• As you probably know, I sent a draft of my book to my publisher, Da Capo Books, in April. They accepted it for publication. It’ll be out in early 2011, if all goes well. Yes, that is a long time from now, but that seems to be how book publishing goes. When all is said and done, I’ll have been working with the idea for almost three years.
• I haven’t gotten back detailed edits yet, but I will soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in reading pieces of the draft, I’d be most grateful.
• About a week after finishing the book, I stumbled into another crazy project and co-founded 48 Hour Magazine with a group of friends. For whatever reason, what we thought would be a small project among friends blossomed into a global collaboration that received 1,500 submissions. What we produced in just two days of editing time (and two total weeks of having any kind of organization) is pretty awesome, I think. Then — and you might have seen coming — we got sent a cease-and-desist letter by CBS and written about in the New York Times and a bunch of other awesome places. It was tremendous fun, but exhausting; my skull hurt for days. Getting any extracurricular writing done has been really hard.
• That said, I have written a couple of appreciations for HiLoBrow, the culture site edited by my friends Joshua Glenn and Matthew Battles. My last two were Notorious B.I.G. and Paul Ehrlich.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was the Katrina of its day. Commentators the country over held forth on what The City meant. Perhaps the most stylish of these was The City That Has Fallen by William Marion Reedy, a St. Louis editor who’d never seen the place. I ran across it in a slim little volume tucked away in the Berkeley library, a reprint of the original from 1933. The essay is a sidelong, sexy (really!), scattershot tour through the American conception of Frisco.

“One may not hear it mentioned for a year, two years, five years—then someone is sure to state definitely that Reedy’s story in the Mirror is ‘the best thing ever written about San Francisco,” wrote Oscar Lewis in the foreword to the 1933 edition, printed by the San Francisco Book Club.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s quite brilliant and quirky. I reproduce it for you here from the Online Archive of California, with links to as many of the people he mentioned as possible. You’re going to love it.

The City That Has Fallen

FRISCO it was called in that affection which prompts expression in diminutives. Shaken to shards in the dawn, gulped in part by a mad sea, swept by flame. Ruin covering agony, crowned by hunger, thirst, fever, pest. Death over all.

Beautiful, soft Frisco, luscious as a great pear or a lush cluster of grapes. City of romance, splendor, strife, where the strange odors of the East come in to sweeten the winds of the West. Frisco sleekly fair and like the Pacific, as treacherous, as fair.

Town of wild, strange, tumultuous memories to one who never saw its streets or sensed its paradisiacal lay or felt the subtle, passionate stirring of its more than Italian, curiously blent quattrocento and ultra modern atmosphere.

There gathered the seekers of the Golden Fleece to scatter their shearings, to gamble, carouse, steal, murder, and build a mighty town. The village a hell and then—the Vigilantes. Judge Lynch was its first law-giver, more rigorous than Draco.

Navvies turned Croesus came in and builded banks, their palaces rising in uncouth ostentation, setting up insane speculation, developing rivalries that flowered into duels and into remorseless combines to drive one man, thinking himself broken, into the sea. Names were heralded from there that meant gold in mountains. Flood, O’Brien, Mackay, Fair, Sharon—and a score more. They leagued with or fought one another. They plundered one another and the public. They died—most of them with a plenteousness of wives, equal almost to that of their money.

Business, politics, the law, life, all life was picturesque and blood color. Then out of the aureate din and dust came the constructives, Stanford, Crocker, Huntington, Sutro, taking mighty chances on building railroads across the continent, dazzling the world with their daring, buccaneering the plains, piercing the mountains and grabbing subsidies that made imperial domains look like kitchen gardens.

Out of Frisco came the gambler Keene to teach lessons to Gould and Fisk and Daniel Drew, to break and be broken, to win and fail, and win and finally hold his own and much more against the most frenzied of frenzied financiers of a third of a century later.

The daughters of rough-and-tumble barkeepers and wrangling was her women married the sons of princes whose lines ran back to the time of Michelangelo and beyond. The woman of the camp queened it in London, and offered to buy the Arc de Triomphe in Paris because it obstructed her view of a parade. The grub-stake prospectors built palaces, filled with the spoil of Italy, on Fifth Avenue. Their daughters set the pace over the Four Hundred. The contest over their wills by wives they forgot to mention clogged the courts. Supreme Justices of the Nation were assaulted by the champions of these wives, and the United States Marshal slew Sarah Althea Hill Terry’s attorney husband to save a justice who had decided a case against her.

