Joe Malinowski and the Light Bulb by Anthony Airhart
The City of Aberdeen draws their water supply from a watershed and dam at the headworks of the Wishkah River. In the early days this facility was quite remote and, in fact, was far from the nearest power line. Not having electricity available was an extreme inconvenience for the workers there.
Aberdeen Water Department Master Mechanic Joe Malinowski had a plan in mind. He wanted to build a water wheel to power a generator and provide the needed electricity. Joe was blessed with exceptional mechanical aptitude but was not a formally educated man. His schooling had mostly been in one room schoolhouses on local farms. There was even a school on his parent’s farm on the Wishkah. One day Joe thought he had caught a lucky break. Engineers from the Army Corps of Engineers were at the headworks dam for a project. He seized the opportunity to bring up his idea for a generator for these educated men to assess. Joe later noted that this idea seemed to intrigue the engineers and soon they were doing a flow survey and calculations. Their conclusions were disappointing to Joe. They determined that there was simply not enough water flow to successfully operate a generator.
Joe Malinowski was not a man who was easily shut down. In fact, when he signed his name, it was accompanied by the letters SAAS. SAAS stood for “stubborn as a stump.” He knew that many farms had small water wheels to provide electricity. Often these wheels were on tiny creeks and turned generators from old automobiles but they did the job. If it worked well on a small scale, he didn’t see why it would not work on a larger scale, too.
Joe decided the engineers were wrong and set to work. He built a large steel water wheel himself. He used what is known as an “orange peel” design to fashion pipes into cups for the wheel and welded them himself. He mounted these on a wheel with an axle assembly and hauled it to the dam. Joe attached his wheel to a large gearbox and the gearbox to a generator.
Joe had a wonderful sense of humor and a laugh I can still hear to this day, almost 50 years after his death. He loved to tell the story of his water wheel and his assessment of the engineers involved. Accompanied by that laugh, he delightedly described how the engineers stood under the lights his generator now powered and stubbornly announced, “It won’t work.”
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