The Ghost Monorail from Washington to Boston

The intriguing new Boston history blog, Looking Backward, has a short tidbit on a prospective D.C. to Boston monorail that, obviously, never got built.
“Illustration by Andre Castaigne for article “The Brennan Mono-Rail Car,” McClure’s Magazine, 1910
A proposed elevated line running from Washington to Boston based on the gyroscope-balanced monorail car Irish-Australian inventor, Louis Brennan. His [...]

R&D Is Not Dispatchable

I’ve got a big feature up on Wired Science about the Aquatic Species Program, an R&D effort at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (née Solar Energy Research Institute) through the 80s and into the early 90s. It’s a case study on how uneven funding can destroy even promising programs. And with the end of the [...]

Video: A Ride Down San Francisco’s Market Street, 1905

Absolutely stunning footage of downtown San Francisco in 1905. Check out how multi-use the streets were. Pedestrians, automobiles (some probably gasoline-powered, others electric and steam), street cars, horse-drawn carriages.
I could go on about the various energy systems represented here, but just watch this video. It’s incredible.
If you like this stuff, and you live in [...]

Narrow Technological Narratives and the One-Wheeled Replacement for the Car

The Dynosphere was a one-wheeled contraption that graced the cover of Popular Science in 1932, but that never made a commercial impact. A 2.5 horsepower engine could propel it at up to 30 miles per hour, though that figure might be bunk.
It’s interesting because we tend to think of the diffusion of inventions like this:

But [...]

1962: “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!”

Ahem. Talk about invoking the American technological sublime! Yikes.
Energy has not always been conceived the same way, at least by oil companies like Humble, a forefather of Exxon.

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supples—if converted into heat—could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To [...]

What Levittown Got Right

You probably know Levittown as the place where America went wrong, if you’re a sustainability nerd. The tract home development in Long Island became the model, so we’re told, for all kinds of suburban development, setting the nation on a path to oil addiction and high energy usage.
But the more I look into the place [...]

1971: “the internal combustion engine will be banned from the central city by the year 2000″

Here’s former Texas A&M geologist, Earl Cook,  and his full quote from a 1971 article in Scientific American.
The automobile engine and its present fuel simply cannot be cleaned up sufficiently to make it an acceptable urban citizen. It seems clear that the internal-combustion engine will be banned from the central city by the year 2000; [...]

The Nucleon, Ford’s Reactor-Powered Concept Car

Wow. Take a look at The Ford Nucleon, the fission-powered concept car from a future that really never came to be. As it’s more mockup than anything else, there isn’t much information available about it. But, man, what a symbol of the nuclear craze that swept America during the 50s. You could drive it right [...]

The Electric Truck’s First Heyday — 1900-1925

The Infrastructurist notes today that a new electric truck can carry 16,000 pounds and has a range of 100 miles.
Well, electric trucks actually have a long and illustrious commercial history that has been nicely excavated by the historians Gijs Mom and David Kirsch. They found that there were actually quite a few electric delivery trucks [...]

We’ve Got 35 Times More Horsepower in Our Cars Than in Our Power Plants

In the wake of the Depression, FDR created a succession of government groups that were to look into and plan for the future. Tasked with understanding the American economy and its social impacts, the National Resources Committee wrote a report in 1937 that was “the first major attempt to show the kinds of new inventions [...]