Ahem, as you can see from the links below, I’ve begun the detail work on my chapter on early wave motors. I’m building a wave power patent database based on a collection at Berkeley’s Water Resources Center Archive, which I’ll be posting shortly. For, let it suffice to say that 102 patents (!) were granted for wave power apparatuses of some kind between 1890 and 1900. The Pacific Coast was the locus of the craze. You can page through the patents in that link, if you like. Many of them incomprehensible or at least terribly inconvenient. Perhaps it no surprise Rube Goldberg came of age in San Francisco in the 1890s.
The image at the right comes from a promotional brochure printed by Terrence Duffy, a local inventor who lived at 948 Geary St, next door to what is now the Edinburgh Castle Pub. He describes a sort of buoy that he imagines could be parked out in the bay to compress air, which would then be piped into the city. Not afraid of a Big Thought, Duffy imagined another application for his wave motor: The Great Ocean Superhighway.
“Employed as a relief-station at a distance from land, and anchored in water broken at intervals into an angry surf, or in the vicinity of perilous reefs or headlands; or stretched in a line of stations, at convenient distances in practicable anchorage, over a great ocean highway — as, for example, between New York and Liverpool — these great buoy-stations, provided with persistent and unfailing power for light, and signals, and every purpose, and with provisions and supplies, and equipped to relieve and succor vessels in distress, would render incalculable service to commerce and to the traveling public,” he wrote in the pamphlet, which the Internet Archive scanned from Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
It’s unclear whether Duffy even built a prototype, as Popular Science Monthly pointed out. “We see nothing in the text, however, from which we are enabled to affirm that the author has set up one of his buoys and put it to an experimental test,” the editors impugned.
A couple wave motors appear to have worked, most prominently the Armstrong brothers pump in Santa Cruz. The rest of them have left little mark in history, but I’m doggedly combing every resource in the area. If you or someone you know might know where to find some lost wave motor information, please get in touch!
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Sunset drives by the Armstrong wave motor
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“We see nothing in the text, however, from which we are enabled to affirm that the author has set up one of his buoys and put it to an experimental test.”
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Cliff House mention
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Big article: “Probably no other single subject, save that of navigation of air, have so much thought and energy been expended as upon the conservation and utilization of the power exerted upon our sea-coasts by the force of waves. And certainly since the days of alchemists and astrologers few themes of thought pursued for practical ends have resulted in so little reward to their students.”
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Notice of Wave Motor Company default in Golden Gate Park
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Compressed air magazine? Awesome.
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A small mention of a tourist trip to see Armstrong wave motor in Santa Cruz
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William Armstrong again mentioned.
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Huge presentation by Albert W. Stahl to ASME. 1892. Perfect!
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Mentions William Armstrong down at Santa Cruz. “Inventor of a Practical Wave Motor”
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Starr wave motor — big fat article about it.
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“San Francisco is home of the wave motor” — This is great stuff.
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James C. Williams. Berkeley has it.
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James C. Williams… Mentions Gerlach wave motor!
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Wow. I assume this was pegged to that monkey that went to heaven, or at least space.
Discussion
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