On September 30, 1882, a water turbine on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, drove a generator and sent current to the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company mill, the Vulcan Paper Mill, and the house of H. J. Rogers, whose father, H. F. Rogers, had built the plant. It produced about 12.5 kilowatts. The Vulcan Street Plant was the first hydroelectric central station in the world, and it was also the first plant of any kind to sell electricity produced from falling water.
Edison's Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan had opened three weeks before it, on September 4, 1882, and it is the more famous of the two, and it burned coal. The Appleton plant used a river. It ran a direct current generator at about 110 volts, enough for roughly 250 lamps, and although small, it was the working model for every dam, turbine and hydroelectric scheme that came afterwards.
Appleton was a paper town. The Fox River dropped about 37 feet over a mile through the city, and by the 1880s the mills along it were running on water power transferred by belts and shafts, which was inefficient and fixed where a mill could stand. Electricity changed that. Power could be sent along a wire, and the location of the water and the location of the work no longer had to be the same place.
H. F. Rogers, a local businessman who ran a paper mill, had read about the electric light and gone to see Edison's works at Menlo Park, and had come home with a water wheel and a dynamo. The plant ran for years. It burned in 1891 and was rebuilt, and it kept going until the river was dammed for a larger station. A replica stands on the site, which is a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
The consequences were not obvious at the time. In 1882 the electric business was about lighting, and water power was about mills, and the idea that rivers would one day be dammed to make electricity for cities was not yet an industry. By the 1890s it was. The first large hydroelectric plant opened at Niagara Falls in 1895, alternating current had won the argument over long distances by then, and hydropower today supplies about a sixth of the world's electricity.