Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1907-08-25
Saw Vast Power Wasted


Saw Vast Power Wasted
ELECTRICITY" said he. lis the powerfo of
the future. and before many years its
source must be the restless sea"
Edison dreamed, and at that time both
visions appeared about equally illhslve.
He saw the great coal beds of the world
approaching exhaustion. He saw that the
power to be developed from tunning
water, great and practical as it IS. would
be utterly inadequate to meet the demand
for power for all purposes. But (along the
ocean shores of the world hei beheld a
waste of energy absolutely incalculable.
The worlds physicists are too univer-
sally on record to admit of dispute on
that point. Some of them those with
taste for big figures. have made meaning
less computations of the energy developed
in the rise and fall of the ground swell
along short stretches of coast.
When you get into the trillions you
might just as well be calling them mill
lions of horsepower. The power is there.
1T has been mere matter of mechanical
device to harness it to useful apparatus.
Always an Inventor
Fred starr was from boyhood always
invehting things. He rugged up con-
trivances for labor-saving about the
house and farm. At the age of IL he
bored out a cylinder from a chunk of
steel with an old file stuck into broom
handle.
Then he added slide valves and pistons
and wheels and worked away until he
had as pretty little steam engine as
boys heart could desire. He still has
the engine and 1t works as perfectly
today as it did up on the farm. 1t was
used to generate the electricity in his
first shop model built on the lines of
the plant now under construction at
Redondo. y
When Starr. then finisher in the Pull
man car works, heard Edisons dictum
he decided to be the man to bring the
wave motor part of it true. But had
he done so that year his work would
have been of little use. Edison had to
bring the other part true first But
given the electrical appliances that these
thirty years have seen come into being
it Is high time for the cheap power to
make those appliances available to all
the people and for all purposes. That
is part of the parallelism of invention.
There must be orderly progress. Com
plete plans for a modern auto would
have been of little avail twenty years
ago. We lacked the knowledge and APP
planes to put the plans into steel and
iron. Before long. says science, cleo |
tricity can be transmitted as far as one
pleases and with little loss on the way
A little higher voltage, a little better /
insulation to hold the current on the |
wires and you can broil st. Louis |
beefsteak with Far Rockaway 'tricity, |
or light the streets of Topeka from |
power installations off Monterey.
Works Through Poverty
Starts first experiments. he says, were
carried on in Chicago. Years of work |
merely sufficed to lay bare the COM
plexities of the problem. But the quiet |
are beginning to gossip was only up |
and at 1t all the harder. He would go
to sleep worrying at the great idea. and |
along in the wee small hours would |
waken to find a new solution tantalzing |
him. Up he would get and put the
outlines on paper before he could get
any more sleep that night. He has
shaved for that same idea year in and |
year out, day and night. in season and
out of season. Somewhere in all his
plans there lurked basic errors, elusive
problems whose very conception required
extensive research and battling expert
The quiet little mans friends
begged him to give up bondage that
was bringing him nothing but poverty
and trouble and rdicule. He merely put
on more steam. Each device was more
than the one preceding. An
infinity of detail attached to the device.
making it almost impossible to build |
models to test the principles used.
Today all those details are present in
the simple machinery of the ultimate
type, but they are unseen, save to the
man who worked through complexity to
simplicity
Ceases to Oppose Nature
There came a time when Starr deter
mined to find and analyze the causes of
defeat in all the wave motors invented
and patented After wading through
of patent office specifications
he began to see light ahead. 1--WE have
all been opposing our puny devices to
nature in one of her most imperious
moods" he said. 1.-THE secret of in
venton is in taking nature by the hand
and going with her"
Beginning with his new principle the
inventor abandoned all attempts to con-
fine rigidly the vast power with which
he dealt and all effort to utilize the sud-
len thrust of the breaking wave. He
saw that the commercially useful energy
IF the ocean is exerted in lifting weight,
He saw that a craft of any description
lying on the surface of the sea was in
constant motion upward and downward; !
its weight or buIk the waves
lift it with ease. Now weight in motion
means power. and Starr determined to
proceed to yoke that power to mechan-
ism that would yield in electrical cur
rent the equivalent of the energy ex-
erted by the ocean swell in raising !
given weight.
Uses All Energy
More specifically, the problem was to
transmute a vertical motion erratc and
variable, and, withal. irresistible, into
the circular motion of a driving shaft.
There were thousand minor desiderata
to be considered this was the great
basic end he held in view. We have
already seen how Starr met this prob
lem.
The roller clutch, worked by cables
upward and downward from
moved by connecting rods
from heavy barge in the water, takes
the power and takes it all. Be it (