8
PEOPLE AND PLACES
INNOVATION IN THE TELLURIDE REGION, IT RHYMES WITH THE TELLURIDE FOUNDATION
(Or Gold from the Minds...) by Susan Viebrock of Telluride Inside and Out
It was a flash felt ‘round the world. On June 19, 1891, Lucien L. Nunn threw a switch to put the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant online to power his Gold King Mine, marking the world’s first commercial transmission of hightension, AC current for industrial use over a long distance. The momentous event, a historic collaboration between Nunn, George Westinghouse and former Edison engineer Nikola Tesla, surged with the hopefulness of thousands of unwritten possibilities: “Let there be light” twinned with flipping a switch. Soon after, Telluride became the first town in the country to have electric street lights. Despite his pint size – just over five feet or several inches shorter than his hero,
Napoleon Bonaparte, and weighing in at just over 100 pounds soaking wet - local legend and polymath Lucien L. Nunn was clearly a giant of man.
common to both Nunn and Musk:
Elon Musk, who, like Nunn, is an irrepressible visionary, an intrepid innovator, and a force for social change, has long insisted Tesla’s ultimate purpose was never to build cars. It is to help the world transition away from reliance on fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources in order to improve the quality of life on our planet.
“Innovation requires enormous insight and intelligence, an appetite for risk, and financial leverage, exactly what Nunn and Elon Musk had/have in abundance. The more complex the problem, the greater the need for risktolerance. The Foundation’s culture, our DNA, is defined by our donors and how they view problem-solving. They make gifts to address complex socio-cultural problems and equally importantly, they support out-of-thebox solutions to those challenges. As with Nunn’s AC plant and Musk’s Tesla Company, the Telluride Foundation is about taking a good idea, like a car for example, and making it better.”
On the subject of innovation, the Telluride Foundation’s president & CEO Paul Major cites characteristics
The Telluride region’s ongoing history of remix and reinvention remains at least as rich as what was once in the
He set the tone and the agenda and put the Telluride region on the map: Big things from small packages.