The City's High-Tech Gamble on the New Holly Pump
Seattle's municipal water works achieves a massive efficiency win with new equipment, proving the city's investment pays off.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The test of the new 5,000,000-gallon Holly pump, completed yesterday morning, was an unqualified success. The trial took four days and yielded results far beyond expectations. The central test was to determine if the Holly pump could raise water with half the coal needed by the older Worthington and Dow pumps combined. The Holly pump raised 3,672,127 gallons using 18,666 pounds of coal, while the combination of older pumps raised only 3,503,330 gallons using 54,908 pounds of coal. The board of public works, with the advice of the corporation counsel, officially accepted the pump.
“The Holly Company, therefore, have done far better than they agreed to, for the economy of coal was to be one-half, but it proved to be two-thirds.”
Infrastructure efficiency has always been a key to Seattle's growth, though today's utility projects focus more on sustainability than coal consumption. The Holly pump represented the cutting edge of industrial technology, much like the modernization efforts at our local utilities today.
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