cities that got the benefit of this, first in sputtering arc-lights, then in rows, and later in patterns and flowing steams, of brilliant incandescent bulbs that turned the city night into another day, lined the streets and roofs with gaudy signs, brought the moving picture industry up to its present appalling hugeness and attractiveness. Since then, there has been no keeping the growing children and the "hands" on the farm.

Presently the engineers found that electricity was light. They made it turn wheels, just as steam did. in earnest.

power and heat as well as Then the revolution began

Still, however, the motion was toward the center. Power plants were installed as part of the factory they served. Electric-light plants were inside the city. Congestion increased. This was the situation when the war began, and war conditions made it worse. These conditions still exist to a considerable extent. The cities grow on. The improvement in working conditions in electric factories, no longer cluttered and dusty with over head shafting, pulleys and belting,-the tremendous attractiveness of the night lights and movies-still draw the young folks away to the city from the country.

The steam revolution did little for the farmer, nothing for his wife, except to take away the industries that kept her family at home. It took away the farm hand but gave little applied energy to replace his muscle. Over most of the country the farm energy unit is still horse power, man power, woman power, child power. The kilowatt-hour is coming to the farm, but it is not there yet, except on an experimental basis. There is still good reason for any big boy or girl, looking at mother's broken figure and seeing what farm life has made of father, to drop the hayfork and milk pail and start for the city-"Me for the bright lights!"

Now, one thing seems to me the message of all civilizations to ours: That this country can not long endure without agricultural prosperity.

The culture of the cities, which we must have-music, the arts of painting, drama, and sculpture, our thrilling new architecture can not long go on, unless it is matched by the culture of the fields. Conditions are not sound if, during such a time of industrial prosperity as exists to-day, there are such abysses of despair as these into which some of our farming regions have fallen.

1 Current enough to light a 25-watt lamp for 40 hours.

We can get along without more big cities. We need many scattered little cities, surrounded by cultivated fields, worked by comfortable farmers whose families love their homes the better because they can reach the city easily for culture, recreation, or work. The farmhouse must be a comfortable modern home to which they love to return, not merely a synonym for drudgery and boredom and isolation.

Rightly directed, electricity can accomplish much of this change. It can replace the vanished farm hand. It can make the farm kitchen a comfortable, well-equipped workshop, can lighten the work and increase the productivity of the dairy and henhouse. It can give the housewife the leisure that is her right. Whether it will do this on terms that the farmer can afford will depend upon the terms that society makes with the new power.

ELECTRIC POWER CENTRIFUGAL

This vision of help for the country from electric power could not have been seen 10 years ago, when it was drawing people into the cities, offering light and power there and ignoring the outer darkness. But within the past 10 years a movement in the contrary direction has begun. Overcoming the inertia of direction which steam had set up, electricity has now shown that its force is centrifugal. Under the right guidance it can scatter the population again over the land, can break up the congestion, rehabilitate the farms, and plant industries on the roads that lead to the farms.

The new development that turned the tide of the power industry toward the open spaces was long-distance power transmission; that, and hydroelectricity.2 It has been made practical to build power plants far from the consumers of power. They may be erected wherever water falls, wherever coal can be carried, wherever condensers can be supplied with cold water. At any point in a drive through the open country one may come upon a huge power house, developing as much current as 20 sizable plants produced in 1900. And from each power house the tall supports for high-voltage transmission wires stalk across the fields, carrying tremendous volumes of current to far-away towns and cities.

Electric current flows uphill, steps across the river on stilts, never stoops to look at a State line. It runs over mountains or across prairies to its objective 200, even 300 miles away, arriving there as quick as winking, fresh as a new-laid egg. Electricity is one thing that can not be adulterated, though it may be weakened by the long journey. However, transmission losses on long lines rarely exceed 10 per cent and on the larger systems are estimated at 5 per cent. Greater distances become practical every year.

So far, American steam-generation plants are being located with more regard to the presence of a cold water supply than the proximity of coal. But it is to be hoped that a technique will be worked out that will make it possible to put the power plants at the mouths of coal mines. This will free the railroads of endless trains of coal cars. It will utilize low-grade coal that can not economically be transported. It will lead to the salving of valuable chemical byproducts of coal that are now entirely wasted in combustion.

Many engineers are devoted to the present technique, based on unlimited water for condensing steam. They view the idea of generating power at the mine mouth as the dream of mere theorists. They point out that from 400 to 600 pounds of cold water must go with every single pound of coal, in operating the condenser of a steam turbine. Where, they ask, is that amount of water to be found at a coal-mine mouth?

