Electricity For The Farm – Everett Franklin Philips – Platanus Publishing

“Yet the average farmer who would get excited if sound young chunks and drafters were running wild across his pastures, is not inspired by any similar desire of possession and master y by the sight of a brook, or a rivulet that waters his meadows. This brook or river is flowing down hill to the sea. Ever y 4,000 gallons that falls one foot in one minute; ever y 400 gallons that falls 10 feet in one minute; or ever y 40 gallons that falls 100 feet in one minute, means the power of one horse going to waste—not the $200 flesh-and-blood kind that can lift only 23,000 pounds a foot a minute—but the 33,000 foot-pound kind. Thousands of farms have small streams in their ver y door yard, capable of developing five, ten, twenty, fifty horsepower twenty-four hours a day, for the greater part of the year. Within a quarter of a mile of the great majority of farms (outside of the dr y lands themselves) there are such streams. Only a small fraction of one per cent of them have been put to work, made to pay their passage from the hills to the sea”