Seite - 112 - in Nikola Tesla and the Graz Tech

112 they were untouched by the technical advancements of electric light and wa- ter pipes. The city’s central water supply, also a technical novelty, was instituted in 1870. The low water rates meant that consumption per capita per day rose to 170 litres by 1897. Only the need after the end of the First World War brought about the introduction of water meters. A strong driver of Graz industry was the railway. The industry needed an efficient transport system and Graz became a rail- way hub. In 1857 the Southern Railway from Vienna via Graz, Marburg/Maribor and Laibach/ Ljubljana to Triest/Trieste was continuously accessible. The eco- nomic life of the city was substantially invigorated by this. The markets of the Levant opened up for Graz via the port of Trieste. In 1860 the Graz-Köflach railway was inaugurated. It facilitated the supply of energy from the west Styrian coal district. In 1873 the western Hungarian or Raab railway (from today’s Graz East rail- way station) was completed in Graz, connecting the city with a traditional trading area in southwestern Hungary. Since the Middle Ages, the two mill streams in Graz had been of great eco- nomic importance, as water was the most important source of industrial pow- er until the 19th century. Since the end of the ‘pre-March period’, industry in the Styrian provincial capital had increasingly begun to make use of steam power. In 1850 there were nine steam engines in Graz, and a decade later there were already thirty. The companies increasingly settled near the railway, where the sup- ply of coal and raw materials was easy. An industrial zone developed along Schienenstrasse. Mechanical engineering, metalworking and brewing proved to be the dy- namic branches of the modern Graz economy. In the brewery of the Reininghaus brothers on Steinfeld, the first pressed yeast factory in Styria was built. Humanic, the largest shoe factory in Cen- tral Europe at the time, was probably the first shed roof construction on the continent.