Serious Futurists

In working on a chapter about the visions that both professional forecasters and regular cultural observers held in the middle of the 20th century, I’ve stumbled into a whole field that seems underexposed these days: “future studies.”
While many people in places like San Francisco are familiar with some futurists like Paul Saffo, Jamais Cascio, [...]

People of Earth, Evacuate Your Cities

Lapham’s Quarterly ran the English translation of the leaflets dropped on Japan along with the atomic bomb this week. While this isn’t strictly energy related, it’s too bizarre a document not to blog about.
The tone is direct, gentlemanly. It begins: To the Japanese People. It ends: EVACUATE YOUR CITIES. In between, the language is firm [...]

Taking the Petroleum-Electric-Radioactive Cure

“Today, flea markets are the only places where there is the remotest chance to obtain a radioactive device designed to purify the air, apply to the body, or add radon to drinking water,” wrote Paul Frame of Oak Ridge Associated Universities in an article on Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas from the late 80s.
It’s a [...]

When The Whole World Needs To Be Quarantined: Fantasy Architecture and Nuclear War

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.
One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is [...]

Techmix: Color Photo and Old, Russian Workshop

Here we see a workshop from about 1910 in Mother Russia. What’s strange here is that most workshops of this time — complete with steam-era details like the pulleys running down from the ceiling — are photographed in black and white. Black and white photos distance us from the period in which they were taken.
Luckily, [...]

Producing Oil for the Motherland, Or: Chinese Anthems for Energy Independence

It’s easy enough for oil-drenched Americans to claim to rail against oil, but imagine if you really, really had no access to energy. No electricity and no liquid fuel. Just you, your muscles and whatever symbiotic organisms you could evolve to fit your needs. Welcome to being a living thing for all but the last [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 scholarly history of american energy and the corporate futures of Big Oil

Trolling for resources on the first oil boom/bust, I came across a class historian of technology, Peter Shulman (now at Case Western), taught at MIT called “Energy and Environment in America: 1750-2005.”
The syllabus is a brilliant resource for history of energy and industrialization fans. Here are the books are articles I culled from the list:

The [...]