There came from the sand lots the cry that the Chinese must go. It stirred the country fiercely, was forgotten only to revive again thirty years and more later as a result of the War with Spain. Out of golden Frisco came the raucous voice of Dennis Kearney, an agitator to live in history with Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, to inspire the thinking of statesmen who would not have wiped their feet upon them. Dennis Kearney’s mad, snarling, obscene mouthings are today translated into profound statesmanlike argument against the Yellow Peril.

Stormy men and sudden wealth and growing cosmopolitanism with all the colorful low life of a great port, the poetry of ships from strange seas, the Babel of all earth’s tongues made the world forget the old mission times, before the Gringos came.

Burst from Frisco the tender tough singer of the “Heathen Chinee“, the historian of “The Luck of Roaring Camp“, the wildly luxurious genius of Bret Harte. He gave us the West fixed forever, as Scott and Burns gave us Scotland, Dumas France, Cervantes Spain.

With the romance that headquartered in Frisco, Mark Twain savored his messages of fun to the world and developed his talent until today he is, not perhaps but undoubtedly, our chiefest man of letters, his gift immortalizing “Tom Sawyer” and “Huck Finn”, classicizing “The Jumping Frog”, vindicating “Ariel” Shelley and interpreting for us the sanctity of Joan of Arc.

In Frisco, Richard Realf sang a few songs unforgettably and, harassed by misfortune, slunk away to die to the music of “De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum“, a poem ranking surely with “Thanatopsis”.

And then a little man, poor, unknown, a printer, almost starving, meditating in this city of the Golden Gate on the problem of the House of Have and the House of Need. This printer wrote a book. It set the economists by the ears. It challenged the theologians. It shook Mammon in his temple, the Pope on the throne of St. Peter. It made men realize the sense of brotherhood. It created a religion of the here and now, with a remedy for want, curb on human greed. The book was “Progress and Poverty“. The man was Henry George, the greatest social scientist since Buckle, the profoundist economist since Adam Smith, the ultimate perfection of antithesis to Niccolo Machiavelli.

In Frisco uprose The Argonaut, the country’s greatest weekly newspaper. Its editor was another Voltaire, Frank Pixley. His cry was, “crush the infamy” (the Catholic Church) and so splendid and multifariously expressive of his hatred that even the Catholics read it for its style.

For Frisco had the aesthetic atmosphere. It was another Florence. The urge to poetry was in the air. Today the author who came from Frisco is omnipresent. Markham of “The Man With the Hoe“, is claimed by Frisco. Frank Norris of “The Pit“, flourished in that town of horrors and magnificences. Gertrude Atherton first moralized there or thereabouts. Gelett Burgess there conceived “The Purple Cow“, and then an odd little man named Doxey issued The Lark, sui generis, an epoch making publication that will live in history with Frazer’s Magazine, with the Anti Jacobin, with the Yellow Book. Ambrose Bierce, the most vitriolic of American writers, there wrote tales that, for terror in artistic imagination, challenge the supremacy of Poe. The Overland Monthly was a Frisco enterprise that lives today. Joaquin Miller went red shirted to London and told them in his “Songs of the Sierras” of what would come to be in the city that “Serene, indifferent of Fate”, as Harte said, “… sitteth at the Western Gate”.

In Frisco, the great romanticist, Robert Louis Stevenson, hungered and wrote one line immortal—”it was a clear cold night of stars”—in “The Silverado Squatters”. In Frisco, they erected the first monument to the creator of Prince Florizel of Bohemia, John Silver, and the reincarnator of Francois Villon.

Hundreds of our later stage’s best actors came from Frisco, where the theatre rose early and flourished exotically. Lotta came from Frisco and became our first ingenue. Its early stock companies vitalized our stage.

In Frisco, Kipling’s manuscripts were turned down by editors, and he avenged himself somewhat on the town, though before he closed his depreciation he had to be little less than just to the place, if for no other reason than that, had there been no Bret Harte and “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, and “M’liss” and “Tennessee’s Pardner”, there would have been no “Soldiers Three”, perhaps no “Kim” and no “Recessional”. In Frisco, William Keith—Keith, who has something of the dark color of Diaz-Keith undoubtedly one of the greatest of American artists. Artists, poets, novelists, scientists, teachers, lent the population a tone of devil-may-care.

