Today, a dam breaks. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The South Fork Creek dam and its reservoir, up in the western Pennsylvania hills, belong to a posh country club based in Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie is a member. From there it's 14 miles down the South Fork to Stony Creek.
Hills rise sharply on either side.
You wind under a 76-foot railroad viaduct, pass a half dozen towns, and finally arrive at Johnstown, population 30,000. In 1856, a promoter named William Kelly returned to his native Johnstown with claims to've invented a new steel-smelting process. In fact, he'd created only one part of the Bessemer process. Speculators invested in Kelly. But, when they established the Cambria Steel Company, they used Bessemer's equipment and Andrew Carnegie's money.