These 11 men each had at least part of a wave power patent assigned to him right around 1890. The amount of information available on any of them is just vanishingly small. Terrence Duffy and Emil Gerlach were also working on wave motors around the Bay Area. So, we’ve got 13 people working on the same technology in the same city — and not a shred of any evidence to tie them together. Tough.

• Hazardous Business: Industry, Regulation, and the Texas Railroad Commission – Texas State Library
  (tags: archive oil)
• San Francisco Memories
  Links from an upcoming SF History site. Great resources.
  (tags: history sanfrancisco)
• California Digital Newspaper Collection
  “Free online access to the Golden State’s historical newspapers”
  (tags: archive California history newspapers)
• The World’s advance: monthly – Google Books
  An unnamed inventor’s new wave motor from 1915
  (tags: wavepower Venice)
• Sandy Lydon – Secret History Wave Motor
  Another Santa Cruz Wave Motor history.
  (tags: armstrong wavepower)
• John Haskey – The Santa Cruz Wave Motor
  SciAm on the Santa Cruz Wave Motor
  (tags: wavepower armstrong)
• William Allen biography from notable San Diego County Report
  (tags: wavepower Allen)
• The Encyclopedia Americana: Wave Power entry
  Bummer entry. “The history of all other devices that have been tried is more or less similar, and educated engineers have come to regard the wave motors as akin to the perpetual motion delusion.”
  (tags: wavepower)
• Finding Aid to the Panama Pacific International Exposition Records, 1893-1929, bulk 1911-1916
  Carton 146, Folder 54
  American Wave Motor Power Co. 1915-1916
  (tags: wavepower)
• Guide to the Rice Family Papers
  Down at UC-Irvine, there are photos of Merrill Rice’s 1897 trial of his wave motor.
  (tags: wavepower)
• The Utilization of Wave Power
  Unnamed inventor working near Cliff House to bring 50,000 or 60,000 horsepower to S.F. instead of steam. – San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser, January 8, 1887
  (tags: wavepower)
• O.C. History Roundup: D.F. Spangler’s wave motor
  Nice write-up by Chris Jepsen of the Spangler wave motor, apparently tested “at the end of the wharf in Newport Beach.”
  (tags: wavepower spangler)

Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, people started trying to invent machines that could transform the force of the waves into useful mechanical power for driving machines. Given the success harnessing river power and the relative lack of horsepower availability outside the big industrial cities until the turn of the century, inventors had a big prize and a big resource, too. The waves — and the oceans more generally — do contain a ton of energy, but making all that sturm und drang turn a shaft or rotate some magnets in a dynamo is tough.

Around 1890, six teams of inventors in San Francisco alone were trying to come up with a way to do it. They all failed, more or less. So, while 102 patents were filed for wave motors and the like during the 1890s, very little came out of all that intellectual investment. Wave motors began to seem like a chump’s game, suitable for quacks and weirdos, not serious scientists. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Americana declared, “educated engineers have come to regard the wave motors as akin to the perpetual motion delusion.”

As a general commentary on the machines proposed back then, this strikes me as not unfair. But, the intent of this database is to let you judge for yourself. Presented below is a list of hundreds of wave power patents from 1865 into the 1930s. Up until the turn of the century, I think it’s damn near comprehensive, but the further you get away from the 1890s, the spottier the documentation is. Some of the patents have a description copied from the applications themselves. If you want to help me fill those in, get in touch. I’d appreciate it.

In any case, go visit the Wave Power Patent Database’s real home, a permanent page here on greentechhistory.com

Harnessing nature is a little like harnessing God.

Or so the following article on the Reynolds Wave Machine would have us believe.

Written back in 1907, it has one of the most stupendously purple intros you’re every likely to see for a science and engineering story; it’s actually a bit like Wired circa 1994. I’ve transcribed it all below for your inspection. If written by, say, David Foster Wallace, it would be titled, “A Brief History of Western Technology.”

It reads like a green tech update to the Tower of Babel myth.  It’s quite brilliant, actually. (And note the similarity between the description of the broken wave machine and the system Pelamis, the leader in wave energy, created.

Booming and thundering and pounding the sands of the sea shore, the mighty waves of the ocean have puzzled and fascinated the mind of man since he first gazed wonderingly at their dark waters. To the uncouth savage, the dire might embodied in their all potent onrush seemed to speak of a powerful god whom it was necessary to propitiate; and he worshiped the strange power.

Later   on   civilization   denuded   the ogre   of   his   supernatural   surroundings, but the inanimate power that lurked in his bosom, ever ready to leap forth and devour the suspecting, filled the mind of the mariner with mingled dread and awe.

The theologian saw in the ceaseless, crashing, roaring, restless power of the wave the omnipotent might of the Deity itself, and its never-sleeping billows that crunched the swirling sands in their teeth breathed of his great strength.

WHAT THE INVENTOR SAW

The inventor, sitting at the seaside, watched with a vague sense of dissatisfaction the rolling rise and fall of the booming waters. The resistless advance of the waves as they ebbed and flowed seemed to speak to him of mighty powers as yet unharnessed, and of strength sufficient to move a world. In the dark shadows of the billows he gazed and long sought to wrest from their umbered waves the secret of harnessing that power. The gently rolling waters told him of a power which, bridled, would perform for the world all the labor at which man was toiling away the brief years of his existence. Small wonder that the inventor passed his days by the side of the incomprehensible sea, struggling with the mystery that seemed to baffle solution.

The rolling motion of the waves seemed to show him what direction his search must be prosecuted, and many years ago the first wave motor was devised. The instrument was floated on the surface of the water, and each successive undulation of the water added its quota to the power generated. But the first storm sufficed to show that this system was unsatisfactory. The floating machine was crunched to pieces by the force it was trying to harness, and a mass of shapeless wreckage floated to shore to warn the Inventor that the problem was not yet solved.

(When did newspapers stop using words like “propitiate” in their business stories?)

The entire several thousand word story can be found in situ here [pdf]. The quick summary is: welcome to 1907,  wave power is about to revolutionze the way that light, heat, and power are made. Two crazy brother inventors have discovered the key to tapping the motion of the ocean. It’s simple, “perfect in detail,” the “motor will not break,” and it “may revolutionize labor.”

“A superficial inspection of the new motor is scarcely sufficient to fully impress one with the tremendous significance of the new discovery,” writes the Herald. “The enormous value of such a motor is almost beyond the grasp of the mortal mind… With the power of the waves from Los Angeles to San Francisco harnessed, the inventors would have more power than the world could use; and electricity would become such a glut upon the market they could not give it away.”

An engineer from Huntington Beach, N.O. Harmon gives the machine his imprimatur, saying, “It would appear to me therefore that this motor will solve the wave power problem.” (You know, *the* wave power problem.)

And at the end of the article, we’re told (quite usefully) that the California Wave Motor company was being formed by “a large number” of area businessmen to commercialize the technology. Anyone know what happened to that company and the Los Angeles Wave Power and Electric Company, which sprung up around the same time, using a different technology? What was it that made these engineers and inventors and businesspeople think they were on the verge of a revolution?

Why’d it take until December 2007 for wave power to return to California as a commercial venture?