New York State History

The rivers and streams of the Great Corridor offered early set­tlers the advantage of easy transportation and communication, and provided the natural routes for growing commerce. They did more. They offered water power to turn the wheels of growing industry.

Up and down the Great Corridor, as elsewhere in the young country, flour mills, iron-working mills, spinning mills and sawmills clustered around every available head of water. As early as 1757 a nar­row loop canal was-dug on the Niagara River's east bank to run a saw­mill for Chabert Joncaire, Soldier of France, Master of the Portage, and Director of the French Government's Trade with the West.

Across the State at Glens Falls, Abraham Wing pioneered a pros­perous lumbering industry when he built a sawmill powered by the plunging cascade there in 1763. Daniel Masters, a blacksmith, set up his forge at the falls of the Oswego River in 1793 and assisted in the construction of several mills powered by the river's rushing waters.

These developments had their counterparts by the hundreds in a growing country that flourished because of its energy but whose only productive energy was that of man or beast—or falling water. Because of the pressing demand for more and ever more manufactured prod­ucts, great strides were made during the nineteenth century in the direct use of water power and in the construction of water wheels. A hydraulic waterway was undertaken on the Oswego River as early as 1823. Similar projects were started at Watertown, Ogdensburg, and Little Falls. Canvass White, an engineer for the Erie Canal, was struck by the possibility of harnessing the power latent in the 100-foot lull of the Mohawk River at Cohoes. Encouraged by Governor De Witt Clinton, he organized the Cohoes Company in 1826 and constructed a dam and hydraulic canals.

But always the miller, the lumberman, the spinner, and other users of water power had to come to the source of power. They could not choose their factory sites at will and have the needed power brought to their doors. In the Corridor itself a series of discoveries was made that would eventually change all that. Joseph Henry, a teacher of mathematics and natural history in Albany, in 1827 began the re­searches in electromagnetism and induction that took electricity a long stride further from the laboratory to make it servant to man. A few years later, following up Henry's experiments, Michael Faraday, the great English scien­tist, found that an electric current flowed along a wire leading from a copper disc rotating between the poles of a magnet.

Step by step, as the nineteenth century grew older, Faraday's device developed into a practical generator of respectable capacity for the production of electricity. One invention after another—the tele­graph, the direct-current electric motor, the arc light, Edison's electric light—led to the conclusion that the uses of electricity were limitless if only it could be produced and distributed in quantity. The problem was how to turn the generator. Men looked first to their oldest source of power, falling water, and then almost at once to the newer giant, steam.