In 1969, the U.S. turned off Niagara Falls | Hacker News Reader

In 1969, the U.S. turned off Niagara Falls

nationalgeographic.com

48 pointsBrajeshwar61 comments

An aunt by marriage grew up in Buffalo. Her parents would respond to unreasonable requests from their kids by saying, Sure, when Niagara Falls dries up. In 1969 the now grown kids called up to claim all those ponies, dogs, etc.

I know it is fundamentally much better that we’ve gained a little bit of prudence over time. But the crazy engineering schemes that America hatched in the 60’s (when we could finally build, essentially, anything we wanted and we hadn’t learned how dangerous that is) will always be fascinating.

Especially all of those "atoms for peace" projects that had nothing to do with nuclear power.

Widening the Panama Canal with nuclear bombs, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/20/archives/a-new-canaldug-b...

Can't forget Project Orion! Just nuke yourself into space!

I'm honestly bummed we never got to try that one.

Might still happen. https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-darpa-select-lockheed-martin-...

I came across this the other day: Operation Frigate Bird[1], a test of an SLBM, from a sub to a Pacific atoll, with a live nuclear warhead. In some ways it's understandable, in others the risks involved are staggering.

[1] Mediocre link, but it has some info; no wiki article found: https://www.bntva.com/operation-frigate-bird-6-may-1962-a-ve...

... and, a couple of days later, Scott Manley has a video on submarine-launched missiles, including some footage of Operation Frigate Bird!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLIdVigNtIo

There's a lot of issues we're dealing with from that era (maybe a bit before it too) that seemed so smart at the time but we truly didn't consider the true consequences. PFAS, processed foods, plastic for everything, etc are just examples of "we have the technology, let's use it now!" mentality. 50+ years later, we have seen the knock on negative effects and can at least consider some new thing and do some regression type testing.

I don't think that mentality has changed at all. If anything, it's become considerably worse. We'll be experiencing the effects of lots of short-sighted quick-profit decisions being made today for decades. The quantity of discarded electronics because of a "non-replaceable" dead battery comes to mind.

The difference today is that we have 50+ years of experiencing those secondary effects. We know what kinds of things previous items have caused and can take that as a hint at what something similar could do. In theory, we should be able to catch net negative before it is catastrophic. The manufactures can also know ahead of time that something might cost more in the long run. Of course, we'd have to have regulations that had teeth, otherwise, of course corps are going to take the now money

An aside but… does this strike anyone else as a manipulated photo? Look at the faces and the railing.

https://i.natgeofe.com/n/80ed3002-9183-4d1c-9b6b-6f27eea2dd2...

It's definitely been manipulated, I was originally thinking AI upscale, but look at the top right of the turbine, details have been painted on. Some OG photoshop going on

It's 100% AI "enhancement." Zoom in and look at their bizarro alien pig faces. I've got easily 10k hours in photoshop and have used generative AI tools enough to spot their signature screwups.

I love the photos in National Geographic because they represent the real world, even if they're color and contrast corrected. Considering how photography-focused National Geographic has been in the past, I'm actually pretty disappointed to see such a sad, hamfisted attempt at photo restoration from them. Ugh.

If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't.

It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time.

It probably worked because nobody made giant prints of the photo until now when it was scanned at high resolution.

> If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't.

a) That's absolutely not always the case with current tooling, especially professional NN-driven tooling from Adobe and the like.

b) This isn't an ai-generated image-- these tools just create detail where there isn't detail. What it has to add to reconstruct a railing, flat surface, or repeating pattern is a lot more straightforward than trying to reconcstruct a blurry face.

> It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time.

c) Those faces aren't scratched out anything. The shapes are far too organic and unnatural looking. Those forms and misinterpretations of what's there are absolutely AI-generated. I'd bank my retirement on it. I've done this work professionally, and I've been doing photo manipulation for 30 years.

The pigfaces are in the getty "original", but it doesn't display any metadata about when it was digitized annoyingly.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/turbine-of-a...

The image was used in a 2017 article at https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/011617/ic... and with the same artifacts so digitization must have been before then.

There are obvious scratch/pen marks on the right side of the “pig face”, so I think the simplest explanation is that the nose happened the same way.

I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching job.

As to how it happened, considering the image has obvious brush or pen strokes in many places, my bet is that’s all it is. The photo was overexposed and details were blown out in the highlights. Someone tried to add it back, resulting in these strange distorted faces. It did look like upscaling artifacts to me at first, but then you wouldn’t have crisp legible text in the same photo. Still, photo manipulation is photo manipulation, and the reasonable doubt in this discussion is a good example of why it should have been pointed out from the beginning.

Though I'm curious about the horrible industrial accident that Pigman was involved in, I think a lot of it is just bad lighting. That sun glaring through the window is going to make a tough time of it for any camera, let alone 70 years ago. It wasn't unusual to go back and "enhance" photos with a brush (hence the phrase "air brushing"), so I'm going to guess that someone tried to fix a bad lighting choice post-production.

It could be down to terrible lighting conditions, very slow film back in the day (low iso), and the men moving. It’s possible something happened in the darkroom, but that’s less likely.

You can actually see painted details in the image if you look close.

For what it's worth, a thumbnail from the the source, ullsteinbild.de (which Getty sourced from):

https://www.ullsteinbild.de/thumb.php/00291799.jpg?eJwljLsOw...

(I want to link to the page, but their website was so shit it does not offer that. The best I can do is the "search result" I was using: https://www.ullsteinbild.de/?82231788017539342720 .)

I'm from and worked at the falls as a teenager. This was one of my favorite stories to tell to tourists because it's just so interesting. The Falls are more important than one may expect to NY since we generate a lot of hydro-electric power. It really is a beautiful piece of nature that you take for granted when you spend your whole life around it.

