3-022-565 - British Pathe Ltd/Heritage Images

The Boulder Dam Activating, 1936. 'At the touch of a switch, waters hitherto controlled only by nature, gushed forth to make a spectacle, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had put it, "symbolic of a nation pulling itself together after the dark days of uncertainty and depression". The New Deal found a dam being opened, it seems, nearly every other week. And where there were dams, there was power. And where there was power, there was recovery'. The Hoover Dam, constructed between 1931 and 1936, was a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives. In bills passed by Congress, it was referred to as the Hoover Dam, after President Herbert Hoover, but was named the Boulder Dam by the Roosevelt administration. In 1947, the name Hoover Dam was restored by Congress. From "Time To Remember - The Time Of The Three Kings", 1936 (Reel 3); documentary about events of the year of the abdication crisis.