Work of Young Men

A MIGHTY ENTERPRISE AND THE POWER BEHIND IT.

Short but Remarkable Business Careers — Nearly Five Hundred Million Dollars in One Project — The Scheme to Harness Niagara’s Giant Force.

(Special Correspondence.)

NEW YORK, Dec. 7. — The influence of young men in the development of electricity for commercial purposes was very strikingly illustrated on the occasion of a recent examination by a company of distinguished public men and capitalists of the work which is being done at Niagara falls to utilize the colossal power which has hitherto gone to waste over that precipice. The capitalists in the party were for the most part men of mature years. Some of them represented the great business centers of the west, New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The aggregate capital commanded by them and those with whom they are associated is nearly half a billion dollars.

But those of that party who had tempted these capitalists to invest many millions of dollars in these works were young men, none of them being over 40 years of age. One, Mr. Frank Hawley, is just 35, and in a comparatively short business career has revealed that the republic and especially electricity commercially developed afford opportunities in which any persevering young man taking advantage of can find fortune. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Hawley, being a poor boy in Rochester, or, as he now smilingly says, having had a curbstone education in his youth, was working 18 hours a day in order to conquer adverse circumstances.

He was accustomed to rise by 4 o’clock every morning to take care of three or four horses and to do other work around a place which could be done in the early hours, and for this he received $2 a week. At 9 o’clock he entered a law office, where he was employed as clerk, and where he studied law when his duties as clerk would permit. There he staid all day, and for that service received a very small sum.

In the early evening Mr. Hawley began the duties in connection with one of the Rochester newspapers — sitting at his desk or reporting in the evening until midnight, then turning in for a few hours’ sleep. The capacity for such labor after a few years brought Mr. Hawley to the attention of men who appreciated his diligence, and he was placed in responsible posts, in which he revealed executive qualities of the highest order. But he had secured this victory at very great cost. His work had produced paralysis of the optic nerve of one eye and a sympathetic trouble of the other, so that it has caused him partial blindness.

With his first considerable earnings Mr. Hawley purchased one country place of the late Jarvis Lord, who was very prominent in New York state affairs for many years, and there he has been teaching lessons to the farmers of New York state, which some of them have been following, with very great profit. With a great herd of Jersey cows he supplies butter contracted for long ahead and at a high and unvarying price the year around to two of the greater hotels in New York, and in his herd he possesses some of the most famous Jersey cattle.

The stock farm itself has very wide repute, and yet it is only an incident of Mr. Hawley’s business career. On Sunday or Monday night he is on a sleeping car, at his place of business in New York city the following morning, and on Friday night is again on a sleeper on the way to his stock farm. In New York he is associated with those who expect to solve the problem of the development of electricity as a towing or propulsive force for boats upon canals, and it was he who recently conceived and demonstrated the feasibility of electricity for such purposes. Yet he is only 35 years of age.

Another member of the party was Nikola Tesla, one of the wizards of electricity but a little over 30 years of age, and a few years ago a student and employé in some of the Edison works. Tesla is the young scientist who astonished the world of electrical experts by demonstrating that it was possible to create an electric current which would pass through space without any other medium than ether, and in doing so would light an incandescent lamp held in his hand. The future possibilities which lie in this discovery it is impossible now to estimate, but incidentally out of them there is one which may be of immediate commercial advantage, for it seems to have solved a problem which has perplexed electricians for some years. That is the problem of the transmission of electric power for great distances without such loss as to make it commercially impracticable.

Tesla’s discovery and his mechanical appliances for the utilization of it may possibly give to the United States ultimately, or at least to that portion of it east of the great lakes and north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, the power which now flows over Niagara falls and goes to waste. It seems to be fairly well demonstrated that this power can be transmitted now at least 200 miles, and if it can be carried thus far it seems to be a mere question of the amount of water which shall be diverted from the falls for the creation of power how far it may be carried in the future.

Mr. Francis Lynde Stetson, who was the law partner of President Cleveland, and who is the organizing force of this great public enterprise, is a young man only a little past 40. Mr. George Westinghouse, Jr., one of the most romantic of American inventors in his experience, and who is interested more as a scientist than a capitalist, is also a young man, being only 46, and that young Niagara Falls lawyer, Mr. Rankin, who as a boy used to sit by the banks of the falls not so much absorbed in their majesty as in wondering why that enormous water power should go to waste and who was the first to conceive the idea of organizing great capital in order to secure it, is less than 35 years of age.

JAY E. HOLLAND.