was completed as a luxury facility to rival the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. Lowe also installed a telescope and observatory on Echo, as he was a patron of the astronomical arts. He even sought to have the Mount Lowe Railway considered the astronomical center of the San Gabriels. He was even able to enlist astronomer Dr. Lewis Swift, whose reputation preceded him. Given the lack of light pollution in the area, Swift was able to discover some 95 new nebulae from the Echo vantage point. ("It could be noted that in an earlier 1892 plan, Charles William Eliot President of Harvard University sought to have a telescope put on Mt. Wilson. Lowe offered the use of his new Mount Wilson Railroad to transport the lenses up. However, the project benefactor died without leaving a trust, and the whole plan failed, and of course Lowe's train didn't end up going to Mt. Wilson either"). Prof. Lowe's success was greatly drawn from his nationally renowned process of generating large amounts of hydrogen gas (see water gas). He had built a gas plant in Pasadena and had piped the gas some to the top of Echo where there was a storage container seen in several earlier photographs. The technology, mainly used for heating and lighting, was soon replaced by electricity. Echo Mountain also sported a menagerie (zoo) which housed several species of local fauna: lynxes, raccoons, snakes, squirrels, and even a black bear. Alongside the zoo was a dormitory and shop facility for maintenance of the trains. Lowe purchased a three million candlepower searchlight from the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The light was installed on Echo in 1894. So powerful was the light, that a claim by Lowe's publicist, George Wharton James, stated that he could read a newspaper by the beam of the light coming through his hotel window on Catalina Island. Exaggeration or not, the beam from the light did have a projection. Residents announcing their birthdays could have the light shone on their homes in the evening. It was also known to stir up a corral of horses, invade lovers’ privacy, and interrupt an evening's revival meeting. By the 1930s the light was considered a public nuisance and was shut off permanently. The Alpine Division A third division, the Alpine Division, was begun in 1894 and took a lengthy stretch of narrow gauge track across