This town, of less than half our population, had more and better daily papers than St. Louis. It sent a boy to New York to challenge the supremacy of Pulitzer in journalism with les taches jaunes, and to frighten Wall Street with a red flag having just a touch of yellow, and to compel by sheer audacity attention to his intention to be president—Mr. William Randolph Hearst.

Frisco has won world-wide renown next to New York and Chicago, and now it has won the world’s interest by a calamity such as was Chicago’s first claim to fame.

A Frisco-built battleship, the Oregon, made a world-wondering run around the Horn to Santiago and into the fight that broke Spain’s power in this hemisphere forever.

Frisco was loved by its citizens as no city is loved in this land, save possibly New York. It was a city that cared for the beautiful, that took to ideas. It had the Bohemian Club, in a world in which Bohemianism was fumigated of its disreputability, and stood for the true as distinct from the perverted tawdriness of Murger’s “Vie de Boheme”. It supported at least four excellent weekly papers, The Argonaut, the News Letter, Town Talk, James H. Barry’s Star,—periodicals individual, high-class, cosmopolitan. George Sterling wrote there the best book of verse of the last four years, “The Testimony of the Suns“, and from Frisco, Jack London, with his gospel of beauty in brutality, captured men’s imaginations and awoke in their hearts echos [sic] of “The Call of the Wild” and the snarlings of “The Sea Wolf”. The literary center of Frisco boasted of the finest book store in the country west of New York and the output of Paul Elder & Co., publishers, was almost a new revelation in some aspects of the art preservative.

Life was lived in Frisco. It was a little of Paris, of Rome, of Pekin. It was a town of temperament in which lightsomeness blent with a native beauty sense. Winds of the sea came in and met with winds of the desert. The fog, mostly pearl-gray but often sun-tinged to opaline, hung over the town and gave it rare values to the esuriently artistic eye. Naval officers brought there, as wives, the daughters Ah Tong, Hawaii’s Chinese millionaire. Sport flourished in all forms, square and vertiginous. The climate made for love making. The wine and fruits and flowers, and the mysterious sea mists and the wonderful odors of East and West made life a picture, a poem. The world turned to Frisco and California as it turned in earlier years to Rome and Florence and Italy. There the singer, the sculptor, the painter, the novelist, sought the sky and air that freshened heart and fecundated mind. It chained the sensitive of soul, and it immuted the merely sensual lovers of luxury. Always and ever about one was the conjugating of the verb “enjoy”—not always conjugally.

It was opulent and of a mighty oriency of brightness, but with darkness to heighten the picture. Its slums were the most impenetrable “in all the lands of Christendie”. Its crimes surpassed, in quality of shudder, the crimes of other places. Its citizens gave to the city more gracefully than other citizens of other towns gave to them. An ignorant miner, Lick, gave the city a great miner’s hotel, and to the state the world’s finest observatory. It was gladdened with many fountains and parks. It was a city which the rich decorated and loved inconceivably, disgraced in their early orgies, but never wholly ruled. Its king was the head of the seamen’s union, Andrew Furuseth, in the face of all the interests and wealth of the community.

A strong sense of beauty somehow clung to the mental image of the town, even to one who, as I, had never seen the place, its glamour always had a sort of hidden foreboding in it. There was ever the same suggestion of lethal malefic genius behind all the story that was told of its curiously morbidezza, amorousness of the day, and its childlike desire to forget the night. It was too far, as it sometimes seemed, and in the glory in which it lay and in which it lingered in thought, there seemed something of a light that held a pale tone of bale back of all its bliss. Its people loved it with that intensity with which we love what we are likely to lose.

There was a great gap in the history of American life, letters and character and achievement with Frisco’s story omitted.

There ran through and beneath the town many a little tremor that the town personified, might have superstitiously interpreted, as does the individual the slight shudder as he talks with a friend—someone walks or dances over my grave. But the gongs and mad fiddlers kept going in Chinatown, and the orchestras in the multitudinous, gorgeous, risque, restaurants never ceased a strain, and the women walked with an added lure in their motions and a deeper softness in their eyes, and as in the old fable, Love and Soul blent to make the climax of pleasure, and the town was rapt in voluptuous, semi-oriental autolatry, and . . .

