Bridging the Gap

Environment and History, 2019

Environment and History is an interdisciplinary journal which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and natural sciences closer together, with the deliberate intention of constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems. ABSTRACT Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and Canada investigated whether they should preserve and enhance the American Falls, one of the two main cataracts at Niagara Falls, by physically reengineering it. This campaign had its roots in local concerns, but tapped into wider sentiments and emotions about the famous waterfall, and came to involve multiple levels of government and the International Joint Commission. Engineers looked at whether it was feasible to remove all the rock at the base of the American Falls -the talus -which led to the dewatering of the waterfall in 1969. Using a range of techniques, including public consultations, the transborder experts concluded that it was feasible to give the waterfall a facelift, and presented a range of engineered options. However, the International Joint Commission ultimately recommended that it would be best to refrain from an interventionist approach and mostly leave the American Falls alone. Employing envirotech and emotional history approaches, this paper argues that over the course of a decade the meaning of 'preservation' in the context of Niagara Falls significantly shifted because of several factors: the emerging environmental movement, the cost of removing the talus and other alterations, evidence that the public wouldn't sufficiently appreciate these changes, and worries about tourism impacts.

Annals of the Association of American …, 1987

Between 1890 and 1910, Niagara Falls became the focus of a great deal of thinking about the future. Many engineers and entrepreneurs predicted that Niagard's waterpower would make it the grcateht manufacturing center in the world. Utopian plans were drafted for a future metropolis that would exemplify moral as well as material progress. During thc same period several novelists pictured Niagara as the focal point of a disastrous future of wars and dangerous inventions. This paper examines the roots of these visions of the future in earlier perceptions of the falls and assesses their relation to the actual industrial development of Niagara.

Literature Compass, 2014

Writing within the conventions of the European sublime was often problematic for 19th-century travel writers who discovered that Niagara had no Old World precedent. I am concerned here with the development of the Falls' treatment in the 19th century when they first became widely written upon, painted, and commercially exploited after the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal. In what follows, I explore the importance of various 'points of view,' a term often used by Henry James as a device to describe a perspective both visual and thematic. These points of view will take in subjects that include silence, guidebook empiricism, guidebook Romanticism, nationalism, irreverence and an artistic acceptance of the Falls as a tourist destination.

Environmental History, 2013

Over the first half of the twentieth century, Canada and the United States considered engineering works that would simultaneously divert water around Niagara Falls for hydroelectric production while ostensibly maintaining and enhancing the appearance of the great cataract. Binational studies and environmental diplomacy resulted in the 1950 Niagara Diversion Treaty, which authorized the International Niagara Control Works. The construction of these remedial works in the 1950s physically reconfigured Niagara Falls and the Niagara River immediately above the falls in order to divert water while masking the scenic effect of lower flow volumes. As a result, depending on the time of day, up to three-quarters of the Niagara River's water does not go over the falls but is sent via massive tunnels to hydroelectric generating stations downstream. During debates in the following decades about further remedial works, public opinion helped stop some modifications of Niagara Falls, signifying a shift in

International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2000

San Rocco magazine, 2014

The Niagara Falls speak to us with great clarity about the evolution of the relationship between man and nature in Western culture. Here a shift can be recognized both in aesthetic and physical terms – from feelings of repulsion and anxiety to ones of enchantment and delight, from the fear of the overwhelming power of the falling waters to the illusion of man’s total control of them. Paradoxically, the Niagara region, a key node of the Great Lakes ecological and economic system, is a region that did not lack planning: the construction of the western end of the Erie Canal, the system of parks designed by Olmsted and Vaux in both Niagara Falls and Buffalo, and the large infrastructures Robert Moses and his Power Authority built in Niagara County, not to mention all of the utopian urban projects that were developed for Grand Island and Niagara Falls. Yet today Niagara is one of the poorest and most socially devastated counties in the state of New York. Its once booming industry has nearly completely evaporated, hiding a territory riddled with toxic landfills and decrepit neighbourhoods behind the touristy curtain of the falls. So what went wrong? How did the grandeur of the past get lost?

In 1893, the Cataract Construction Company, after four years of delibera- tion, decided that the power generated by its turbines at Niagara Falls would be transmit- ted by alternating current and not by direct current, telodynamic (wire rope), hydraulic, or pneumatic systems, all of which were considered. This paper examines the scientific, technological, and cultural contexts of the decision making process to understand why the CCC’s engineers chose ac. I suggest that the decision was based as much on cultural criteria as on straightforwardtechnical criteria. The engineers who made the decision felt that the technology used at the Falls should match the natural grandeur of the Falls with its o m technological grandeur. Thus they chose a power system that, though untried, was developing rapidly, and held great future promise. Their bold scheme proved SUE- cessful, and the Niagara Falls power project, by far the largest of its day, established the standards for hydroelectric power generation and transmission for many years.

In 2016, the National Army Museum has acquired an important 18th century watercolour entitled “An East View of the Great Cataract of Niagara” (1762), by the military artist and surveyor, Captain Thomas Davies. This paper explores why this work is of such significance.