Another one from the Canada trip. Got a guided tour of the old Niagara power station, built in the early 1900s. It's a genuinely impressive piece of architecture and engineering. Massive scale, massive excavation, all of it done with simple tools by today's standard.
What got me was how deliberately they built it beautiful. Real extra expense poured into the architecture, on purpose, so the building would enhance the area instead of scarring it. Made me think a lot about the power of architecture to shape how people actually feel in a space.
The view from inside the station, looking out over the intake and the falls beyond it. You forget you're standing inside a machine.
They walk you through the old outlet tunnel to get there, more than a hundred feet underground at the base of the falls. That's where the water ended up after dropping through the whole system and driving the turbines. Long, blue-lit, cut straight into the rock. Comes out at an archway looking right across at American Falls and the Rainbow Bridge, which is a hell of a reveal after that much dark stone.
They've also done some real modernization work on the building, and that got my engineer brain going on systems. When do you actually replace an old system? You build the new way, and the instinct is to immediately kill the old way. But then what happens if the new way stops working? Now you've got nothing. Better to keep the old thing around, at least until there's a third layer of redundancy. Belt and suspenders, then you're good to retire the original.
All those old meters are still sitting there. Thomson ammeters, voltmeters, frequency indicators, a whole wall of them, doing their job long after anyone expected them to.
And then, tying it back to music, we got a demo of a powerful Tesla coil discharging at very specific frequencies to basically play music. It's ionizing the air in just the right way to produce a sound wave, and what you hear is a musical note. Sounds like the purest sawtooth wave possible. It's the most fundamental synthesizer there is. No speaker cone, no delicate electronics to drive correctly. Just blasts out pure voltage and makes sound that way.
Even the gift shop tote had a Tesla quote on it: "the present is theirs, the future for which I really worked is mine." Guy was right, eventually. Here's the coil actually doing it.
