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Updated: May 27, 2025
When wave-power and other forms of the stored energy of the wind have been properly harnessed in the service of mankind, the region around Niagara will only be one of thousands of localities at which nitrogenous manures can be manufactured electrically at a price far below the present cost of natural deposits of nitrate of soda.
The wave-power machine, when allied to electric transmission, will, without doubt, supply in a cheap and convenient form a material proportion of the energy required during the twentieth century for industrial purposes. Easy and effective transmission is a sine quâ non in this case, just as it is in the utilisation of waterfalls situated far from the busy mart and factory.
Hardly any natural source of power presents so near an approach to constancy as the ocean billows. Shakespeare takes as his emblem of perpetual motion the dancing "waves o' th' sea". But the ocean coasts where alone natural wave-power is constant are exactly the localities at which, as a rule, it is the least practicable to build up a manufacturing trade.
The advantage of the wave-power, however, would be seen mainly during the calm and desultory weather which has virtually been the means of forcing sail-power to resign its supremacy to steam. For checking the rocker in time of heavy weather special appliances are necessary, which, of course, must be easily operated from the deck.
Taking the first of these difficulties into consideration it is obvious that by means of a counterbalancing weight, about equal to half that of the buoy, it is possible to cause the wave-power to operate two ratchets, one doing work when the pull is to landwards and the other when it is to seawards.
Some tentative schemes have been put forward for tapping a source of wave-power by providing a vessel with flippers, resting upon the surface of the water outside her hull, and actuating suitable internal machinery with the object of propulsion.
Then, again, the loose chain at low tide would permit the buoy to drift abroad within a very considerable area of sea surface, and in order to take advantage of the rise and fall on each wave it would be essential to provide at the derrick on the shore end of the wave-power plant very long toothed bands or equivalent devices on a similarly enlarged scale.
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