But one may find, in the report of the Pennsylvania Giant Power Survey (made by Morris L. Cooke, the noted industrial engineer, and a corps of technical engineers) accounts and pictures of mine-mouth plants now functioning successfully in England and Germany. There the "dreamers" have learned to cool water artificially in "cooling towers" built close to the mine. They have also devised ways of using the water of a small stream over and over before letting it escape.

I have faith that our engineers will not lag behind those of Europe, when they are once convinced that this problem must be solved, American engineers do not easily say of any problem, "It can't be done," if they are given a reason for doing it.

Generated by water power.

INDUSTRY TAKES TO THE FIELDS

Since our giant has had his reach so lengthened by long-distance transmission, the power houses are taking to the open road and the factories are following them. The Boston Post Road, near which I live, is beaded with big sunny, airy factories, spreading out over old farmsteads. It is good to see so many laboring men and women living in the country instead of in stuffy, noisy city lodgings.

In this connection be it noted that our part of New England shows an increase in the use as well as the value of farms during the past five years, in contrast with the decrease of 5 per cent in fields cultivated and 25 per cent in valuation of farms in the country as a whole. The United States Bureau of Agriculture Economics attributes this to the purchase of old farmhouses and adjacent lands by factory employees and other industrial workers who produce their own eggs, poultry, milk, and vegetables to an extent that rates them as "farmers"- -a farmer being one who cultivates at least 3 acres and produces not less than $250 worth of farm products a year. Our power producers are alive to this situation, and are experimenting on the electrification of farming on an experimental farm which they maintain cooperatively in Massachusetts. They are also promoting every kind of domestic convenience that may increase the use of power in the home. We women home makers in the region of which I speak no longer find neighborhood girls to help with housework. They go to the mills where electricity makes the work light. We do reap compensation, however, from living in a superpower belt, where power is being generated all around us and domestic use in the offpeak hours is being catered to. My home town is largely residential, with widely scattered prosperous homes. It has used electric light for over 30 years, but is only now become thickly enough settled to attract a gas company. Everybody has electric lights, and kitchen installation has begun. The average current used per month is comparatively very high-48 kilowatt hours --for which amount the average cost is 9.3 cents per kilowatt hour.

This year, just as the new gas company was trying to sign us up for gas-range installation, the power company offered a new "three-step" rate for light and power. This means that after I have paid about 9 cents per kilowatt hour for as much current as could possibly be used to light the house, the rest costs me only a few cents the "cooking rate." As the electrical equipment of my home (a modest one) requires over six times as much current as is ordinarily used for lights, the actual average cost in my particular case is about 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

This moderate domestic power rate puts me into the class of the "specially privileged." The domestic lighting rate in 115 cities averages 7.46 cents, and the average current used for lighting is only 365 kilowatt hours a year.

POWER RATES IN VARIETY

Three hundred kilowatt hours per month is ample current to light my 10-room house and run the range, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, irons, fans, radiators, and minor appliances. (Water heating is still beyond my purse. I shall rejoice when there comes into use here an "accumulative" electric water heater, such as have been introduced in Switzerland, France, and Great Britain, made practical by a very low night rate. They use current only between 10 p. m. and 6 a. m., the ebbtide of industrial use. Hot water tanks and even whole houses are thus being heated, tanks being insulated to hold the heat all day).

Being curious to know how I should fare were may home in some other place, I have compared my electricity bills with some figures quoted recently in the Congressional Record, compiled from the published power rates of the National Electric Light Association for 1924. If I used 312 kilowatt hours per month, my bill for two months (two-months bills are the common practice) would be $29.36, and my rate 4.7 cents.

Kilowatt hour.

See Electrical Merchandising, March. 1926.

Mr. Samuel Insull, addressing the National Electric Light Association last May, stated that of 226 companies which served six one-half million customers, the 15 having the highest rates (13.1-18 cts.), reported an average yearly residential use of only 194 kilowatt hours. As rates decreased, average consumption increased, "until it reached an average of 1,171 kilowatt hours per customer per annum for 3 companies having rates ranging from 1 to 3 cents per kilowatt hours. Companies with materially low residential rates had the better balance sheets, better public relations, and altogether were in a healthier condition. (Electrical World, May 22, 1926, p. 1129).

• Congressional Record, Sixty-ninth Congress, first session, p. 8463. South; reprint of Bulletin 104, National Popular Government League.

Value of Muscle Shoals in the