Alexis Madrigal
The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, right when Watt was getting his steam engine going, there were no centralized power plants. It was hard to move steam, so you put the coal-fired engines right where you needed the power.
Electricity changed all that because it was easier to move electrons. But the old model of [...]
Solar Cells vs. The Atomic Gadget for Your Desk
Many people know that the solar cell was invented at Bell Labs, helped along by the men who created the silicon semiconductors that underpin electronics. But a far less well-known story today is the nearly simultaneous creation of what were known as “atomic batteries” by Bell Labs’ arch-rival, RCA, in 1954. As described in John [...]
Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity
Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for. It once held great mystery and excitement, at least for the geeks of the mid-19th century, like Clifford Pyncheon, a bed-ridden felon with an interest in metaphysics, in the passage below. After all, electricity had been associated with lightning [...]
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 [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
