James Delmage Ross was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, the third son and third of four children of William McKenzie Ross, scion of a long line of Rosses and McKenzies from the north of Scotland, and Marianne (Wilson) Ross. His mother's father had emigrated to Canada from Ireland, and her mother, Matilda Delmage, was the daughter of an Irish soldier of Huguenot ancestry after whom young Ross was named. When he was only two his mother died.
As a boy James worked with his brothers in their father's horticultural nursery and florist establishment, meanwhile attending school. When he was about nineteen, after two years at the Collegiate Institute of Chatham, he received a teacher's certificate--the end of his formal schooling
Throughout his life, however, Ross had a deep thirst for scientific learning, which he pursued on his own initiative: when only eleven he repeated Benjamin Franklin's experiment with lightning. Possessing an excellent memory and a driving energy, he acquired an extensive knowledge of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and engineering.
His book, New Views of Space, Matter and Time (1931), gives eloquent testimony of the heights to which self-education carried him in these fields. After six years of teaching school Ross contracted tuberculosis, from which his mother had died, and the doctors gave him little hope of a cure. This was the time of the Klondike gold rush and, determined not to succumb to his malady, he joined a party of Canadians bound for Alaska, eventually making his way as far as Nome. It required many months to make the trip, sleeping in the open air and living off the country, and by the time he reached Alaska the inroads of tuberculosis had been overcome.
Ross came to the United States in 1900, locating first at Anacortes, Wash. , where he worked as an electrician in a salmon cannery. Here he met another young Canadian, W. J. McKeen, with whom he formed a lifelong association, and together they moved to Seattle in 1901 and opened an electrical shop. The following year, when the citizens of Seattle voted to establish a municipal power plant, Ross put to use his knowledge of the new technology of electricity by taking the job of designing the electric generating plant at the city's Cedar River water supply reservoir and a transmission line from Cedar River to Seattle at the unprecedented potential of 45, 000 volts.
In 1911 he was promoted to be superintendent of the City Lighting Department, a post he held without interruption, except for a few months in 1931, until his death. After demonstrating that he could provide cheaper electricity to farmers and home-owners by the use of water power, Ross found his way toward expansion blocked by private utility interests. He nevertheless obtained a permit, after a special trip to Washington, D. C. , in 1917, to develop the Skagit River site, some 125 miles from Seattle, as part of the city system. To cultivate public interest he made the power site into a veritable summer resort, with a railroad over the scenic canyons, flower gardens with tropical plants (horticulture was, next to electricity, Ross's most consuming interest), colored lights at night, and recorded music through loudspeakers; and he urged the adoption by the city of extremely low rates to encourage wide use.
Seattle came to be known as the best-lighted city in America and boasted more electric ranges than any other city in the world, regardless of size. These achievements attracted wide attention--and strong opposition from the private utilities' National Electric Light Association. Ross's popularity, however, was unbeatable; when Mayor Frank Edwards dismissed him in 1931, Seattle citizens recalled Edwards by a vote of 125, 000 to 15, 000 and reinstalled Ross. In the interim Ross--who had already served as an adviser on many electric power projects in other parts of the country--went east, where he conferred with Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York on the development of public power from the St. Lawrence River.
When Roosevelt became president, Ross became a principal architect of the New Deal's public power program, aiding in the expansion of TVA, in the initial organization of the Rural Electrification Administration, and acting as consultant to the Federal Power Commission and Public Works Administration. Roosevelt persuaded him to take a leave of absence from the Seattle City Lighting Department in August 1935, appointing him to the Securities and Exchange Commission to help implement the Public Utility Holding Company Act.
In 1937, while still on leave, Ross became the first head of the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency distributing the electric power generated at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. He led the fight, aided by President Roosevelt, to make power available to small users on a par with industries set up near the power sites--the fight for the "postage stamp rate" as opposed to the "zoning rate. " Ross was a powerfully built man, whose energetic manner and jovial disposition gave no hint of his earlier serious illness. Kindly and considerate, he took little interest in the accumulation of personal wealth. He was a staunch lay leader in the Presbyterian Church and designed, built, and operated station KTW, the first and for many years the largest wholly church-owned radio station in the United States.
Ross died in Rochester, Minn. , as a result of an embolism, several weeks after undergoing a surgical operation at the Mayo Clinic for an intestinal obstruction. He was interred in a mausoleum at the base of Ross Mountain (named in his honor) on the Skagit River, at the site of the power development he had created. President Roosevelt, in a memorial tribute, called Ross "one of the greatest Americans of our generation. "
Ross was prominent as the Father of Seattle City Light. He helped design and build the power plant at Cedar Falls on the Cedar River. He made the efforts to secure and construct the hydroelectric project on the Upper Skagit River, which provided 40 percent of Seattle’s electricity. Ross Lake and Ross Dam on the Skagit were named in his honor.
In 1907 Ross married Alice Wilson of Charing Cross, Ontario. They had no children, although they raised or educated five, of whom one, a nephew, James Stewart Ross, was especially close to them.
