Archive for December, 2008
Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)
Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. [...]
The Beasts of the Oil Burden
When the first real oil man, Edwin Drake made the first oil strike, and the stuff came gushing out of the ground, Black tells us that Vanity Fair ran a cartoon featuring gussied up whales at a gala celebration of the first oil well. We read: “As they danced and frolicked in celebration of the [...]
Petrolia: the landscape of america’s first oil boom
That’s the title of Brian Black’s 2000 book about the rise and fall of Pennsylvania’s oil country, which arrived on my doorstep today. It is part of a growing literature about previous energy crises and the human responses to them. This case is of particular interest because the exhaustion of PA’s oil fields gave early [...]
The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery
Now, friends, this is what I call an economic stimulus plan! John Adolphus Etzler, writing in 1836 , recommended a strict diet of solar, tidal, and wind power — and if we followed his recommendations, we’d end up with, well, you know, utopia:
I promise to show the means for creating a paradise within ten years, [...]
Big Oil Literature: Lot’s Wife as Barrel of Crude
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXyeTU3QucY]
I picked up a hilariously awesome and quite informative book, The Rise of American Oil, at a secretive bookseller on 17th and Mission. Through a locked gate and up three outdoor-carpeted flights of stairs, I found a smorgasbord of strange books including this 1948 paean to crude by Leonard M. Fanning. It’s blurbed by a [...]
The Russian Wind Turbine of 1931 — and Its “Streamlined House”
The Russian design was bold and practical, if one has in mind the limitations under which they were working. In May, 1931, after two years of wind measurement, a wind-turbine 100 feet in diameter was put in operation on a bluff near Yalta, overlooking the Black Sea, driving a 100-kilowatt, 220-volt induction generator, tied in [...]
the afterlife of a company and its files
Tracking the S. Morgan Smith company — once a powerful manufacturing concern that built the huge hydro turbines of the New Deal electrification era — through the mergers and bankruptcies of 20th century business is tough. It’s also a minihistory of business in America. A small northeastern business grows into a major concern before being [...]
The 75-foot, 8-ton Failure that Ended a Renewable Energy Era
What we mean when we say “spectacular failure” is something along the lines of the Smith-Putnam turbine failure. After finally going online after waiting years for parts during the long years of World War II, the first grid-tied wind turbine tossed one of its blades into Vermont’s spring sky. Stranded aloft inside the electricity generating [...]
the putnam-smith wind turbine schematic
It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? As early experiments involving teams of MIT and CalTech inventors go, they did all right.
energy research spending
These two charts help explain why we find ourselves without many industrial-scale ideas in the energy space. It takes decades to commercialize pure science and we’ve been underfunding energy for decades.
One ray of hope: military technologies can fortuitously transform into civilian innovations. For example, modern wind turbines owe a debt to the Red Baron and [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
