Ames: Where Alternating Current Was Born
Near Telluride, Colorado
A few miles south of Telluride, in a narrow gulch on a fork of the San Miguel River, a mining man named Lucien Lucius Nunn built something that changed the world. The Gold King mine was going broke buying wood and coal to run its ore crusher. Nunn gambled on a new and largely untested idea.
Alternating current. In eighteen ninety one, the Ames plant sent electricity across roughly two and a half miles of wire to power the mine's stamp mill. It was one of the very first times in history that alternating current was generated and transmitted commercially over a distance to do real industrial work.
The machines were built by Westinghouse, and the motor design came from patents licensed from Nikola Tesla. Water dropping nearly three hundred twenty feet spun a Pelton wheel, which turned a generator putting out three thousand volts. Engineers had warned it might not work at all.
It worked so well that Nunn's little operation grew into the Telluride Power Company, an early electric utility. The current that lights your world tonight traces part of its lineage to this remote Colorado canyon.
