Excerpt from Rural Lines, USA: The Story of Cooperative Rural Electrification The chief problem, however, remained one of getting electricity at a cost that would permit farmers and other rural people to put it to work. Some electric companies were willing to extend service to rural con sumers, but the price usually was prohibitive. As a rule, farmers had to pay from to per mile for construction of the lines to their homesteads. Then, on top of these heavy construction costs, rural people usually had to pay more for the electricity they used than did their neighbors in the city. One man deeply concerned about the high cost of rural electric service was Morris L. Cooke, an electrical engineer. He set out once and for all to solve the puzzle of the true cost of distributing electricity in rural areas. As an adviser to the Power Authority of the State of New York, he and a small staff of engineers started from scratch, adding up labor and material costs. Published in 1933, their findings showed that it was possible to build rural lines from $300 to cheaper per mile than power companies claimed they could be built. But it was evident to many, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that rural people in 1935 would not get central station electric service at rates they could afford to pay without the Federal Government's lending a hand. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.