When discussing the dilemma of discipline, I mentioned that a rowboat, built for VP, was used late at night in the dorm water tank.  Unless you were at Rethy at that time you would have no idea why discipline might be discussed at all.  Let me fill you in.

When I grew up at Rethy Academy, Victor’s Pond existed.  It was the water supply for a perfume factory.  The forest of eucalyptus trees from which the leaves were harvested was on the hill on one side of the road and the factory was down near the stream that had been dammed up to supply the necessary water to produce the perfume.  The rusted remains of a huge boiler and some big iron pipes were all that I found when I was there, many years later, exploring to see what was left.

The fragrant leaves from the young eucalyptus trees had been placed in a huge covered tank with superheated steam from the boiler passing through the tank.  The exiting steam was routed to a condenser to become a mixture of water and the eucalyptus oils vaporized from the leaves.  I couldn’t find anywhere the special piping used to route the steam and oil vapors to and through the condenser, which had been filled with water from the pond.  The liquid leaving the condenser must have been collected in another container, possibly made of glass, where the water and precious perfume oil separated.  Since oil was lighter than the water it would slowly rise to the top.  That was gone too.

The dam had washed out, the pond was gone, and the quiet stream wound its way through the marshy valley.  VP did not exist.  It was only a valley filled with weeds.

Down-stream, however, there was an open area and the stream was again visible where it passed over the granite bed-rock, plunging abruptly down into the valley.  The rushing water formed a beautiful water-fall as it tumbled onward, splashing between the huge rocks, to disappear again beneath some giant ferns on its way towards Lake Albert.

The area was beautiful, with a cypress tree woods lining what had been the shores of the old pond.  The ground beneath the trees was carpeted with needles, a perfect place for camping or for a picnic.  The eucalyptus trees were now full grown, their leaves more than thirty meters above the ground, impossible to ever harvest again.  The perfume factory could never be re-built, but the stream could be dammed up again.  We referred to the place as VP.

Victor had been the name of the old chief, before Congo had been granted independence, and now his son Daudi, was the chief.  There may have been flood rains that caused the dam at the perfume factory to fail or it may have been destroyed at the time of independence.  The local people probably had their own ideas as to how to use the stainless tubing left behind by the fleeing settlers.  No one was motivated to monitor the level of the pond to let out extra water during a heavy rain, so, the pond went downstream.

The young chief somehow got the idea to make the dam again. He cleared all the brush from the area that would be flooded and made a channel to divert the upstream water away from where the dam would be rebuilt.  One side of the channel was the edge of the pond, the other was a low dike following the bank to the old spillway walls.  New boards to block the flow would be added when the dam was completed.  He made a simple tunnel of planks for water seeping into the basin so it could flow under the dam during construction.  Daudi Victor was a pretty good engineer.

I have no idea how the perfume factory pumped water from the pond into their boilers and condensers, possibly their pumps were powered by a diesel motor of some kind.  I could find no evidence of their having used the power from the falling water a short distance down-stream.  I was the science teacher at Rethy, and a field trip to measure the hydroelectric potential of the falls would be a perfect opportunity to teach and have a great time too!

The ninth grade science class was studying potential and kinetic energy.  Why not measure the energy available at those falls and use some conversion factors to see if the falls could supply enough electricity for Rethy?

Electricity was first available at Rethy only from the gas or diesel generating plants purchased and installed by the missionaries.  We used wood, kerosene, or propane gas for cooking and we had kerosene refrigerators.  Candles, lanterns and pressure lamps did not provide much light, so the dorm bought a diesel generator to provide good lights for the Academy.  The printing press and the hospital had their own generators as well. 

After the rebellion, when getting the different departments at Rethy functioning again, it was decided to work together to produce electricity and to repair the water system so the Rethy Utilities Company, RUC, was formed.  A 23,000 watt HR4 Lister Diesel generator was installed and supplied steady power for four hours in the morning and three more hours in the evening.  Could we get that much electricity from the waterfalls?

My boys knew about horse-power proving which car was the best, but the idea that they actually defined power by timing how fast a horse could do work was just stuff in books at school.  That work, meant lifting something heavy and loading it on a truck was easy to understand.  If you were really strong you could load the truck faster. 

So, if a horse lifts 250 pounds of hay up 15 feet to get the load to the loft and does it in seven seconds that must be one horse power, right?  Well, those old farmers wanted to get scientific, so for Isaac’s horse, 250 pounds of hay times 15 feet gives 3,750 foot-pounds in seven seconds which would be 535.72 foot-pounds in one second.  Of course after many experiments with different horses they got all the hay in the barn.  Maybe Isaac’s friend, James Watt, had a stronger horse.  In the end they decided 550 ft-lb/sec would be the standard unit of power. 

