Originally built in 1826 for businessman Lyman A. Spalding, the smaller three-story stone building on this site became the Norman & Evans Iron Foundry. After it burned in 1840, it was rebuilt several times and enlarged by Charles E. Dickinson into the seven-story Electric Building, making it one of the tallest buildings in Lockport at the time. A hydraulic race from the canal passed through the seventh story of this towering stone structure, one of America’s most unusual industrial buildings, with features designed by Birdsill Holly and his friend and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison. Water power from the hydraulic raceway on the south side of the canal at the Niagara Escarpment powered all of Lockport’s street lights free of charge to the city’s citizens. The huge pipe projecting into the canal’s natural basin is the canal discharge conduit, which releases water escaping from the lock chamber as the level of Lock 34 is lowered, sometimes sending water high into the air like a geyser. Thomas Alva Edison, born in 1853 and died in 1934, is best remembered for inventing the incandescent electric light bulb and phonograph and for improvements to the telegraph, telephone, and motion pictures, and he held a record 1,093 U.S. patents, the most issued to a single person.