It is amazing what a person can find on eBay!  Recently Item # 350081342890 turned out to be a Fitz-Burnham water-wheel turbine, like those that powered flour mills or small hydroelectric plants!

According to Bulletin #100 of the Fitz Water Wheel Company, and the seller, this turbine can deliver 11.16-hp, with a 20-foot head, with a flow rate of 360 cubic feet of water per minute, at 402-rpm.  That means (if I did my calculations correctly) a person can hook up to it an 8.5-kw or 9-kw, single phase, 120-volt, ac generator, and pull approximately 90-amps from it.  That is not very much power considering the cost of the dam, the flume, the turbine, the generator, the mechanical governor, and the switch gear!  Also, one would have to consider the use of a gear-box or flat-twist belt.

However, at one time water-power was the only thing available to many mill owners. 

Sources:

1. Water Power Equipment: Bulletin No. 100;  Fitz Water Wheel Company, Hanover, PA. 1941.  Reprinted by the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills, 1992. pp.16 - 39.

While scanning my searches I thought I had found a picture postcard of the Nebraska Gas & Electric Company's power plant at Plattsmouth, Nebraska.  Unfortunately it was a picture of the power plant at the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad's shops and roundhouse at that location. 

About the time NG&E was merged into the Iowa-Nebraska Light & Power Company, it and the Nebraska Power Company erected 66,000-volt transmission lines into Plattsmouth providing the former with a valuble interconnection.  NG&E owned a small steam power plant at Plattsmouth, and may have been the location for the substation where the lines met.  By the early 1950s a 115,000-volt transmission line from the new Kramer Station at Bellevue (recently razed) and a 161,000-volt transmission line from OPPD's new North Omaha Station made the old 66,000-volt lines redundant.  Then, how things took off from there, not just in Nebraska but the world over!  Fears of Global Warming here we come!

I also read the comments somebody left about my last blog.  The book suggested might indeed be interesting, along with others about the subject.  Major General Smedley Butler was certainly a man for the times.  Anti-war sentiment was strong during the 1920s and 1930s.  It is also interesting how Hitler was later able to use that sentiment to his own ends, almost to the point of isolating the United States.  It is also interesting to note that Wendell Wilke, the one-time president of Commonwealth & Southern, a large utilities holding company, was passionately anti-war and ran against FDR as the Republican Presidential Candidate in 1938. 

I wish I could remember that quote about how prosperity, brought about by the industrial revolution, inevitably leads to people either adopting socialism or fascism!  True then, true now. 

I see more eBay searches in the future!

Happy eBaying!

The 1920s were an interesting time in U.S. History.  It was a time of significant technological change.  During this period the U.S. Navy built some very interesting ships; The Tennessee and Colorado class battleships, the aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga, the S-class submarines, the Omaha class light crusiers, and the Northampton class heavy crusiers.  Also, the Navy was heavily dependent upon World War I era flush deck destroyers (four pipers).  I might also add, the U.S. Navy had seven Yangtze Patrol gunboats built in 1927, including the U.S.S. Guam and U.S.S. Panay.

I recently found a book about the submarine S-39, one of the "pigboats" that later saw action during World War II.  I really look forward to reading that book.  It will be added to my collection of books about the S-class subs.  My other two books are Under Pressure by A.J. Hill, and On the Bottom by Edward Ellsberg.  These books deal the sinking of the submarines S-5 and S-51.

David A. Budka