Citations:superpower

Noun: "electricity generated in a large plant"

 * 1919, W.A. Bowden, "Canada's Canal System," The Canadian Engineer, Volume 37 (August 21, 1919), p. 243:
 * [B]y far the larger portion of the capacity of our hydroelectric stations is to be found in what may be called "superpower" stations; many of them are also interconnected to allow more efficient operation.


 * 1921, Carl A. Norman, The Economical Utilization of Liquid Fuel (Ohio State University), p. 183:
 * The Holzwarth turbine has been spoken of in Germany in connection with the proposed building of enormous electric power stations in lignite and coal districts. These power stations would ... eliminate the transportation of this type of fuel, and introduce economies from large scale systematization and utilization of natural resources such as are now aimed at in America by the "superpower" development in the East.


 * 1925, George Frederick Gebhardt, Steam Power Plant Engineering (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1925), p. 23:
 * 6. Superpower plants. Any of our ultra-modern turbo-alternator central stations is in effect a superpower plant, but the word "superpower" in this connection is intended to refer to the large central stations comprising a part of a regional system.


 * 1939, Jerome Kerwin, "The Church and the Garrison State," The Review of Politics vol. 1, no. 2 (March, 1939), p. 184:
 * The War came upon a world that had lost the sense and meaning of natural law and natural right: a world of many democratic states that had rejected the divine origin of democratic principles; a secular world that placed man in the center of the universe and talked of the day when men would be like gods; a world that looked to the creation of a heaven here below by man's own unaided efforts; a world of super-states and super-men and super-power.

Noun: "excessive or superior power"

 * 1922, D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, p. 269:
 * He felt his own power, he felt suddenly his virile title to strength and reward. Newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward.


 * 1934, James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, What Now? (New York: Viking Press):
 * I have enumerated our principal forces and resources and set forth that none of these factors is a panacea; that we must correlate all our elements of strength to form a super-power to be centered on our main objective; that, knowing the rights we are entitled to, we must persistently use this power to defend those rights we hold....

Noun: "sovereign state with dominant status"

 * 1935, Nathaniel Peffer, Must We Fight in Asia? (New York: Harper & Brothers), p. 12:
 * Now, eighty years later, Japan exercises a decisive influence in the world. ... In eighty years from the Middle Ages to the super-power of the twentieth century!


 * 1944, William Thornton Rickert Fox, The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union: Their Responsibility for Peace (Yale University, Institute for International Studies), p. 21:
 * "Great power plus great mobility of power" describes the super-power. Acting in coalition, the Big Three can bring preponderant power to bear wherever desired.

Noun: "fictional extraordinary physical or mental ability"

 * 1970, Richard A. Lupoff and Don Thompson, All in Color for a Dime, p. 166:
 * His only super-power was a one-time-only flying ability, achieved when Wacky made him a patched-rubber suit and filled it with helium.