Now I'm not too much into electricity or anything but I got a question. Have you ever seen those like water mills in a river ( Real life or T.V. ) that have a huge wheel the water turns to make electricity? Well if you have you might know they used to work pretty good for smaller towns but anyway a turning wheel will create energy so if you put a bunch of the wheels halfway down Niagra Falls theyd be turning very very fast with the falling water therfore making alot of energy which makes electricity. Maybe if someone put a bunch of wheels there, we could create an everlasting, clean energy source.
Well atleast i think itd work.

If you got any comments post em : )
-rdrpr0-

That seems like a simplistic view of a very complex item. It will never be done, forget it. I don't even want to start on why.

http://www.infoniagara.com/d-att-hydro.html
For everyone else not up with the times there is a hydroelectric plant at the falls

Hey red reaper0,you should have posted in the "Re-inventing the wheel" forum

haha but it has been done

insert foot in mouth now haha just kidding

Ever heard of a dam? You have no clue on hydro electricity do you? Learn something easier, like solar cells, lol. and the bigest watter mills output at most few hundered watts and 50 or amps lol a city? lol (runs for president) lol.

Sorry. Nikola Tesla got there first, shortly after inventing the means for AC generation and distribution, then beating Edison in a war for the public heart for his AC current over Edisons DC, and then finally building a wheel to in Niagra falls, which he used to drive power station turbines, thus fulfilling his childhood dream, somewhere betwewen the late 1800's and early 1900's. The power station is still there, and has since been greatly expanded.

um.... it was the first plant in the US!

edison got his electricity there.

Eventually

First though, and before any AC power stations existed, Edison was generating electricity as DC current, and was solving the problem of DC transmission being inefficient by simply building a power station every one or two miles away from each other.

When Tesla invented the first ever means to generate and distribute AC (which we still use today), Edison went on a negative publicity campaign for obvious reasons. At one point Edison was even electrocuting animals on the street with AC current to show how dangerous it was (at which point some clever soul invented the electric chair!). All this while Tesla was amazing his friends and aquaintances by passing such voltages through his body so as to be lit up in a bright electrical aurora. And things.

Tesla eventually won the conract for the electric lighting of some big important festival, beating Edison (who in a fit of sour grapes refused to sell Tesla any of his patented light bulbs), whereupon people in power saw that edison was entirely wrong about AC, and Tesla went on to build the first ever AC plant (and hydroelectric at that!) at Niagra falls.

to be fair to red reaper, what he/she suggested has never been done. reaper suggested putting "wheels halfway down the falls" not halfway down the river.

reaper there are several reasons why doing what you suggested is not practical.
1. you would destroy the beauty of the falls themselves
2. the obvious engineering challenges that would be required to divert the falls in order to build "under" it.
3. the "wheels" would be under the water flow, but the generators could not be so you would need massive shafts to go from the wheels to the generators.
4. the incredible force of the falling water at niagra would likely be too much for the bearings on the shafts to handle

those are not the only reasons why it wouldn't happen, but are surely enough to understand why it never will.

and crossfire, reaper started off by saying "Now I'm not too much into electricity or anything but I got a question", that suggests that knowledge of that subject is lacking, but willing to learn more. i am very surprised that somebody with your techspot ranking has not read the forum rules which state:

Personally, I'm very suprised that ANY member feels that it's perfectly OK to lambast another member "out of the blue".

Let's nip this in the bud, and resume normal service with no further comments along such lines.