The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

Less known, but no less remarkable, was the adoption of hydropowered electric lighting in the gold mines of the Sierra Nevada. The first electric grid built to light a mine also became operational in 1879. Using water-driven dynamos designed by Charles Brush, the mine owners were able to light three 3,000-candlepower arc lamps. These allowed the miners to work through the night, effectively doubling the time they could spend searching for bright mountain gold. Electric lighting was so intimately linked to profit, in this case, that it quickly became an essential tool for mining companies. Slowly these companies also began to electrify pumps and hoists, building longer and longer lines to carry electric current from where the water fell to extraction sites. As electricity grew into an increasingly necessary form of industrial power, the grid’s lines also grew and stretched to accommodate the circumstances into which it was built and within which it would need to function.