Anecdotally, if you visit, Canada gets a nice view of the American Falls and their surrounding tourist attractions are nicer. The American side gets real sketchy if you go about seven blocks up from the park.

> The American side gets real sketchy if you go about seven blocks up from the park.

The same is true on the Canadian side, but Canadian sketchy is nothing like US sketchy.

On the American side, Goat Island is very nice. You can even walk into the river if you're sufficiently foolish, and from there you can just about throw a rock over the falls. The Canadian side is pretty heavily commercialized.

There are vast tracts of green space on the Canadian side all the way from Fort Erie to Niagara-On-The-Lake, so if you want to avoid the heavily commercialized areas just don't go into the parts of the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario that are right up against the Niagara River and below the Falls.

Both sides have seen significant industrial decline but the American side much worse, as I believe it was more industrialized to begin with. Moreover, there are not a lot of geographic alternatives on the Canadian side in comparison. Western New York has been decimated by de-industrialization whereas Niagara on the Canadian side is on the orbital fringe of the economic powerhouse of Toronto, essentially the NYC of Canada.

Also tell tourists about the Schoellkopf Power Station disaster on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls in 1956:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051567

>Since the late 19th century the Corps and Canadian engineers have continuously tweaked the two cataracts to balance opposing goals: harnessing power and maintaining natural beauty. Today, up to three quarters of the Niagara River runs beneath the falls on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border via massive tunnels to hydroelectric plants, rather than over the towering brinks

Didn't know that. Fascinating. Would like to see the falls before all the diversion.

That would mostly be summers during the daytime.[1] The diversions vary by season and time of day.

[1] https://www.niagarafallstourism.com/blog/do-they-shut-off-th...

Diverting more would maintain more of the natural beauty by preventing erosion.

At the current rate, in some millions of years, it’ll just be the world’s most dangerous river rapids.

> in some millions of years Sounds like a meaningless "problem" to me. Global warming is right here right now. Renewables should be put to use.

Corps had similar erosion control initiatives to shore up the Mississippi river going through Minneapolis, came up recently because it is in need of repair.

More on the subject from the cited environmental historian Daniel Macfarlane - https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/niagara-teleco...

https://archive.ph/qV6Ge

Getting infinite recaptcha loop (I'm not using Cloudflare DNS)

Works for me.

That's part of Cloudflare's insidiousness. It discriminates against people based on often unknown factors. It's even less transparent about what it blocks than China's Great Firewall.

Rather than complaining that the link doesn't work why don't you guys with weird set ups just provide one of your own instead?

Tired of seeing it in every comment section. It works for most people, consistently.

I'm tired of seeing "works for me" in every comment section.

Try another browser (firefox didnt work)

You're right, it's working for me in Chrome but not Firefox... that's really frustrating!

Better managed than Guaira Falls, which Brazil completely submerged in 1982 to build a hydro plant[0]. They would be the largest falls, by volume, in the world if they still existed. (The nearby Iguacu falls are still worth seeing, although definitely overtouristed [1].)

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gua%C3%ADra_Falls

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iguazu_Falls

I’ve always dreamed of doing/seeing an economic analysis of closing the falls entirely, and using nearly 100% of the flow for electricity. Would the value of the added production exceed the tourism losses?

Or at least shut down the boring US side and keep horseshoe falls running.

You’d be able to claim you’re preserving the falls against erosion for future generations once solar/wind/nuke/whatever generation ramps up.

(They already divert more water at night for more electricity)

Not every natural resource needs to be exploited 100% for profit.

Gotta change the light bulbs in the rainbow now and then.

“Here’s what happened next” is such a BS way to title an article.

To remove paywall, open DevTools, open the Console and run:

  document.querySelectorAll('.PaywallModal', '.Article__Content__Overlay--gated').forEach((element) => element.remove() );
  document.body.style['overflow'] = 'scroll';
  document.body.style['position'] = 'unset';

Congratulations you are now a JS programmer.

Fake news. It was in 1949, and it was Bugs Bunny! Here's the evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_9U1NH6Mj4

I grew up watching these cartoons (much later, in the 80s). I had read this article before, but I never thought of looking up which came first, the cartoon or the actual event - I had always assumed the cartoon was contemporary to, and inspired by, the actual event. Now it turns out the cartoon predates reality by 20 years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Rabbit

My Mother used to live in Buffalo. She would recount tales of the harsh winters up there. Using cross country skis out of her second floor window.

She mentioned that there were times when the Niagra river would freeze up and shut down the falls.

Buffalo's winter weather is subject to occasionally strong, harsh, cold winds coming directly off Lake Erie, sometimes bearing massive amounts of snow. The end result is that the conurbated area of Buffalo can be hit hard and take days of digging to clear, while only just a bit north, west, or south the snowfall might be much less. This is not a regular phenomena; when it happens it becomes part of the urban folklore. In the aftermath, residents reminisce about it for years and/or buy tee shirts with the slogan "I survived the great snowstorm of (insert year here)."

> while only just a bit north, west, or south the snowfall might be much less.

I don't want to go west of Buffalo during a snowstorm.

Yes, Fort Erie, ON (a bit west, as I say) can also get the same snowstorm trouble.

This content is paywalled. Web archives don't seem to bypass it. You have to delete the popup and move the content out of the scroll-locked body.

Reader view on macOS/Safari worked fine for me.

Reader view on firefox also works.

archive.today has a cached version.

Interesting that a copyright holder seems to have moderately successfully controlled the distribution of their material. Not that it will last, though.

But only because their material doesn't have enough value to be worth spreading through piracy systems.

I've added JS commands to remove the paywall to another comment, top level for visibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38462751

Reply on news.ycombinator.com