October 9 · This Day in America
Two hundred and sixty-six miles of transmission line march out of Black Canyon, over mountains and bone-dry desert, toward a city that has outgrown its own electricity. Tonight the current arrives. In the Los Angeles Civic Center, a switch is thrown and a sixty-foot electric arc cracks to life over the crowd, fed by the tamed Colorado River. City Hall floods white under a billion candlepower. Floodlights bloom across the skyline and a chorus sings the national anthem into the desert air. A river that had drowned towns and starved farms is now a wall of concrete turning turbines, and its work is light. The dam was begun under one president and finished under another, in the teeth of the Depression, by men who lived in a tent city in 120-degree heat. They built the thing that would build the modern West.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1888
For four decades it had been a stump, then a scaffolded dream, then the tallest structure on Earth. Today the doors open to ordinary citizens. Thirty-some people pack into a steam elevator for a ten-minute climb up the marble shaft — the alternative being 897 stairs. At the top, narrow windows, and the whole young capital laid out below. A monument to the man who refused a crown, finally finished, and given to everyone.
Source: www.nps.gov