Imagining the Future at Niagara Falls

Between 1890 and 1910, Niagara Falls became the focus of a great deal of thinking about the future. Many engineers and entrepreneurs predicted that Niagara's waterpower would make it the greatest manufacturing center in the world. Utopian plans were drafted for a future metropolis that would exemplify moral as well as material progress. During the same period several novelists pictured Niagara as the focal point of a disastrous future of wars and dangerous inventions. This paper examines the roots of these visions of the future in earlier perceptions of the falls and assesses their relation to the actual industrial development of Niagara.