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HISTORY OF ENERGY
James C. Williams, Ph.D. April 25, 2006 Energy plays a fundamental role in shaping the human condition. People's need for energy is essential for survival, so it is not surprising that energy production and consumption are some of the most important activities of human life. Indeed, it has been argued that energy is the key "to the advance of civilization," that the evolution of human societies is dependent on the conversion of energy for human use.1 Few people have questioned the long-held assumption that standard of living and quality of civilization are proportional to the quantity of energy a society uses. However imprecise it may be, most people still accept the steadfast formula: energy=progress=civilization.2 The widespread belief that energy and civilization are inextricably linked certainly has historical foundation. Throughout history, humans have focused on controlling the energy stores and flows that are part of nature. For tens of thousands of years, people relied solely on the chemical (caloric) energy gained from food that produced the mechanical (kinetic) energy of working muscles. But thanks to human intellect, people were able to unlock and overcome physical limits imposed on their own muscle power "by using tools and harnessing the energies outside their own bodies."3 The earliest "energy tools" were those used to hunt animals, harvest edible plants, catch fish and fowl, and process and transport foodstuffs. Most of the family structures, societal groupings, and political and economic institutions created over thousands of years focused primarily on the extraction, processing, exchange, and marketing of food, as well as of "fossil and organic energy sources (wood, peat, coal) ... used ... for heating, cooking, lighting, or for firing the kilns and furnaces used in smelting ores."4 The vast array of unique human cultures b b d th t f th b i i t th
Nikola Tesla 1894 Cresson Medal CSA Case File #1756 Marie Curie 1909 Cresson Medal CSA Case File #2413 Joseph J. Thomson 1910 Cresson Medal CSA Case File #2563 Catalog Only Thomas A. Edison 1915 Franklin Medal CSA Case File #2640 Joseph J. Thomson 1922 Franklin Medal CSA Case File #2782 Catalog Only William Coolidge 1926 Potts Medal CSA Case File #2853
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CSA Case File #2853 William Coolidge 1927 Levy Medal CSA Case File #2865 Catalog Only Max Planck 1927 Franklin Medal CSA Case File #2864 Catalog Only Enrico Fermi 1947 Franklin Medal CSA Case File #3173
absorbed the quest for these basic energy resources into the widest range of human activitiesrituals, festivals, taboos, myth, dance, games, religion, language, art, and warfareall of which embody humanity's cultural values in their most fundamental forms.5 Quite simply, human existence has been dominated by the age-old necessity for energy.
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across wide ocean expanses opened up the Americas to Europe. Colonists brought with them water-powered mills, which appeared from Latin America to Canada. By 1800, citizens of the newly established United States were importing English style textile factories, and within two decades expansive water-powered industrial cities emerged in Lowell, Massachusetts and other New England locations. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, Euro-American industry depended for energy almost entirely on water power.
Age of Steam
The modern era began with the eighteenth century introduction of steam power to English coal mines by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen. Their steam engines and those of James Watt supplanted less geographically flexible water-powered mine pumps. Synergistic relationships between coal mining, the iron industry, and steam power led to advances in steam technology, and by 1800 steam engines joined waterwheels in powering English textile mills. Entrepreneurs found that steam power overcame water power's geographic inflexibility, the limitation that any one stream could only support so many mills, and waterwheel stoppages and slow downs caused by drought, flooding, and ice. Although water power continued to be the dominant energy resource for manufacturing through much of the nineteenth century, particularly in France and the United States, steam power ultimately proved more flexible and economically efficient. During the nineteenth century, steam engines improved enormously. American businessmen imported steam power from England, and by the 1840s it began competing successfully with water-powered manufactures. Philadelphia inventor Oliver Evans, famously known for automating water-powered flour milling, patented one of the first successful high-pressure steam engines. His engine and others modeled on it soon drove the riverboats and railroads that characterized America's nineteenth century transportation revolution. In Philadelphia in 1876, an enormous iconic Corliss steam engine towered over the main exhibition hall and powered the hundreds of machines on display at the Centennial Exhibition.7 The steam engine permanently established the link between fossil energy resources and industrialization.8 England and European countries turned to coal for steam fuel before 1800, and by the mid-nineteenth century Appalachian coal succeeded wood as steam fuel in the eastern United States. On the Pacific Coast, manufacturers and transporters continued to use wood, but they preferred coal and imported it at great cost from as far away as
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preferred coal and imported it at great cost from as far away as Australia. The scarcity and high cost of good coal on the Pacific Coast combined with discoveries of petroleum in southern California resulted in the development of oil as steam fuel, which unseated coal as steam fuel during the first half of the twentieth century.9
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ot be eas y t a s tted o e o g d sta ces, c es a s C power system achieved. Implemented by Edison's competitor in electric power, the Westinghouse Company, AC power superseded DC power and made possible the development of large electrical generating plants sited long distances from customers. Although Westinghouse's harnessing of hydropower at Niagara Falls with Tesla's polyphase system is perhaps better remembered, developments in AC power transmission from distant Sierra Nevada power sites in California to the coastal cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles established the standard in long-distance polyphase electric-power transmission.13 By the early twentieth century, electricity had become the favored method for transmitting energy, but applying it for human uses depended on many scientists and technicians working together. Perhaps Edison's most important invention was the industrial research laboratory, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, the General Electric Research Laboratory had emerged as a model for advancing science and technology. There, researchers steadily improved the ways in which humankind could apply electricity, and among them William Coolidge stood out. His development of the tungsten filament for Edison's incandescent lamp and later the X-ray tube earned him a most respected place in the ranks of twentieth century scientists and engineers.
