Yesterday’s photo was of a power control box, at a power generation “station,” in Ft. Myers, Florida. The photo above is the huge 2-cylinder, oil-driven engine in that power station, from 1904. You might be surprised to know that this power station was for a religious compound, known as the Koreshans, who inhabited the area around that time.
I found it amazing the amount of technology and the amount of gender equality that existed in this religion; but alas, it died out for lack of procreation! Surprisingly, one of the tenets was that they basically not procreate! Seems like a short-sighted strategy to me!
The one really far-fetched tenet of their religion, however, was that of the “Hollow Earth Theory.” It’s the idea that the earth has a hollow interior, and we actually live on the inside of our planet’s shell, and there really isn’t a cosmos or universe. All sorts of hocus-pocus took place to convince people that it was real, including a huge experiment on the beaches of Ft. Myers in the early 20 th century. Shockingly, The Hollow Earth Initiative (THEI) exists in force today (google it if you don’t believe me!), and there was even a United States Patent number 1096102 issued in 1914 !!!! Crazy stuff, I tell you.
Anyway – as regards the photo, this 2-cylinder engine was air-started by huge high-pressure air tanks, then run on a diesel cycle to turn a huge flywheel, which in turn ran to a 3-phase AC generator (contrary to Edison’s preference of the time of DC distribution), and the power was controlled by the application of a varying DC current to excite the field windings in the 3-phase motor, run by a DC generator fed off of the same belt. So imagine you’re in 1904, and there are generally only oil lamps in the streets, if there are any at all, the genius Edison says go with DC distribution around town, and here’s this religious camp running it’s own AC power, years ahead of when the rest of the country bought into AC distribution due to lower losses over long transmission lines (see professor for details). My dad and I got a private tour before other people showed up for the running of the engine.
