Here's the first of Buzz's topos on technology. First subject: electricity.
History fans will have recognized Benjamin Franklin's kite-and-key experiment and the grudge between the hero of the internet, Nikola Tesla, incarnation of the solitary, strange and underappreciated mad scientist who did all the work for capitalists Thomas Edison and JP Morgan. I could tell a story about it, but here's their Epic Rap Battle instead...
History fans will have recognized Benjamin Franklin's kite-and-key experiment and the grudge between the hero of the internet, Nikola Tesla, incarnation of the solitary, strange and underappreciated mad scientist who did all the work for capitalists Thomas Edison and JP Morgan. I could tell a story about it, but here's their Epic Rap Battle instead...
The last panel, though, is about one of those megaprojects that teach you the very meaning of "Giant" in Canada...that is, until the Chinese built bigger (darn chinese!). The James bay project took a generation to build, between the 1970s and early 2000s and was the pride of Hydro-Quebec when I was a child (late 1980s) There was a reason why! The Robert Bourassa generating station is one of the biggest on the planet and all built underground in the granit of northern Quebec (a thousand miles north of Montreal).
Because of its size, the people who worked there called it "the cathedral"...and that's just the station underground! The reservoir can easily be spotted from space and that "Staircase of Giants" the cat is sitting on is the spillway of the reservoir. It gets rid of excess water and can take a spill bigger than all major rivers of Europe (Seine, Loire, Rhine, Thames, Danube, Dniepr...tell-me-if-I-forgot-one) COMBINED...and that's just the excess...in case...
And that's just the biggest station. All other stations of the James Bay project produce enough power to fuel a country like Belgium...and that's not even half of the total production of Hydro-Quebec, who has other giants, notably the Daniel-Johnson dam, smaller, less secluded but more impressive than the Bourassa dam with its arches and Churchill Falls, in Labrador.
And that's just the biggest station. All other stations of the James Bay project produce enough power to fuel a country like Belgium...and that's not even half of the total production of Hydro-Quebec, who has other giants, notably the Daniel-Johnson dam, smaller, less secluded but more impressive than the Bourassa dam with its arches and Churchill Falls, in Labrador.
...and that is just Quebec. I didn't even get into what British Columbia and Ontario produce in hydroelectricity. Overall, 59% of Canada's electricity comes from hydro.
We're not just talking gigawatts with those dams, we're also talking cultural importance. For the biggest part of the 20th century, electricity was produced by private, foreign companies. In the 1960s, premier Jean Lesage, along with his future successor, René Lévesque, nationalized the province's electric grid so the people of Quebec, through their government, is in charge. In short, they were "master of their own home", or "Maitres chez-nous", like Lesage said. With those words, Jean Lesage (the brown dog holding the map) incarned the Quiet Revolution, carried out by his successors René Lévesque (the cat with the cigarette) and Robert Bourassa (the "Father of the James Bay project", shown here with his trademark nerdy glasses).
...."maîtres chez, nous", and yet, if it's so easy to understand that we want to be master of our own destiny, why is it so hard to understand that the First Nations want the exact same thing? The Bay James project may be one of this country's most amazing feats of engineering, but it also took land away from the Crees who lived on the shores of those rivers.
...."maîtres chez, nous", and yet, if it's so easy to understand that we want to be master of our own destiny, why is it so hard to understand that the First Nations want the exact same thing? The Bay James project may be one of this country's most amazing feats of engineering, but it also took land away from the Crees who lived on the shores of those rivers.
