The Leeds and Northrup Electrical Power Systems records include papers, presentations, correspondence, memos, blueprints, and other materials relating to the development of a national electrical power grid in the United States. Leeds & Northrup Co. employees Bloor, Cohn, and Morehouse were influential in coordinating the creation of a national, interconnected electrical grid in the United States over the mid-twentieth century. The records illustrate how they navigated the economic, commercial, and technological obstacles to interconnection on the regional level in the 1940s and 1950s, and then coordinated of energy flows on the national level as they helped close the East-West ties in the 1960s. However, the papers are not confined to the activities of Bloor, Cohn, and Morehouse, nor restricted to the activities of Leeds & Northrup; the research, reports, and work of many other electrical engineers appear, and the work of such professional organizations as the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the North American Power Systems Interconnection Committee, among others.

Box one is largely content published in outlets including Electrical World, Power, Electric Light and Power, Business Week, and American Institute of Electrical Engineers and American Power Conference proceedings. The second box is the remainder of the materials originally cataloged by Bloor, but contains much more unpublished material under the “Product Data” heading, including correspondence, wiring diagrams, internal reports, and various committee meeting notes. The third and final box contains materials not included in the original nine boxes of W. Spencer Bloor; these materials are predominantly unpublished. A significant amount of materials focus on solutions to technological problems with large-scale integration, including frequency bias and decomposition, as well as the opportunities presented by the application of new computer technology to automatic generation control.