Archive for December, 2008
Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”
Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute [...]
The “Water-Operated Power Generating Device” of 1926
I stumbled across Norman Dell’s incredible 1926 patent for this wacky hydrokinetic power scheme while searching for a rumored tidal power project in Long Beach in 1925. Apparently, water currents would carry cars with vanes dipped into the water along a sort of track, thereby moving a chain and creating mechanical energy that could be [...]
A Brief Pictorial History of Electrified Christmas Trees
The lit-up Christmas tree is one of those traditions that seems like it should stretch back to the beginning of time. Its twinkling lights are now ubiquitous and certainly predate my birth. But I’ve never seen a good exposition of where and how and when the industries that surround it — Christmas tree farms, distributors, [...]
Foreshadowing Google: Coal, Advertising, and the Cost Per Inquiry
“ENGINEERS have found that 43 percent of the coal used by the average industrial plant fails to produce power,” begins this advertisement for advertising, which compares the trials of engineers looking for efficiency with the tribulations of ad men trying to prove their worth.
“In advertising, as in fuel,” we read, “the big problem is to [...]
11th Hour Deja Vu
Sometimes, like say when you’re watching the Leonardo DiCaprio/worldsaving vehicle 11th Hour, you might get the feeling that no one really saw global energy problems and ecological disasters coming. Like everyone in the 1940s was just wearing a fedora, talking like Humphrey Bogart, and happily eating coal for breakfast.
But it didn’t happen like that. There [...]
The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy
I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. [...]
Wind Power Fiction from the 1911 New York Times
The April 30, 1911 edition of The New York Times featured a wonderful piece on the creation of J.G. Childs’ “wind turbine electrical plant,” which tells a delightful fairy tale about what wind power would do for the rural farm:
“Here are some of its possibilities on a farm,” we read:
It pumps all the water used [...]
The DOE’s Solar Photovoltaic Budget 1975-2002
I recently read Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute spouting nonsense about how much funding the Department of Energy has wasted on renewable energy.
“[Mr. Chu] is an indication that Obama really is committed to pursing renewable energy, which the Energy Department has been subsidizing and researching for 30 years,” Ebell told the Washington Times. [...]
Electrical Generation as a Part-Time Job for Kids
Forget raising pigs, wind turbines are where the money is at.
At least that could have been true in 1933, according to this article from Popular Mechanix. In it L.G. Heimpel, an agricultural professor at MacDonald College in Quebec, argues that your average farm boy could making a little extra cash by charging people’s batteries with [...]
250,000 Tiny Greenhouses, Each Containing One Head of Lettuce
The homefront during the world wars is a great place to look for strange technology and new social practices.
So, permit me a brief digression from green tech into the gender-bending agricultural and industrial story of Britain during the war told in the pages of the aforementioned 1918 National Geographics.
Judson Welliver tells us, “Everybody knows how [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
