When I think of character I think of Max Hebgen, the Montanan who died of pneumonia contracted on the job when he was 45 years old. By then he had designed our early integrated, carbon-free, hydro-electric system and put it into service. He even reached into this own pocket to keep an electricity company going through hard times, because he knew its importance to our young state. He was the first General Manager of a capitalist organization, the Montana Power Company. Thirteen days after he died, the Montana Socialist Party’s newspaper published this salute to Hebgen’s character:
“In the death of Max Hebgen, not only the city of Butte, but the entire state of Montana has lost a good and socially useful citizen. Born and reared in a working class environment and for many years following his trade as a lineman he steadfastly held himself to the purpose of fitting himself for greater responsibilities and wider scope in the exercise of his abilities. He spent most of his leisure hours in the study of electricity, and electrical engineering, and in the course of a few years found himself fitted for the duties of superintendent of the electric lighting and power plant, which was one of the Clark properties in Butte. Nor did he then relax his diligence. On the contrary, with even greater concentration he pursued his studies and increased his knowledge and skill by practical experimentation. He made himself one of the best informed and most reliable authorities in this country, in his chosen field of labor and became the president of the Montana Light and Power Company, which is the largest and most powerful of the electrical industries. Under his guiding genius the operations of this institution were greatly extended and numerous electrical plants in Montana bear testimony to his wise foresight and constructive skill.
Success in his profession never spoiled Max Hebgen. He was, in the best sense of the phrase, a big man. Of vital temperament, he was essentially constructive in his activities. He lived in his work, and his ruling ambition was to create and to make his creations as perfect and enduring as possible. Not exploitation for private gain, but genuine service was his passion, though he would not so have phrased it; perhaps was scarcely conscious of it. Loyalty was another trait in his character, and it manifested itself in his home and all other associations. He was appreciative of good and faithful work on the part of those who worked under his direction, and many are the employees of his company to whom he has opened the way to further advancement. His elevation to a position of power and distinction never destroyed his understanding of and sympathy with the working class. In his dealings with wage-earners he was scrupulously fair and his personal attitude toward the public which his company served was ever generous. He seemed desirous of giving as reasonable rates as was consistent with excellent service, good remuneration for labor and regard for the earnings of capital invested in the enterprises. Not always was he able to execute what he personally favored. The other influences surrounding him in his official capacity frequently overruled; but the will was there.
Yes, Max Hebgen was a truly great man and his life one of social usefulness. He was not what is called a ‘good mixer,’ but the sterling qualities of his nature, his indubitable ability, his indefatigable endeavor toward excellence, his essentially proletarian nature and sympathies greatly endeared him to this who knew best, and the people of Butte, especially the working class, have greater reason for respecting his memory than they, perhaps, have ever known or suspected.”
When Magoo and I drove from Helena to give our presentation in Butte, we followed the Great Falls to Butte Rainbow A and B lines, 126 miles of paralleled, ancient looking towers of angle iron still bearing electricity southwards along today’s Interstate 15., The Rainbow A & B lines were completed in 1910 by crews working for Hebgen, a telegraph lineman turned electricity operations genius. He figured out how to harness the length of the Upper Missouri River extending from a storage lake in the Madison River’s headwaters to the dams of the Missouris waterfalls, once so great that the American Indians riding out of view called them The Sound.” Hebgen’s integrate hydro-electric system supplied power for purifying smelted ore at Black Eagle, smelting ore at East Helena and Anaconda, and mining the unforgiving hard rock beneath the Butte Hill. The lines hanging on those quaint-looking metal transmission towers, like the first ones west of the Mississippi that connected Madison River’s Bear Trap Canyon dams into Butte were always loaded at full capacity. They transmitted millions of kilowatt-hours from a sub-station near the Rainbow Dam in Great Falls to energize four electric motors in the Butte Hoist Compressor Plant near the Missouri Sub-station on The Hill, and motors for giant compressors at The Leonard, The Bell and the Never Sweat mines. Each of these huge electric motors in Butte ran two enormous air compressors for squeezing air to 90 pounds per square inch. When a motor was down for maintenance, backed-out compressed air would bring it up to 75 revolutions per minute before workers turned on its electricity from Great Falls. Like coasting a pickup truck down a driveway to start its motor by catching its gears, using the air motor for starting kept the Rainbow A & B lines from being over-loaded with electric power being drawn in surges for starting requirements. Giant storage tanks or receivers outside the Butte Hoist Compressor Plant were connected to a series of 16 horizontal receivers or air storage tanks a quarter of a mile down The Hill. Miles of eighteen-inch steel lines carried the air across The Hill from these receivers to hoisting engines and to ten-inch air lines going down every shaft. Four-inch air lines carried the air to working places. Large steel air receiver tanks grouped vertically next to each hoisting engine room held sufficient air to cover a stationary twin 2500 horsepower air-powered hoisting engine’s peak energy requirements for moving the many man cages required at shift changes. Heat from the single steam boiler remaining to heat each mine’s locker room, or dry, warmed the compressed air in towers designed to give stationary engineers better control with air that was more responsive. During winter, warmer air in the 18-inch lines criss-crossing The Hill melted their covers of snow, sometimes creating short-cut trails for the miners going on or coming off shift. Butte kids would hang around those miners’ trails hoping to panhandle leftover sandwiches from homeward-bound lunch buckets. A short distance up The Hill above the compressor pant there was an open steel water tank ten feet deep and a hundred feet across. This simple mechanism maintained the hydro-static pressure on all compressed air in The Hill. A column of water dropping from under the tank down The Hill hooked from below into the bottoms of that series of 16 horizontal receivers, as air was being fed from the compressors into the top of the same series of receivers. Thus water pressure maintained air pressure across The Hill, in spite of occasional simultaneous peaking by many hoisting engines. The air pressure could be monitored by watching the rise or fall of water in the hydrostatic tank. Nothing more than stored air energized the hoisting engines of Butte’s eleven largest mines and their rock drills.
This marvel happened because Hebgen had the good judgement to approve the system as proposed by Bruno Nordberg, a compressed air expert from Wisconsin, including increasing the stroke length of the drivers on the steam-powered hoisting engines from 48 inches to 60 inches. This allowed a change of primary energy from coal for steam to water for electricity, which was less expensive and incidentally allowed workers and their families to breath cleaner air in Butte.
When National Defense Authorities ordered all production officials at the various Anaconda Company mines to increase zinc and copper production as rapidly as possible, there began a crash program of facilities enlargement aimed at producing more copper by Spring 1941. Due to submarine interdictions, the U.S. Office of Production Management was more worried in the near term about not having enough manganese or zinc. So, as The Company transferred 400 miners from copper to zinc and manganese production in Butte, in Anaconda The Company started building a manganese concentrator and nodulizer. The output of Butte’s zinc mins rose immediately from 5,000,000 pounds per month to 7,700,000 pounds.
These early pre-WWII preparations included stabilizing the 150 megawatts of electricity supply that would prove essential to The Company’s critically important wartime effort. Stabilizing supplies required helping to form the first eletricity pool in the nation, which in turn required completing a new 161,000 volt transmission line form Grace, Idaho to The Company’s smilers at Anaconda. The new line augmented an existing 161,000 volt line to the smelter from Kerr Dam on the Flathead River. The new power pool gave The Company access to the generation resources of several private companies in other states and electric power generated by the federal government’s Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River. Everything was renewable, because everything was hydro-electric. This Northwest Power Pool with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, started rescheduling electricity flows in emergencies and during planned maintenance outages.
Throughout WWII these 100 percent renewable electric power flows could be optimized for required uses throughout the combined territories.
