1935 - Energy

Energy

The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) established by President Roosevelt's executive order May 11 will underwrite rural electric cooperatives and provide loans for transmission lines. Only 10 percent of 30 million U.S. rural residents have electrical service, but with help from the REA, 90 percent of U.S. farms will have electricity by 1950.

Title I of the Public Utility Act signed into law by President Roosevelt August 26 is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which forces the breakup of the giant, unregulated monopolies that have controlled prices and territories (see 1932). Roosevelt has called the holding companies "evil" in his State-of-the-Union address, they have fought against regulation, but the Supreme Court will uphold the PUHCA in 1946 after continued opposition from the holding companies, whose numbers will drop from 216 in 1938 to just 18 by 1958, and the PUHCA will remain the overriding regulatory law until 1992.

The Federal Power Act signed into law by President Roosevelt gives the 15-year-old Federal Power Commission (FPC) authority to regulate interstate and wholesale transactions and transmission of electric power.

An estimated 6.5 million windmills have been produced in the United States in the past half century. Most are used to pump water or run sawmills, but some "wind generators" have produced small amounts of electricity.

President Roosevelt dedicates Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam) on the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border September 10 (see 1933). Completed 2 years ahead of schedule after 4 years of construction (engineer Frank Crowe receives a $350,000 bonus for pulling it off), the $175 million project contains 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete that has been set with cooling tubes to hasten a process that would otherwise have taken 125 years (concrete generates heat as it sets and then contracts). Some 5,000 workers have been employed in building the dam, which is 70 stories (726 feet) high, 1,244 feet long, 660 feet wide at its base, 45 feet thick at its crest; architect Gordon Kaufman has given it a modernistic art deco design, the monolithic structure will be renamed in 1947 to honor the president who authorized its construction, and although 145 men (96 by some accounts) have died from heat exhaustion and other causes while working on the project, no one has been buried in the concrete (see 1936).

The Connally Hot Oil Act approved by Congress February 16 regulates production of crude oil, penalizing excess production.

Texas drillers strike oil in the state's Permian Basin. Banker-rancher Clarence Scharbauer's family moved from New York to Midland in 1889. He has bought the Goldsmith Field to feed cattle, and by the end of the century it will have produced more than 900 million barrels of crude petroleum.

Britain's Anglo-Persian Co. of 1914 becomes the Anglo-Iranian Co. as Persia becomes Iran (see British Petroleum, 1954).

Oil magnate Edward L. Doheny dies at Los Angeles September 8 at age 79.