Update!

It's been nearly 3 years since I last used the blog, but thought I should start using it again. Will share some interesting things design and architecture related and anything random and maybe post a bit of what I'm working on at the moment. Enjoy.

THE WAVE MOTORS OF CALIFORNIA

"Still embedded somewhere in the shores of California, buried by more than a century of sand, are lost hydroelectric machines.

Deep in the prehistory of green energy technologies now being researched by Alexis Madrigal for his forthcoming book, there is a whole series of devices intended to generate power from the sea.
Precursors of today's interest in tide power, these were "wave motors" and mechanized basins that turned the coast into a series of timed catchment reservoirs. The landscape itself became a machine.
One of the earliest patents filed for such technology was by Oakland resident Henry Newhouse in 1877. The purpose of his machine was "[t]o utilize the tide for a water-power," his patent text read, as quoted by the San Francisco-based Western Neighborhoods Project, "and preserve a continuous power by means of the arrangement of a reservoir to catch the water at high-tide, and a discharge-basin to let the water out at low tide and shut it out while the tide is rising."
Like something designed by Smout Allen, tunnels would be drilled through littoral rockfaces, even as natural bays were both expanded and reinforced. The coastline is soon a linked sequence of valves through which the tides can flow, generating electricity as they pass through a maze of elevated waterwheels and pumps.

A great example of this type of wave motor comes to us from "the Armstrong brothers"; it was built on the coast of Santa Cruz in 1898."

(via BLDG BLOG)