Interestingly, many years later it was found that electricity could also do work and those guys called the electric power Watts.  So, electric power was named after the guy who came up with the horsepower idea when he was selling steam engines to farmers.  It took 745.7 watts to do one horsepower of work.  I guess we were all set to see if a waterfall could do as well as a Lister diesel generator to supply electricity at Rethy.

The basic idea was to determine the amount of energy available at the falls, apply some efficiency factors when converting to electricity, add losses for about 8 miles of mid voltage transmission lines, then see how many kilowatts could be distributed at Rethy.  

To get the horsepower we needed to know the pounds of water falling every second over the falls.  The height of the falls needed to be measured and that is where survey instruments could have been used, but we had none.  How would we weigh the water flowing in the stream?  We had wrist watches with second hands.  That should help.

We did schedule a field trip to measure the potential of the falls at VP using very primitive equipment.

We measured the flow in the bypass channel that had been cleaned out to carry the stream during the re-construction of the dam.  Water in a stream flows at different rates, at different depths.  It depends on the width, the contour of the land and the angle of descent.  There are formulas for flow rates through pipes made of different materials and of different diameters at different angles.  Our results were sure to be inaccurate.

We selected a relatively straight section of the channel which was a little like long rectangular box.  Measuring the estimated width in several places we recorded the average.  The depth varied quite a bit so we made measurements at a number of places across the stream to get the average depth.  The length was easy.  We calculated the approximate volume in cubic feet.  Each cubic foot of water weighs about 62.4 pounds.

We floated a variety of things down the section of the channel we had chosen and recorded the number of seconds for each trial.  Eventually we wrote down the average time.

The height of the falls would not be very accurate either as we only had a carpenter’s level and a bamboo pole about 20 feet long.  With one student sighting along the top of a the level, a second one watching the bubble trying to hold the level, level, and a third one to carry the vertical pole down-hill we had a system.  When the line of sight was on top of the pole the pole location was marked to become the new sighting location and the process was repeated a number of times down the hill to a possible turbine location.

There was never a power plant installed at VP but it became a popular place to visit with our dorm kids.  We even built a pier and a boat-house from cypress poles and boards.

The pond was big enough to use for boating and we made some boats at Rethy, including what Bob Ward called the Mother Duck.  That was the paddle-wheel boat he made in the dorm shop using old plumbing pieces, bicycle chains, and sprockets to drive the paddles.  A canvas covered canoe framework, found in an old Boy Scout book, worked great using instead vinyl seat cover plastic found in Bunia.  We painted the one-man plywood row-boat we made, blue and white.  That is the one that ended up in the dorm water tank.

That tank was built by Ray Stauffacher and was the beginning of running water at Rethy.  For years our water had been hauled, four barrels at a time, by oxcart up from a spring in the valley.  The water was now to be pumped up into a large holding tank on dorm hill.  The three-foot deep rock base, was built using cement as mortar and was about 25 feet in diameter.  The eight-foot cylindrical wall, constructed of brick reinforced with two strands of barbed wire in every layer, completed the shell of the tank.  The interior was plastered with a rich mixture of sand and cement.  The top was open to the air.

Is it any surprise that making boats to float in the tank was an irresistible temptation?  I recall a small corkwood clipper ship I made while a student at Rethy.  It had masts and sails and needed to be tested in a large body of water to see how well it handled the wind.  If one was tall enough to jump up on the edge of the foundation, and reach the top, he could climb up to sit on the narrow wall and preform his experiment.  Of course the tank needed to be full.

My experiment was successful in that all my questions were answered.  Of course the ship floated, it was made of corkwood.  The wind caught the sails.  The clipper ship capsized.  The sails got wet.  The tiny flag I envisioned flapping in the breeze sank below the water.  The little lead anchor that was to hold my beautiful clipper ship, safely out in the middle of the vast ocean, away from the rocks, couldn’t keep my little ship from drifting into the pond scum that had collected on the far side of the dorm water tank.

A successful experiment, only sometimes, yields the desired results.  The boy learned about reality in water tank.  The teacher, that took measurements at VP, concluded with his students, that the potential hydroelectric energy there was insufficient.  He used more accurate surveying equipment when initiating the Koda Hydroelectric project.  Those falls, which Marr Miller discovered when hiking down to Lake Albert, supplied more than 200 times the power of the HR4 Lister diesel to Rethy and the surrounding area, including Kwandruma.

The boy who was part of the group that launched the blue and white VP rowboat into the dorm water tank is now an engineer.  I am quite sure he helped measure the potential power available at the falls on that field trip.  Life at Rethy was rich with opportunities to live and learn without the distractions of all the entertainment continuously offered to kids these days on their phones.  Creativity is a gift from God.  He made us in His image!