Tower construction along the Columbia River in 1939 was precarious business. Below, four men work on the a line from Bonneville Dam to The Dalles, Oregon. Pictures on pages 4 to 6 are from a book about the history of the Bonneville Power Administration entitled, "Power and the Pacific Northwest 1937-1976". The book contains a brief history of power systems nationwide, but focuses on the Northwest. Crown Jewels highly recommends this publication as a resource for power aficionados. Out of print, of course, you will have to search for it from suppliers of used books.

Above: Men work high above ground to dead end a conductor on a BPA line from Vancouver, WA to Eugene, OR. Notice that even at this late stage of construction the insulators are still in their wooden packing crates. The year was 1939.

Above: In this picture from 1970, three men use "hot sticks" to work on an energized conductor. Hard hats are now required. However, the practice of suspending a wooden ladder from a tower cross beam is still in use.

Pyrex carnival glass suspension insulators were widely used on BPA lines. However, I was unable to identify any in use in any of the dozens of pictures in this 180 page soft cover book. It was written by Vera Springer and published by the Dept. of Interior for the US bicentennial celebration.

The Bonneville Power Administration book features a lot more than just line construction. Quite a bit is written on the history and construction of dams in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. This picture, from the late 1960's, is described as a Mercury arc valve at the Celilo Converter Station on the northern end of a d-c intertie. 4,200 towers carried three-point-four-million kilowatts of direct current power 845 miles from The Dalles, OR to the Sylmar Substation in California when the intertie system was completed in 1970. (See (below) the back cover of this issue for a view of transmission towers on this line.)