The Pictorial Record of Man’s Conquest of the Colorado River, this program documents the building of the Hoover Dam, one of the engineering marvels of its day, begun in 1931 and completed in 1936. It was the largest dam in the world for many years. It cost 50 million dollars (800 million in today’s money) and over 100 workers’ lives.
Although Hoover Dam was always its official name, President Hoover’s unpopularity in the 1930s and 1940s was such that it was almost always referred to as Boulder Dam instead.
But in the 1930s it was all-American optimism, and a mammoth achievement accomplished in record time using machinery and techniques that had to be devised from scratch to enable the unprecedented size of the project. The sheer scale of everything is what impresses today… impossibly big pipes, vast heavy industrial machinery, and determined workers performing amazing tasks.