THE POWER OF PERSONAL RESOURCEFULNESS by Wayne Phillips The year was 1928 and the place was a small farm at the upper end of Coonhollow, a watershed near Sublimity, Oregon, named for its raccoon population. Leonard T. Phillips, the tenth child of the eleven children of Riley Polk and Abigail Rice Phillips, then 35 years of age, still resided with his parents. An Albino with an immense crop of bright white hair, he could see little through great thick spectacles. His eyes lacked the heavy pigmentation that surrounds the normal pupil and light diffused in uncontrollably. His poor vision led to poor progress in school. The school he attended was a one-room, one-teacher affair of perhaps fifteen students altogether. Some of them were his own brothers and sisters. He was big and strong but painfully shy in childhood. He succeeded in passing "The Fifth Reader" in his formal schooling but four of his sisters became school teachers and another became a city librarian. They understood that behind the visual and emotional handicaps there resided an intellectual giant. To read, his nose rubbed the paper and his head shook as his eyes danced rapidly forth and back over a narrow interval that inched slowly along line by line. When the reading became particularly difficult, his glasses were shoved up to hang as though discarded in his bramblebush of hair and the paper was brought still closer to his eyes. Despite Leonard's handicaps and with his sisters' help he learned to play the pedal organ, the violin, the country fiddle, the banjo, guitar and harmonica with such power and perfection that he was always in demand to play. He provided instrumental and vocal music for any party, picnic, dance, or rally within miles of his parents' farm. This tremendous demand for his musical services forced him out of his childhood shyness to some extent but he remained a gentle recluse all of his life. His memory was astounding. He could read an epic poem once and recite great portions of it from memory long after. Once, when challenged, he is reported to have recited all of "Snowbound" flawlessly. I can still recall with overwhelming nostalgia his whiskey baritone sweetly reciting "Lady of the Lake" to violin music of his own making. In the 'teens of 1900, Leonard Phillips added popular science to his reading. In 1922 or 1923 he built one of the first (quite possibly the very first) radios in Oregon. That radio's appetite for electricity could be satisfied only briefly by "Hot Shot" batteries. These batteries were of the dry-cell type. They were expensive and the radio played (for a gathering) at any time a transmitter was "on the air." Visitors coming from afar to hear the radio brought news of neighbors who had purchased electric plants. That news was electrifying! An electric plant would make possible another, much more powerful radio. Installed in 1925 or 1926, all that I now recall of the electric plant, a Delco, was a small shed full of glass-shelled batteries. These batteries were charged by a generator driven by a small one-cylinder engine. When running, the engine continued to run until one battery equipped with a hydrometer was fully charged. The rising hydrometer at that point tripped a switch to open the generator charging circuit and shut the engine down. As the battery bank discharged into the continuing load, the same hydrometer fell to a lower limit closing a switch that recoupled the batteries to the engine's generator. The generator, now acting as a motor, used some of the remaining stored power of the batteries to crank, and thus restart, the engine. There were flaws in the system. If the engine stopped because it was out of fuel, the hydrometer would ultimately tell it to restart. Without fuel it couldn't start and the fruitless cranking rapidly depleted the remaining energy of the battery bank. Then, in the dark (always in the dark because that's when the engine ran most of the time), in a rainstorm, or fresh snowfall it was necessary to visit the shed with a coal oil lantern, refill the tank and hand crank the stubborn engine back to life. This flaw, and others leading to frequent shutdowns, led Leonard Phillips to build an overshot waterwheel of the old-mill type on the North Fork of Mill Creek just upstream from Coonhollow Falls. That waterwheel drove a Dodge automobile generator revised by him to produce 32 Volts DC for replacement of the engine, really as a supplement to the engine charging the battery bank. By 1928, the date of the beginning of this anecdote, the precursors of today's electric appliances were reaching rural American in 32-volt DC versions for use with Delco plants. Curling irons, waffle irons, electric irons for the laundry, electric washing machines, electric outdoor lights, sewing machines, electrically driven grain mills, and other devices such as the electrically driven cream separator and chick hatcher, soon passed from the status of luxury or curiosity items to the status of necessities. The combined efforts of the old-mill style waterwheel and the engine could not satisfy the load. Improvement was needed! The North Fork of Mill Creek, originating a mile or two upstream from Riley Polk Phillip's place, drops gently about 30 feet in elevation as it crosses that farm and then drops abruptly an additional 30 feet at Coonhollow Falls just before it leaves the farm. A modest stream of 50 or 60 gallons per minute in mid-August, it is a raging torrent of 100 second- feet in March as the snows melt and spring rains fall. Uncle Len had by this time, and with the help of his sisters, acquired quite a library on the emerging technology of electricity. He owned a complete set of that early authority, The Hawkins Electrical Handbook Series. Tacky tomes all, they promised the greatest of revelations, new comfort and other advances all through the good offices of electricity. He also now knew about waterwheels other than the old-mill type and correctly concluded that he could utilize a Pelton wheel beneath the falls. With characteristic directness, he felled two tall fir trees of 20-inch diameter at a point some distance above the falls and dragged them by horse team downstream and over the falls so that their butts lodged twenty feet from the face of the falls while their tops rested on the crest of the falls. With a hand axe he clambered up and down these logs or trunks chopping away limbs and peeling off the bark. With the two trunks lying about 4 feet apart, he nailed short 2 x 4 timbers across both, creating a gaint ladder with 2 x 4 rungs at one-foot intervals. Searching for pipe to lead the water