The AC system was engineered and installed by Westinghouse employees V.G. Converse, Lewis B. Stillwell, Charles F. Scott, and Ralph D. Mershon with the assistance of engineering students they recruited from Cornell University. In the summer of 1890 Westinghouse delivered the equipment and the engineers installed it later that winter. The system consisted of two identical 100-hp Westinghouse single-phase alternators (the largest the company made at the time). One was set up in a generator house, initially just a wooden shed, in the small settlement of Ames where the Howard Fork and Lake Fork streams joined to form the San Miguel River, just outside Ophir. Used as a generator, it produced 3000 volt, 133 Hertz, single-phase AC. It was driven by a six-foot Pelton wheel under a head of water carried in a 2 ft diameter steel pipe supplied by the Howard Fork and Lake Fork as well as natural reservoirs up hill from the plant. The electricity was transmitted up the mountain to the mine via two bare copper wires mounted on poles using Western Union cross-arms with insulators. Total wire costs were about US $700, about 1% of the cost estimated for a direct-current line. At the mine the second 100-hp Westinghouse alternator was installed in the role of a synchronous AC motor to drive the stamping mill. A smaller single-phase induction motor (a new type of motor developed from patents Westinghouse had licensed from inventor Nikola Tesla) was installed as a starter motor to spin the larger alternator up to match the synchronous speed of the generator.