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discovery was Marie Curie, whose work "on the spontaneous radiation emitted by uranium compounds" set the stage for subsequent discoveries on atomic structure and the intrinsic power of the atom. The early decades of the twentieth century brought sustained scientific research in atomic physics, particularly in Europe. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi at the University of Rome was prominent among scientists working in this exciting field, and during the 1930s he focused on producing artificial radiation by bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons. As the European world became more and more unstable with the rise of Nazi Germany, its alliance with Italian fascists, and increasing anti-Semitism, Fermi and other nuclear physicists began leaving their universities and research laboratories for North America. Fermi's particular circumstance was quite remarkable, for he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 and received permission from Italy's fascist government to go to Stockholm to receive the award. Instead of returning to Italy, however, he and his Jewish wife and children traveled to the United States, where Fermi took a professorship at Columbia University in New York City. As the world went to war in the 1940s, Fermi and other physicists in Europe and America came to understand that a uranium atom split by a neutron would cause a self-perpetuating chain reaction of atom splitting that would release enormous energy. This process, called nuclear fission, suggested possible military applications, and Fermi and his colleagues at Columbia University joined with Albert Einstein to persuade the U.S. Government to study the idea. Meanwhile, at Columbia, Fermi sought to develop a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction. In 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the "Manhattan Project," Fermi's work was relocated to the University of Chicago, where in December of that year, he and his team achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. The work of Fermi and other nuclear physicists led directly to development of the atomic bomb, which the United States twice used against Japan in 1945. In the wake of World War II, the United States created an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to oversee nuclear weapons development as well as to bring nuclear power to peaceful applications. During the 1950s, the AEC worked with public utilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California to develop electric power generation using nuclear fission. Nuclear energy soon emerged as one of the most touted solutions to the electrical world's energy problem. Industrialized nations everywhere constructed plants to meet ever-multiplying demands for electric power but nuclear power was not without its
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demands for electric power, but nuclear power was not without its drawbacks. But by the end of the 1970s, seismic safety became a substantial enough issue for Californians that a moratorium was placed on building new nuclear power plants and the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in Pennsylvania galvanized nuclear power opponents. These incidents combined with the unresolved solution to the disposal of radioactive nuclear waste and extended construction times to effectively end new nuclear power plant construction in the United States. In 1986 the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine and subsequent widespread radiation poisoning, put Italy, Germany, and other countries on the path toward ending reliance on nuclear power. While nuclear energy has not gone away and is still seen by many people as one of the best solutions to human energy needs, other energy resources such as solar, wind, and biomass also offer promise. No matter where people find the energy to support their cultures and societies, it is plain that human life has been dominated by the age-old necessity for energy. The Energy Case Studies presented here celebrate the unique ingenuity underscoring humankind's scientific and technological quest to harness inanimate energy to its use. Imagine, if you can, just what the next steps in our energy history will be.
Wilhelm Oswald, "The Modern Theory of Energetics," The Monist, 17 (1907), 510-11; Ian Barbour, Harvey Brooks, Sanford Lakoff, and John Opie, Energy and American Values (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), 2.
2
An important critic of the energy=progress=civilization formula is George Basalla, "Energy and Civilization," in Science, Technology and the Human Prospect, Chauncey Starr, ed. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 39-52. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 3. Also George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Barbour, et al., Energy and American Values, p. 3.
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Carolyn Merchant develops this conceptual framework in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 6-7.
Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
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Press, 1983), p.7. For the United States, see Lewis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930, vol. 1, Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1979).
7
Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., Early Stationary Steam Engines in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969); and Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar, Engine's of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. Barbour, et al., Energy and American Values, p. 3.
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James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1997), ch. 8.
10
Benjamin Franklin, inspiration for The Franklin Institute, America's first mechanics institute, is well-known for his experiments with electricity. Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930, vol. 3, The Transmission of Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California, ch. 9; Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
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