RECOLLECTIONS OF POWER AND IRRIGATION

My paternal grandfather must have been a crackerjack engineer.
Back when not too many homes in the Midwest country had electrical
power, he installed a 32 V. DC Diesel generator in a garden-house
and had the big house wired (the old 'knob & tube' style up in the
attic). The wall outlets were like lamp sockets and for years the
lamp cords had screw-plugs. Adapters were used for the more recent
two-prong plugs. The 32 V system ran for years, perhaps 1928 or so,
as I can distinctly remember the generator going "poom-poom-poom"
down in the garden house. Eventually my father arranged for an AC
power line from town, initially 440 V and not too reliable, but
it permitted installation of a GE Monitortop Fridge and the icebox
went to the back porch for backup. Once I found a box of the old
32 V light bulbs in the barn and had some fun putting them into
lamps, to go off like flashbulbs. They would be worth something
now.

Grandfather also decided to fight the typical Kansas dry summers
by installing irrigation plumbing throughout the six or seven
acres of grounds and gardens, for which he put in a hydraulic-ram
pump down at the river dam and a big elevated storage/pressure tank
next to the servant's cottage. The hose faucets scattered about
the grounds were decorative Victorian cast-iron things, about
three feet tall, and I wish that I had a couple now. This system
ran until AC power became available. I can remember that it went
"clack-----clack-----clack" on about a 5-second cycle, and I couldn't
get a satisfactory answer from my father as to how it worked without
power. I don't expect that the pump flow rate was very great, as it's
pumping head to the tank was easily 50 ft. Pumping 24-hours may
have given 2 hours of garden watering. Later father put in an AC
motor driven pump at the springhouse. He had a lot of trouble
keeping that running as I recall. The old storage tank came down
in the 40's when the supports went bad.