Spirits String Telegraph Wire to Settle the West

In the 19th century, you didn’t need a cable company to build out your network, the spirit of America did it herself, as shown in John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress. Manifest destiny and technologizing the country went hand-in-hand. The early to mid nineteenth century was like. Historian Bruce Sinclair summed the spirit of the [...]

The First Good Road in America

American roads, particularly outside cities, were terrible in the 19th century. Before the arrival of asphalt and then concrete on the scene, contractors used a method called Macadamizing after the man who invented it, John Loudon McAdam.
In this painting, we see the construction of the first American macadam road in 1823. Keep in mind, though, [...]

The League of American Wheelmen and the Paving of America

The bicycle, quite literally, paved the road for automobiles. The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world’s cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million [...]

The Insensitive Strength of the Automobile

In 1907, the Chicago Post observed:
“it is too soon to lament the horse. We have not yet come to the day when we must decide whether to pet him, as the dog, or eat him as the amiable cow. Our sentiment for the noble beast will remain, and with the heaviest work undertaken by insensitive [...]

Dickens on Steamboat Travel in 1841

Dickens made a trip from Pittsburgh down past Louisville to the Mississippi on the Ohio River, which he recorded in evocative detail in his American Notes. Granted, he sounds like a bit of pansie, but his descriptions of the danger of the ships is fascinating. The furnace and all its machinery were open to the [...]

Fire! Who You Gonna Call? The Steam Powered Fire Engine

I had wondered on occasion where the term “fire engine” came from. It’s a little weird, a little Fahrenheit 451, to call the thing which puts out the flames “a fire engine.” That is, until I stumbled across this wonderful illustration. Oh! The fire engine was actually a steam engine that was used to pump [...]

How Many Buggy Whip Makers Were There, Really?

It’s common to deride the “buggy whip makers” as a class of businesses that couldn’t hack the technological disruption caused by the introduction of the automobile. The once-vibrant whip business run over by the internal combustion engine’s power. The horror! Is there no respect for the past?
Anyway, I was researching Louisville in the mid-19th century [...]

Beautiful Windmill Catalog – 1879

Researching Daniel Halladay, who patented the first self-regulating windmill, I ran across this beautiful old catalog from his company, the U.S. Wind and Engine Pump Company, headquartered in Batavia, Illinois.
The pictures are copyrighted to Windmillliterature.com, but you should check them out. They’re wonderful.

The Discovery of the Power of Greenhouse Gases

New Scientist has a great piece on John Tyndall, who discovered the physical basis for the greenhouse effect 150 years ago.

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In [...]

What’s Riskier: Solar or Nuclear?

Nuclear energy is the highest risk form of power production, right?
That’s been my unexamined assumption as I looked through various non-fossil energy alternatives. Today, though, while researching Three Mile Island (you know, a what-did-really-happen? piece) I ran across an old Oak Ridge National Lab report that made me think a little deeper. Not just about [...]