19361776 Club
Boulder Dam's generators spin up, and electricity starts moving to Los Angeles
The power lines run nearly 300 miles from the Nevada desert to a city that has been waiting for them.
For five years, the dam in Black Canyon had been a construction site: thousands of men pouring concrete through desert heat that averaged nearly 120 degrees in the summer of 1931. On October 9, 1936, that changed. Boulder Dam's turbines began turning, and the first hydroelectric power generated there flowed out over transmission lines toward Los Angeles. The city that had helped finance the dam now had a new source of electricity, delivered from a structure the federal government had owned for only a few months…
