1941 - Energy

Energy

Grand Coulee Dam begins generating power on the Columbia River in eastern Washington (see 1933). Contractors organized by Henry J. Kaiser and the late Warren Bechtel have built the world's largest hydroelectric installation—500 feet high, 500 feet thick at the base, and stretching 4,290 feet across the river. The first man-made structure to exceed in volume the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, it contains nearly 12 million cubic yards of concrete, and while it has cost the lives of 77 men (out of thousands who worked on the project at an average wage of 85¢ per hour), it impounds 150-mile-long, 130-square-mile Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake as its reservoir, controls flooding, permits irrigation of 1¼ million acres of parched desert land, and has 24 giant turbines that make cheap electricity available to the region, undercutting the rates charged by private utility companies (six more turbines will be added in 1974).

Engineer Stephen Bechtel begins construction of a top-secret pipeline through the Canadian wilderness to Alaska.

Korea's Shuifeng Shuiba hydroelectric project (Supung-dam) is completed on the Yalu River after 4 years' work. Built by the Noguchi interests for Japanese colonial authorities, the dam is 525 feet high, 2,790 feet long, and forms a reservoir 20 miles long. By 1944 it will have a generating capacity of 450,000 kilowatt-hours.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) chairman Harcourt A. Morgan resigns September 15 and is succeeded as head of the TVA's three-man board by David E. Lilienthal, now 42, who will retain the position until 1946 (see 1938). Morgan has worked to improve agriculture in the valley while Lilienthal has managed the TVA's power program, pushing through mammoth hydroelectric dam-building projects that have antagonized private power companies. TVA began building coal-burning steam plants last year to meet the growing demand for power that has exceeded the capacity of its hydroelectric plants (steam plants will account for 62 percent of its installed capacity within 45 years); TVA power will make the valley a mighty war-production resource in the next 4 years, using cheap electricity to turn out aluminum, nitrate explosives, steel, aircraft, textiles for uniforms, leather for boots, and all manner of other materials. By 1945 the TVA will be the nation's largest producer of electric power, and per-capita income in the region will have risen 73 percent over this year's level (see Kentucky Dam, 1944).

Onetime oil baron E. W. Marland dies in poverty of a heart ailment at his Ponca City, Okla., home October 3 at age 67, having long since lost his fortune.

U.S. sales of fluorescent lamps reach 21 million, up from 1.6 million in 1939 as factories and offices rush to install fixtures that can accommodate the lamps introduced by General Electric in 1938.