How Workers Blasted Niagara Falls’ First Power Tunnel 200 Feet Underground

In 1891, hundreds of Italian immigrant workers descended into a shaft beneath the streets of Niagara Falls and began boring a 6,700-foot tunnel through solid limestone — by hand, in compressed air, for a dollar and twenty-five cents a day — so that a power station above them could light the city of Buffalo forty-one miles away. The engineers who designed that power station are in the history books. The men who built the tunnel beneath it are in payroll ledgers that haven't been comprehensively indexed. This video tells the story of the Niagara Falls tailrace tunnel — the engineering problem that required boring through groundwater-saturated rock under an operating city, the compressed air that kept the water back and slowly damaged the men breathing it, the misfires that killed workers who went back to check them, and the legal doctrine that ensured no one was required to count the cost. The battle of the currents between Tesla and Edison is the story history kept. The tunnel is the story history forgot. Nikola Tesla's generators are in the Smithsonian. The tunnel the men cut is still under the city. Their names are not on any surface above it. If this kind of history matters to you — the men whose work is permanent and whose names are not — subscribe and hit the bell. Every video on this channel exists because someone built something and was left out of the story of building it. Leave a comment with the name of a structure you've crossed or driven over and never thought about who built it. #ForgottenLabor #NiagaraFalls #LaborHistory #IndustrialHistory #AmericanHistory #NikolaTesla #Westinghouse #TunnelConstruction #ImmigrantWorkers #GildedAge #CaissonDisease #TheBends #InfrastructureHistory #WorkingClassHistory #HistoryDocumentary