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It was the American Dream in the Age of Edison, where the unknown backyard tinkerer felt no limits in making an invention that solved timely needs. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, mechanical devises ruled. Coal, oil and gas were the chief fuels, blackening the sky, the buildings, the water, and the lungs, to stoke the furnaces of industry. Yet clean power was as appreciated then as now, harnessing the more consistent features of nature: windmill power, for grinding grain or pumping water, industrial waterwheels, hydro-electric generators, tap water heated by desert sun or mountain chimney-flue.

The motion of the waves and tides seemed far more predictable, yet elusive. If the ocean could lift heavy ships, and guide a rudder along a current to follow a course, why couldn’t that power be harnessed? In 1877, Oakland resident Henry Newhouse filed one of the earliest wave motor patents, for “a reservoir to catch the water at high tide, and a discharge basin to let the water out at low tide, and shut it out while the tide is rising.”

In 1886, inventor E.T. Steen looked for a spot where the wild waves roared into the coast. He approached Adolph Sutro to lease a section of Sutro’s property north of the Cliff House to build a wave motor. Sutro was intrigued, having made his fortune in 1878 by building the 3-mile “Sutro Tunnel” in Nevada, an engineering achievement that could drain 4 million gallons of water daily from the Comstock Silver Mines. He rented the tunnel to mine owners for $10,000 a day. In 1883, Sutro bought the Cliff House and adjoining land comprising one of the most dangerous and spectacular waterfronts on the coast. Steen’s Wave Motor was designed to send water uphill to a water tank, then run down to a Pelton waterwheel turning a dynamo, producing electricity. It could also fill a reservoir with salt water, and piped to run industrial waterwheels and cable cars, fill swimming pools, sprinkle streets and flush sewer lines.

With Sutro’s encouragement, Steen built his wave motor across the mouth of a sea-cave north of San Francisco’s Cliff House. But even with explosives, the sea was too wild and the seabed too hard to excavate a pit in the sea-floor to allow the pendulum to work correctly.  Through experimentation, this was apparently replaced with a fan-like paddle. When they built the water tower, the pipes leading up to it were destroyed 14 times. After five of months construction, they declared a success in December 1886. Yet they hadn’t accounted for rough weather damaging the motor. Then on Jan. 16, 1887, a schooner was shipwrecked, and its cargo of 80,000 pounds of dynamite exploded, destroying the vessel, and wrecking the wave motor. Sutro encouraged Steen to rebuild, but Steen hadn’t paid any rent. On Sept. 3, 1887, Sutro opened his reservoir on a shelf of land south of the wave motor, and called it his salt water aquarium.

Seeing the possibility for a heated swimming pool, Sutro laid the foundations in 1891 to build the world’s largest indoor plunge baths. His million-gallon tanks could be refilled in an hour using the power of the tides, or in five hours at low tide. That year, Sutro replaced Steen with inventor Henry P. Holland. His new wave motor sat just offshore from the first, with the framework high on a crag, linked to the coast by a rickety swinging bridge. His design was vastly different from the previous, using a 3,000 pound iron buoy, with the tanked water intended to power multiple electric-generating water wheels. But the crag-top machinery was so vulnerable to strong winds and crashing surf, that they were unable to stay ahead of its constant damage, and it shut down. Sutro opened his baths in 1896.

In 1895, San Francisco inventor Emil Gerlach arrived from a fundraising failure in Santa Monica, to build his wave motor in Capitola. He lined up local backers attracted to his infectious enthusiasm, promising cheap electricity from the constant untapped energy of the tide, which might power an electric train between Santa Cruz and Capitola.

Gerlach leased the Capitola Wharf, and explained that previous wave motor machines had failed, having been built before electricity had been fully developed. “Cumulative batteries” had become necessary to store the electricity. His more than $23,000 wave motor included an apparatus weighing 30 tons, with the largest balance-wheel in the state. In 1896, Gerlach gave his motor a final test, pronouncing it a success, and “the nearest thing to perpetual motion the world will ever know… .”  Unfortunately, his discovery turned out to be perpetual stillness, as the Sentinel noted: “The Gerlach Wave Motor does not allow itself to be disturbed by the waves.” Gerlach said it failed because of its location.

