Once, in the mid-19th century, the outskirts of Jaffa were home to a tidy *bayyara* — an orange grove with a well and a small workers’ house. The land belonged to a Christian merchant, Manuel Calis, until 1856, when an unlikely figure arrived: Albert Augustus Isaacs, a missionary from Jamaica. An Anglican priest, traveller, and photographer — born in the Caribbean, educated in England — Isaacs became convinced that under the scorching Palestinian sun he would build a model of modern agriculture: the **Model Farm**. It was meant to be a school of new farming — European ploughs, an irrigation tower, water channels, storehouses, and a manager’s residence. But Isaacs soon left, and another visionary took his place — Paul Isaac Hershon, a Jew from Buchach who had converted to Christianity and became a Talmud scholar. He tried to revive the farm, to teach local Jews and Arabs the “right” way to cultivate the land. Yet the soil proved heavier than ideals, and the dream faded.

Decades passed. The land was sold, and in 1923, the first power station in Eretz Israel rose on this very site — a white-stone building with tall chimneys and narrow windows, where Tel Aviv’s first electric lights flickered to life. The new neighbourhood took its name from the Hebrew word for electricity — **Hashmal**. And here entered a man of a different scale: **Pinhas Rutenberg**. Born in Romny, Ukraine, educated in St. Petersburg, a revolutionary once linked to the murder of Father Gapon, later an engineer in Italy, his life pulsed like high voltage. In Italy, he befriended Jabotinsky and Weizmann, and when he came to Palestine, he already had a plan: to build a nation powered by water. He founded the **Palestine Electric Corporation**, bringing light to Tel Aviv and Haifa and building the hydroelectric station at Naharayim. People called him *Zaken HaHashmal* — “the old man of electricity.”

Stories surrounded his private life — whispers of a librarian, a son who became an engineer in the Soviet Union, even a descendant who joined the *Chelyuskin* Arctic expedition. Rutenberg never confirmed a thing, preferring to be remembered not as a man of secrets but as the one who gave the country light.

Today, the area looks completely different. The **Bat Sheva Tower** rises over the remnants of the Model Farm, surrounded by offices and cafés. Yet the white power-station building still stands, and the restored farmhouse hides between skyscrapers. The city has changed, but memory remains: here began the story of Tel Aviv’s first orange grove and missionary dream, here its first lights were lit, and here Rutenberg built his empire of electricity. Walk down HaHashmal Street today, and you can still feel history breathing beneath the asphalt.