Archive for January, 2009
Technological Change Does Happen, a Reminder
It’s impossible not to laugh while watching this local San Francisco news broadcast. It tells the story of “the first step in newspapers by computer,” the delivery of copy via Compuserve to people like Richard Halloran, whose tagline, in place of say, citizen or CEO, is “Owns Home Computer.”
There’s something poignant about the last scene [...]
“A Road Not Taken” — Tracking Carter’s Solar Panels
In the wake of the energy crisis and impending collapse of the nuclear power industry, Jimmy Carter installed some solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came to power, he pulled them down, like all symbolically. But, wait, then what happened to them?
Turns out that both Google and a [...]
Faulkner on the Automobile, 1935
In William Faulkner’s supposedly racy and minor novel, Pylon, we read that the automobile was:
“expensive, complex, delicate, intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the indvidual muscles, bones and flesh of a new and legless kind.”
The car body. [...]
The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry
The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.
In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that [...]
Coal the Anti-Hero
Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use.
In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant [...]
The Population of Mechanical Iron Slaves
The tendency of early 20th century writers to equate machines with slaves was disturbing. Here’s one characteristic example from A History of Commerce (1907). Clive Day writes:
A simple operation in arithmetic will show the amount of work, in human equivalent, now done by steam. Taking, for example, a modern country, Germany, we find engaged in [...]
Histories of Steam and Capital
I’ve added a bunch of new resources to the “Steam” reading list, drawn from Google Books’ excellent scans of a series of histories from the early 19th century through the early 20th.
In particular, I’d draw your attention to the biography of Watt, who everyone knows, and Boulton, who far less people know. Watt made the [...]
What about the C in RE < C?
After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen [...]
Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”
We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”
The solar tower exploits [...]
An Introduction to the Largest Interconnected Machine on Earth
The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”
Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