Then the earthquake came! And flood, and fire, and death in his most fantastic disguises burst in on the dreams that came through the ivory gate of dawn. The passional city learned to pray. Suffering paid in a flash for each pulse of joy. But the men of the ruined city met in their forum and said, “The city shall rise again more beautiful than before”. The hungry, the tatterdemalion crowd, shelterless, wan, haggard, smokegrimed, joked with the soldiers over their dole of bread and water. The women rallied each other on their bizarre, bisexual garniture. Life had been pleasure. Ruin was fun. Death? Well to have died in the fall of Frisco was something like coming home from battle on the Spartan shield.

Will Frisco stay fallen? No. A new Frisco shall up—rear itself and laugh at the sea, and when old Atlas again shifts the globe a little on his shoulders—it will laugh and dance and fight and drink and make love as before and be proud that among its other claims to greatness is that of having met and conquered a calamity that stilled and chilled the whole world’s heart for a day. Before the crash and flame, Frisco was beginning to protest at being called anything but San Francisco. Yet Frisco clung, it held some winking, sly hint of frisky. Even the great black headlines over the evil news used the diminutive abbreviation like a touch of light in the cloud, a sort of fresh, smiling rose on the pall, speaking of resurrection. The foundations of the city went wobbling at the end of the Easter feast almost. ‘Twas and ’tis an omen.

Frisco fallen shall flower again from disaster and desolation and death, and it shall realize the dreams not only of those who vowed their dreams shall not be defeated, but the unfilled ambitions of those lovers of the city who went down in the ruin to the realm where is not light, nor laughter, nor song, nor weeping, nor dreaming more. It will be a great city for it is a great city even today, though never rose again one stone of it upon another. It has given, it still gives us the joy of life, the throb of passionate story, the sense of love of beauty in all forms, the thrill of an unparalleled catastrophe, the inspiration of indomitable cheerfulness before the most implacable fate. There’s something in it of the spacious older world and yet something too, that is unforgetably [sic] American in its peoples’ recovery to a mood of readiness, as the poet said, “to match with Destiny for beers“. Vale et Ave Frisco the beautiful, the glad, the strong, the stricken, the invincible. Down with her went our hearts. Up with her will go our souls. The country’s hope and faith and love are more fired than the shuddering earth and all these are in the tear brightened eyes of Frisco looking out from the wreck over the Pacific where lies the future big with mighty fates for her beyond all prophecy.

As almost all authors will tell you, this is the worst question to get. The soundbiting process is hard and fraught with risk. Nonetheless, over at Change.org, I stuck my toe in the “what’s your big idea?” waters in an exchange with Emily Gertz about the history of alternative energy. I’ve only got eight months left before I have to turn in a draft, so it’s as good a time as any to start trying to distill my message.

Clearly, this isn’t a perfect summation of the book, but it’s one of my first attempts at the high-level synthesis of a book’s worth of stuff. I left out the narrative substance of The History of Our Future, i.e. the stories of the people who proposed plausible alternative technological paths to the ones that we took. There were smart, realistic green tech advocates pushing for changes to the legal and technical systems of our country to put us on a smarter, less-polluting energy path. Wind and solar might not have been ready to shoulder the grid’s burden in 1955, but there were people who advocated doing the research to find out when that they would be ready. They were ignored by all but a few (notably, Hubert Humphrey, oddly) — and as a result, alternative energy research is probably decades behind where it could be.

Anyway, on to my response to Emily on the other big ideas from the book:

The first is that renewable energy played an underappreciated role in industrial revolution in the U.S. Unlike Britain, which really got going with coal, American factories used more hydropower than coal all the way through 1850. Windpower also opened up the prairies for farms, unleashing a torrent of energy (i.e. food) upon the nation. So, even though the overall horsepower or kilowatt hours (or whatever metric) of a lot of early renewable energy technologies was rather low, their social impact was very high.

Second, every energy technology has receieved enormous support from the government, as have biotech and most of the packet of technologies associated with computing and the Internet. Most of the subisidies and R&D money have gone to nuclear power and fossils. And by most, I mean almost all of it. Despite what free marketeers might want to think, the markets for energy have never been “unfettered” or structured in a neutral way. For many years, the government wanted to encourage energy consumption, not conservation. (In retrospect, perhaps that wasn’t the best policy, but that’s an easy thing to say when you live in a fabulously rich country with unfettered access to all forms of energy.) The Cold War directly and indirectly drove U.S. energy policy for nearly thirty years. Thus, nuclear power plants got tons of support — despite the existence of many of the solar building and water heating techniques (as promoted by the 50s era Association for Applied Solar Energy) that are now in use elsewhere in the world.

