Twin Branch — the “world's first” that rides on a company publication

1940–41 · A WORLD CLAIM AT ITS CARRIER'S STRENGTH

The claim: The Twin Branch power plant, on the river at the city's east side, carries the largest superlative ever attached to a Mishawaka address. Of the plant's third unit, added in 1940–41, the city's history writes that it was, “according to a company publication, ‘the world's first generating unit to utilize steam pressure as high as 2,400 pounds per square inch in the commercial production of electric power.’” The technology record of this history prints the claim exactly at that strength and no stronger: the carrier is a company publication — the utility's own — and beside it stands the trade record, the designers' journal describing a plant designed at 2,500 pounds, unmerged and unreconciled. The two figures are not the same fact, and this history does not make them one.

The ground: What is not in dispute is the plant itself: a major generating station on Mishawaka ground, fed by the Twin Branch dam, whose documented course — the first power of 16 December 1903 from the Twin Branch hydro plant in the businesses record, the steam plant's growth, the license proceedings that fill the Current & Today record's forward calendar — is owned by the technology, businesses and current records between them. The fame, such as it is, is a sentence in a company publication that the city's history repeated. It is printed here because a “world's first” claim on a city's ground is this chapter's exact subject — and printed at its carrier's size, which is what separates a record from a brochure.

Sources:

1. The technology record of this history — the Twin Branch claims at their carriers' strength: the company publication's “world's first” 2,400 pounds, the designers' journal's 2,500, printed unmerged.
2. The businesses record of this history — the Twin Branch hydro plant's first power, 16 December 1903.
3. The Current & Today record of this history — the plant's present state and the Twin Branch license open house of 12 November 2026.