—This is not Love Canal, Fobel then said and smacked the top of his lectern: there is no equivalent between that situation and ours, I heard him say—

—At Love Canal, the Hooker Chemical Corporation was found guilty of monstrous violations of the law, I heard him say—

– The Lost Scrapbook p. 388

Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, was the site of a toxic dump in the 1940s, although to be fair the Hooker Chemical Company had permission to dump waste into the canal and when the Niagara Falls School District wanted the land in 1953 to build a school, Hooker sold them the land for $1, because, you know, it was poisonous.

The city continued to build on the land, and in the 1970s, birth defects and a whole host of other health problems in the community started to appear. This mirrors what happens in The Lost Scrapbook in the fictional Missouri town of Isaura.

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In the battle of the currents between Edison and Tesla, one of the crowning achievements for Tesla was the construction of the Niagara Falls power plant.

In 1893, Westinghouse Electric was hired to design a system that could generate alternating current power from the falls. Tesla was put to work on the project, utilizing a new three-phase system of alternating current (along with 13 other patents by Tesla) that allowed transfer of electricity over longer distances.

The Adams Power Plant Transformer House still stands as part of the project. On Goat Island, there is a monument to Tesla that was given to the U.S. by Yugoslavia. The statue, depicting Tesla seated while reading a book, was created in 1976 by Croatian sculptor Frane Krsinic.

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This building is the only remaining structure of the first large-scale, alternating current electric generating plant in the world- the Edward Dean Adams Power Plant.

Put into operation on August 25, 1895, the hydroelectric plant was a collaboration of several organization over the course of three years. Notably, Westinghouse Electric was subcontracted to build the AC generators based on the work of Nikola Tesla and Benjamin G. Lamme.

The construction of the power plant was an enormous undertaking. In one tunnel alone, 16 million bricks were used to line the walls and cost the lives of 28 workers.

Today, the Adams Power Plant is on the National Historic Register, but is fenced off and in a state of disrepair. There is talk of converting it into a science museum.

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