Carefully watching this project were the Armstrongs, Will and his half-brother Ned, a chief of police. In 1897, local and San Francisco investors were relieved when the Capitola Wharf was leased by wave motor inventor Henry Schomberg from Los Gatos. At a local bakery, Schomberg displayed a working model of his design, to transform wave action into compressed air.

Schomberg felt that previous wave motors mistakenly harnessed the forward motion of the waves, while his focused on up-and-down motion, compressing the pistons with either shallow or deep strokes. He believed this build-up of compressed air could then be piped away like gas, working on the basis of a steam engine, only without the fuel and water. But this did not succeed; and Francis M. Graham’s wave motor experiments on Lighthouse Point in 1897 resulted in a patent, but nothing else.

The Armstrong brothers felt Gerlach’s project could have been done more simply, so they invented their own version of a wave motor. Yet the large sums lost and shady wave motor schemes of others were discouraging investments. The Armstrongs forged ahead, building several scaled down prototypes, testing each on a barge off Black Point and Twin Lakes. Success happened when a wave motor launched a water spout into the air. City councilmen came out to watch these experiments, becoming impressed. The city was in a drought, and the town’s dirt streets needed to be sprinkled, to reduce dust clouds kicked up by horse and wagon, with saltwater to kill the weeds. The council promised if the Armstrongs could build a working wave motor on shore, the City Council would provide $100 to build a 60-foot water tower.

At the west end of West Cliff Drive, R.H. Hall (father-in-law of Fred Swanton) provided a cliffside site on his dairy ranch not far from the Natural Bridges. This site was sometimes referred to as the Ventarron (Spanish for gales) because of the frequent strength of the winds and waves. Atop the 50-foot bluffs, the Armstrongs sunk two shafts in the cliff, one 8 feet in diameter and the other 5 feet, connected at the bottom to a tunnel for the in-rushing tides. A four-posted derrick over these wells suspended a float in one shaft, whose rise and fall drove a pump in the other shaft.

When the wave motor was completed, a demonstration for the City Council was attended by many other Santa Cruzans. They cheered when a geyser of sea water shot 60-feet in the sky. So the tower was built with a water tank on the top. Because the 6,000 gallon tank capacity could be filled in an hour, the motor had a barrel one could fill with water to plug the intake and turn off the wave motor, reducing wear and tear.

The Santa Cruz Wave Motor became famous, often praised in newspapers and magazines as the world’s only working wave motor. An article appeared in Scientific American (Jan. 4, 1902) detailing its mechanical workings, and in the Marine Journal of New York (Jan. 1, 1910), hoping this promised a future without over-reliance on coal, gas and oil. The tower became a tourist attraction, seen for quite a distance, and some enjoyed a climb to the top for spectacular views. It appeared on souvenir porcelain and silverware. Subsequent wave motors would compare themselves to Santa Cruz, although few others succeeded.

Fred Starr began promoting an electric-generating wave motor in San Francisco about September 1905, showing off a working prototype on the Mission Street pier, operated by a steam engine, but keeping the details secret. Santa Cruz was bewildered when the Patent Office seemed to declare the Starr Patent to be the first working wave motor. Starr was prepared to build it near the Cliff House, but the 1906 earthquake sent Starr to Los Angeles, where he built a wave motor and pier at Redondo Beach in 1907. After spending $65,000, the project failed in 1908, and Starr had a nervous break-down, dissolving his company.

Santa Cruz seemed to be the first successful wave motor, and the Armstrongs had plans to eventually add water wheels to generate electricity. But as city streets became paved, the need for salt water sprinkling disappeared, and the wave motor was torn down. For years after, its blow hole delighted passers-by as an Old Faithful. Yet not withstanding the viability of various wave motors, their inventors were pioneers of an early green technology.

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