Canada at War: THE MARITIMES: The Tides and the Dream

At the head of New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy, the tides average 35 ft. Twice a day a wall of roaring white water, called the “bore,” rushes up the winding Petitcodiac River, then ebbs lazily back to sea.

For 25 years a New Brunswick inventor named Rupert Turnbull has dreamed of building dams using Fundy’s tides to generate an estimated 400,000 h.p.* If the tides can be effectively harnessed, if Inventor Turnbull’s particular plan is good, the Maritimes would get cheaper electricity, postwar employment.

To put his plan over, Turnbull has wrangled persistently with skeptical experts, out of his own well filled pockets has paid for surveys. Last week, before the Canadian Senate’s Harbors Committee, he wrangled some more. This time he got tentative action. The Committee’s decision: “immediate” investigation.

The Dreamer. At 73, Rupert Turnbull is stoop-shouldered, spry, twinkle-eyed, enthusiastic. A native of St. John, N.B., he graduated from Cornell in 1893, studied at Germany’s Heidelberg, got his first job as a General Electric Co. engineer at Newark. In 1899 he inherited a fortune from his banker father, soon returned to New Brunswick to experiment in the new science of aerodynamics.

While the Wright brothers were still making their fledgling, flights, Inventor Turnbull was building Canada’s first wind tunnel. Later he concentrated on aircraft propellers. To test homemade ones, he constructed a 300-ft. railway, mounted props on flatcars, learned which kinds had the greatest pull. His neighbors thought him mad. The upshot: patents on an electric controllable-pitch propeller, for which he draws royalties from such war-busy plants as Curtiss-Wright and Britain’s Bristol Aeroplane Co.

His interest in Petitcodiac is largely philanthropic. He heads the Petitcodiac Tidal Power Co., which holds development rights. But he told the Senate Committee that his firm wants no money for the rights. Rupert Turnbull only wants to see, before he dies, a longtime dream come true.

* There have been other plans for harnessing Fundy’s tides. Notable among them: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s short-lived Passamaquoddy Project.