down the ladder to the waterwheel he learned that the city of Oregon City was replacing all of its wooden water mains with new cast iron mains. He acquired, free, several lengths of these old wooden mains, redwood stave tubes spirally bound by steel wire, of about one-foot diameter and used them to lead the water from a small dam above the falls (a dam just deep enough to cover the entrance to the pipe--a feature that provided nearly steady flow and fixed head since the excess simply ran over the top of the dam) downstream to the crest of the falls thence down the gaint ladder to a nozzle of about 2-inch diameter delivering water to the wheel. This much of the project completed by a person blind by today's legal standards. This is enough to inspire the title of this tale but there is much still to relate. Unable to buy a Pelton (impulse) turbine, Leonard built his own. To build it, he started with a worn-out 4-cylinder engine from an early automobile or tractor. This engine had a huge flywheel 2 feet in diameter with a face width of 4 inches and a rim thickness of at least 1 inch. He removed the pistons and head from the engine, placed the engine upside down upon the ground and poured a fair sized pad of concrete around it; the head bolt studs and nuts served to anchor the engine block to the concrete. He then cut 4-inch long segments of U channel from an old automobile frame and bolted these to the flywheel. Note that he did not have one of today's marvelous electric hand drills. All of these holes through the rim of the flywheel he drilled laboriously with a hand brace and bit. The engine's oil pan he left in place to protect the crank and bearings of the engine. He filled the cylinders and crank space with enough oil so that the crank splashed into this oil, the splashed oil serving to keep filled small pockets he'd provided above each bearing and which by virtue of small drilled passages continuously fed oil to each bearing. On the end of the crankshaft opposite from the flywheel, he mounted a large flat-belt pulley which drove a smaller pulley on the intermediate shaft. A large two-groove V-belt pulley on the opposite end of the intermediate shaft then drove the small double V-groove pulley on the generator. This arrangement served to step up the speed of the generator above that of the turbine wheel. Total hydraulic head on the turbine nozzle was perhaps 35 feet with a resultant nozzle water velocity of approximately 47 fps. This nozzle velocity required a bucket velocity on the turbine of 24 fps for maximum power extraction. To provide a 24 fps bucket velocity on a wheel of 2-foot diameter required 230 rpm. The belts and pulleys increased this speed to nearly 2000 rpm from the generator, an increase of approximately 9 to 1 or 3 to 1 in each of the pulley sets. The generator, its particulars now long lost, had an output of perhaps 2 or 3 kW. and was contrived by him with typical ingenuity. He revised or rewound a 110-volt industrial DC motor to function as a generator producing 32 volts DC. The Dodge automobile generator from the old overshot wheel plant upstream returned to service. Driven by another set of pulleys from the intermediate shaft, it now furnished exciter current for the big new generator. We might wonder why he'd not purchased an appropriate generator to begin with but his parents farm was never productive of much but progeny and the great depression of 1929 had now struck. The 110-volt DC motor he'd started with had gone to the junkyard with many others as the early DC electrical utility systems gave way to 60-cycle AC systems. He needed 32 volts DC to avoid replacement of all of his electrical appliances and lights previously driven by the Delco plant. The resulting system served the farm from 1930 to 1947. In 1947 the REA completed the last leg of a power line whose construction had started before World War II but had not yet reached the upper end of Coonhollow when the war's demand for copper stopped its progress. Other than the human energy of its builder, the system had cost nothing; a capital outlay of perhaps $100. It ran with but few outages for 17 years. The system had its shortcomings, of course. On one occasion it was stopped by the body of a large water rodent lodged in the turbine nozzle. In 1935 it was shut down for two or three weeks by ice formed in an unusually tough winter. Controls were rudimentary. A steel wire, running from a lever and notched sector mounted on a porch post at the house, passed over pulleys on his power line poles to a head gate at the dam for start up and shut down. A Big rheostat at the power house permitted manual adjustment of exciter current and system voltage. A trembly voltmeter and ammeter on the back porch at the house displayed the system performance. Generator regulation was so poor that when a significant part of the load was removed, the voltage would rise to such an extent that all remaining lamps burned out. To prevent the unwise from causing such a catastrophe, he simply removed or disabled enough light switches so that a stabilizing base load remained "on" at all times. This led to the making of new acquaintances as strangers of good intent stopped to inform him that his Delco plant was still "on" in broad daylight! During most summers the creek flow would dwindle to the point that the penstock could no longer be kept full. When this happened, the "head" on the turbine could no longer maintain the required generator speed and a month or more of shutdown was imposed. Fortunately, these shutdowns coincided with the summer's long days when less evening illumination was required. He found too that he could postpone the summer shutdowns by inserting a smaller nozzle inside the regular nozzle at the turbine. The result of this nozzle reduction was to keep the penstock full at a lower flow rate. A full penstock provided the head necessary for normal water velocity at the turbine. The turbine and generator could thus run at the required speed but the load it could serve was reduced to one or two lamps and the radio. The first good rain of the fall was cause for celebration as the lights went on again all over the farm. If we were to reckon the benefits of the plant at today's energy prices, we might conclude that it had earned (.05$/kW./Hr.) (2kW output) (10 months operation per year) (720 Hrs./Mo.) (17 years) =$12,240. This is not a great deal of money by today's standards but it was a fine return on the original $100. It also earned for him a small place in the history of Coonhollow and monumental stature in the eyes of one of his nephews.