For a lot of green tech types, I think it’s exhilarating and surprising to find intellectual predecessors. There have been people making roughly the same arguments for solar power for a hundred years. In the 50s, Farrington Daniels at the University of Wisconsin, for example, would be more than at home in most of the debates that we’re familiar with. Some of the earliest advocates of solar power — say, John Ericsson, a famous-in-his-day inventor — pushed hard to deploy it in the poor/developing countries of the global south.

But the key question that people ask me a lot is something like this: do the technologies already exist to generate a huge percentage of our light, heat, and power from renewable sources?

My answer is a qualified yes, for three main reasons: 1) green tech has never received funding at levels comparable to the other “new” industries of the 20th cenury (biotech, nuclear power, semiconductors, network tech). We don’t know how much cheaper and better solar, wind, geothermal, and energy storage can get, but they are already pretty close to competing with fossil fuels in many places. 2) The price of energy is going to go up. The cheapest oil is gone and the cheapest power comes from very old power plants (nuclear, coal, or hydro). Without renewables or huge amounts of demand reduction, the utilities will have to build new plants, which will be more expensive no matter what the power source is. Comparing new fossil, nuclear, and renewable power plants, renewables will look pretty good. 3) Solar, wind, next-next gen biofuels, and geothermal look better positioned to take advantage of the other technologies that have developed over the 30 years since the last energy crisis.

But, still, it’s a little hard to answer this question because it assumes that technology is just metal and silicon and engines.

Technologies are only half-machine. The rest is human. People establish the systems and ground rules that allow them to work. Arguing that renewable energy systems cost more or can’t provide 24/7 power can be rhetorically effective but misses a key point: The energy system was built by and for fossil fuel use. An individual solar/wind/geothermal tech is trying to play on a field that’s been designed for a different game. Wind is wearing cleats on a basketball court, let’s say.

If you change the technical and financial systems — making the grid more flexible, say, or valuing cost stability more highly in economic models — then alternative energy looks better. For example, wind is totally insensitive to the price of oil and natural gas. If we think that over the next 20 years, the price of oil/gas will go up (which damn near everybody does), then wind farms look a lot more competitive with natural gas plants.

Another example would be the indemnity that the US government extends to the nuclear industry (Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act). It essentially takes a lot of risk off nuclear power plant developers’ balance sheets. That makes the “cost of money” (the interest rate, basically) that these guys have to pay lower. Voila! No technological change, but the price of nuclear plants drops. Changing financial structures or using the government to “derisk” projects will be a key strategy to driving green tech deployment.

Image: Harry Thomason’s 1961 solar home patent.

“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”

— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the 1976 Annual Review of Energy

Given that the U.S. uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year now, I began to wonder how total American energy consumption stacked up to our pre-farming ancestors total energy usage.

Four million tons of coal would have yielded about 90 million BTUs back in 1976. Americans use about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year. So, do a little math, divide 100 quadrillion by 90 million, then divide by some time unit and voila: Americans burn through 90 million BTUs — what our hunter-gatherer ancestors used each year — in about 8 hours.

Hell, we burn four million tons of coal every 32 hours or so.

(This makes me think. Do we need a sort of fossil debt clock that counts up all the fossil fuel BTUs we’ve burned?)

Image: Keith Bedford/Bloomberg News. Linked from the NYT.

Well, if you were a nomad in Mongolia, you’d probably want some television via a satellite dish and powered by a solar panel, too. Right?

Image: A random trip to Mongolia by a couple, Peter and Jackie.

The common treatment is simply to say, “Renewable energy is just too expensive.” That’s why Google says RE < C is the ticket to a better world. John Doerr is slightly more subtle. He says that we have to make the right outcome (clean energy) more profitable than the wrong outcome, so that it will become the most likely outcome.

But how things drop in cost, why, and whether that’s the only reason firms and consumers make decisions remain unexamined in these statement. I get it, though. That’s because it’s hard to bring the forces of several different disciplines to bear on this problem. It requires learning a bunch of different methods and folksonomies.

