In 1891, local businessman Henry Sinclair and Dr. Cyrus G. Baldwin, the first president of Pomona College, co-founded the San Antonio Light and Power Company. Their goal was to provide electric street lighting to the city of Pomona. The technical challenge they faced was that direct current power could not be practically transmitted long distances. Fortuitously, Baldwin hired A.W. Decker, a creative young engineer familiar with the cutting edge of advances being made with alternating current. Decker installed the first single-phase alternating current hydroelectric generator in San Antonio Canyon above Claremont. In late 1892, power was transmitted 14 miles to Pomona and, one month later, 29 miles to San Bernardino. The age of long-distance transmission had begun, thereby opening access to remote hydroelectric resources.
Most history texts consider the Niagara Falls to Buffalo, New York transmission line as the first long-distance electric line in the nation built in 1896, but the reality is that Decker did it four years earlier in San Antonio Canyon. A bronze plaque marks the spot-on Mt. Baldy Road.
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