From Today I Found Out.

100 kilometres northeast of Sudbury in the Canadian province of Ontario lies the small town of Cobalt, population around 1,000. There isn’t much left today; like many former mining towns scattered across the province, Cobalt went boom and bust long ago, leaving it a shell of its former self. But in its heyday Cobalt was a powerhouse, source of a significant percentage of the world’s silver and the birthplace of hard rock mining in Canada. But the town had another, less well-known claim to fame, located sixteen kilometres southeast on the banks of the Montreal River. Until the 1980s, a spectacular white rooster tail of water shot up from the banks of the Montreal River, sending a curtain of mist drifting across the surrounding woodlands. This man-made geyser marked the site of an engineering marvel: the Ragged Chute Compressed Air Plant, which, despite having no moving parts, reliably supplied power to the surrounding mines for more than a century. This is the story of one of the most ingeniously elegant engineering projects in history, and the forgotten engineer who created it.

Author: Gilles Messier
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Caden Nielsen