But hey, why write a book if you don’t really want to get your hands around something? So, I’ve been assembling a small bibliography of economic history and technological change. When I say technology here, I’m including the innovations of a social variety, too. Here’s what I’ve got on my reading list for the next couple of weeks.

• Susan Previant Lee and Peter Passell. A New Economic View of American History. 1979. The kind of quantititative economics that we’ve all come to love. You can win with data.
• David Edgerton. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. 2007. “Much of what is written on the history of technology is for boys of all ages. This book is a history for grown-ups of all genders.”
• Aidan Davison. Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability. 2001. So far, an attack on the “ecomodernist” project, under which Davison would probably file the entire realm of green technology.
• Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong, Eds. Technology and the Good Life? 2000. A lot of thoughts about the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the fruits of Albert Borgmann’s philosophical tree.
• Enrico Santarelli. Finance and Technological Change: Theory and Evidence. 1995. It’s fascinating how little information I can find about how finance/banking technocrats evaluate technologies that come before them. Yet in modern green tech, they are really the keepers of the keys.
• Johnathan Hughes. The Governmental Habit Redux: Governmental Controls from Colonial Times to the Present. 1991.
• Joel Mokyr. Twenty-Five Centuries of Technological Change. 1990. An economic primer on technological change.
• Daniel Boorstin. The Republic of Technology. 1978. Boorstin’s attempt to understand globalization it seems. With characterstically soaring language. (I’m not complaining.)
• Nathan Rosenberg. Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics. 1982. Love it. Starts with a historigraphy of technical progress.
• Paul Stoneman. The Economics of Technological Diffusion. 2002. A textbook. Lots of curves and graphs.
• David Noble. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. 1977.

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, it as painted in the mid 20th by Carl Rakeman. From the Federal Highway Administration:

he first macadam surface in the United States was laid on the “Boonsborough Turnpike Road” between Hagerstown and Boonsboro, Maryland. By 1822, this section was the last unimproved gap in the great road leading from Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay to Wheeling on the Ohio River. Stagecoaches using the road in winter needed 5 to 7 hours of travel to cover 10 miles.

Construction specifications for the turnpike road incorporated those set forth by John Loudon McAdam of Scotland. After side ditches were dug, large rocks were picked and raked, then were broken “so as not to exceed 6 ounces in weight or to pass a two-inch ring.” Compacting work for each of the three layers was quickened using a cast-iron roller, instead of allowing for compacting under traffic.

In 1830, after 5 years of work, the 73-mile National Pike (or Cumberland Road) became the second American road to be built on the “McAdam principle.”

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 water out of the hoses! Right.

This image was drawn from The City of Philadelphia as it appears in 1894, “a compilation of facts supplied by distinguished citizens for the information of businessmen, travelers, and the world at large.” Really, it’s a kind of extended chamber of commerce brochure detailing the various civic accomplishments of the year. A  portrait of a city just before the turn of the century.

And it was in that city in that year that Pedro Salom and Henry Morris launched their Electrobat electric carriages.

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 — John Etzler tried out his “burning mirror” concept outside town — when I stumbled across a list of the occupations of all the white, free men in a 1852 history of the city. To my surprise, way down at the bottom of the list, we find that there were only three whip makers out of the 15,159 workers in the city. Three! Not much of an industry to destroy.

Far more important to the horse and human transportation system of the city were the 95 hackmen who drove the buggies, the 43 livery stable keepers, 15 feed dealers, and 452 cartmen. Why don’t they get to be the butt of any jokes?

The whip maker industry was about the size of the artificial flower makers (2), stereotypers (3), comb makers (3), egg packers (4), surgical instrument makers (4), and bird stuffers (2). The buggy whip makers were dwarfed by the dageurreotypists, twenty-three of whom plied their trade in Louisville.

Unrelatedly, the list of the professions that employed a single person is wonderful.

• Cement Maker
• Distiller
• Glass Stainer
• Iron Safe Maker
• Lightning Rod Maker
• Pickle Dealer
• Telescopic Instrument Maker
• Wall Paper Maker

That’s a lot more interesting set of professions than the most popular professions: laborers, clerks, carpenters, students, grocers, cartmen, tailors, and foundrymen. It pays to specialize, I suppose.

The full list of professions, alphabetized, is after the jump.