[Footnote: "Assuming the maximum power used to be one
hundred horse-power, the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the
'load factor,' or average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent
of the total one hundred, the cost per month in the cities named is as
[above]."--Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.]
Boston $937.50
Philadelphia 839.25
New York 699.37
Chicago 629.43
Cleveland 559.50
Pittsburgh 419.62
Buffalo 184.91
Niagara Falls 144.17
These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing
supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the
estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply
of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation
by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050.
Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other
site in America, by the strip of shore on which La Salle's men, from the
banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December
night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three
miles above the falls--and so opening to the view of the world a natural
source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or
rich mines of gold or silver.
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