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 San Francisco, don’t miss archivist Rick Prelinger’s “Lost Landscapes” event this Friday. He’ll be showing footage from all over San Francisco that he’s collected from residents. (Rick is the one talking in the video.)

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 really most inventions’ adoption curves look nothing like that, even ones much more successful than the Dynosphere. What about, say, the Bluetooth headset? Or the diesel car? Or the nuclear reactor? Or the household fan? Or the thermos? Or Dolby surround sound? Or the videophone? Or the electric knife for cutting turkey? Or manufactured gas from coal? Or compressed air pipelines for transmitting motive power? Or the bicycle? Or electric resistance heating? Or anti-dandruff shampoo?

Our thinking about technology is based largely on a handful of products when hundreds of thousands of other things have been brought to market and used by millions of people. We don’t have to ignore the car, but let’s not skip over the rest of this vast history.

Intellectually via a Twitter conversation with Tim Maly, Maureen Ogle, and Suzanne Fischer.

Image: NYT.

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 meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms — to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” Sign is the World’s First Choice!

Via Grist

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 as it actually was built, the more I’ve become convinced that individual Levittown houses were probably fairly low energy-intensity dwellings — and that the community as a whole was smarter than we give it credit for now.

The original Levittown Cape Cods were under 800 square feet, had big windows for drawing in sun light and heat, and were radiantly heated by pipes in the floors. In comparison to even the most energy efficient big, modern home, it would have used a lot less electricity and heating fuel. Not only that, but the Levitts were prefab adherents. They insisted on using factory-machined parts for just about everything because it was cheaper. My guess is that the method generated less waste, too, and required less energy. Plumbing and energy pumping was minimized because of the boiler between the kitchen and bathroom.

The construction methodology wasn’t perfect, of course. They had almost no insulation, for example, and were built in treeless pastures that could not take advantage of natural shade.

The Levittown community had some excellent features built-in that later communities would eliminate. For example, every section of the community had a supermarket and little stores built right into the neighborhood. For women stranded in the ‘burbs without cars, it was not only an essential and efficient shopping spot, but an important center for socializing, too.

I had the pleasure of talking with Polly Dwyer, head of the Levittown Historical Association, and a resident of Levittown for more than 50 years. She recalled that she and her husband — a World War II veteran — didn’t even look at the inside of the house they bought (“They were all the same, we figured”). They were far more concerned with being close to the Village Green, as it was called (“We bought the location”).

What if the real Levittown had become the model for building suburbs? Compact communities with smaller homes and built-in retail and social establishments. Somewhere along the way to the suburban dream embodied by Levittown, the good parts got excised and the high-energy and antisocial elements emphasized.

How that happened is an important story and underplayed story. Some Spanish suburbs look like a cluster of high-rises built way outside Madrid. Though you wouldn’t exactly call these tremendous examples of planning, they do allow for some of the amenities of density. The point is: it’s not just that America suburbanized. How we suburbanized matters, too.

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to be working on some energy models aided by Jared Silliker and Dawn Danby of the old Levittown homes. Stay tuned — and let me know if you want to help!

And in case you missed the Levittown links that got me interested, here’s a roundup:

Levittown, Pa. | Building the Suburban Dream: “Between 1950 and 1960, 20 million people were drawn to mass housing developments on the outskirts of America’s cities. In terms of sheer numbers, the move to the suburbs outstripped the fabled Westward migration of the 1800s many times over… The new suburbs combined country comforts with city conveniences. With the help of modern production and financing methods, builders like Levitt and Sons made the American dream of homeownership affordable to millions.”

HOUSING: Up from the Potato Fields – TIME: Time’s original write-up on the miracle of Levittown, New York.

Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb: “Levittown has long represented the paradigmatic postwar American suburb. Yet very little in the way of good critical work has been done on the history and significance of this American cultural icon. Over the past decade I have been assembling materials to provide an ongoing cultural history of Levittown and, through its story, to offer a more nuanced and sympathetic picture of American suburban life in the Cold War era. Part of a larger project, Outside the Gates: Cultural Landscapes from the Material to the Virtual, my Levittown work has become so interesting in itself that I have allowed it to evolve into something closer to a work of collaborative history, here on the ‘net.”

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; it should probably be banned right now. Because our cities are shaped for automobiles, not for mass transit, we shall have to develop battery-powered or flywheel-powered cars and taxis for inner-city transport.

Well, we’re not quite there yet, but how about the kindler, gentler, 21st-century version: congestion taxes?

(This is part of my on-going forecasts project, which details just how bad we are at predicting what the world is going to look like.)

Photo: Tom Baker.

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 bopping around American cities before World War I.

The hope among the electric vehicle advocates of the time was that “separate spheres” for internal combustion and electric vehicles would emerge. Between cities, cars would replace the railroads, but inside cities, electric trucks could replace the horse-carts that did most of the moving around of goods.

As it turned out, gasoline-powered cars could serve both long-haul needs and provide about-town services, thus creating vertical integration that worked, aside from the energy and fuel inefficiency of the whole enterprise.

The key point, though, is that for moving goods around a town in the beginning of the century, electric trucks were a success. Mom and Kirsch provide the details in the 2001 article embedded at the bottom of the post. Here’s a taste:

“In fact, at certain times, under specific conditions and for clearly identified groups of customers, the electric vehicle was both more reliable and cheaper to operate than comparable gasoline-engine or horse-drawn vehicles — the superior technology, that is to say, although its superiority could endure only as long as those specialized markets continued to exist. Technological superiority resided not simply in the physical properties of the individual technologies but in the contexts and systems in which motor vehicles were embedded.”

The lesson that we can draw from the last century could be that new forms of organization and distribution will need to develop if electric trucks are going to make become a major part of the commercial fleet.

And it’s worth noting that I don’t think the companies and people of the day were entirely unaware of the air pollution that internal-combustion vehicles generate. One major electric truck user was, in fact, Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago. In the late 19th century, the Windy City was really struggling with urban air pollution. A Chief Smoke Inspector was appointed to to make sure that steam boilers using soft, smoky coal kept them in good working order. If the owners neglected their boilers, they could be fined based on old “nuisance laws” that prevented people from keeping dead animals in their homes or what have you.

Given that the early internal combustion engines were smelly and smoky, you can bet people had the same kinds of misgivings about gasoline as they did about soft coal.

“Upon my appointment as Chief Smoke Inspector,” wrote Chicago’s Chief Smoke Inspector, F.U. Adams in a report to the city. “I found that there was an overwhelming public sentiment in favor of a suppression of the smoke nuisance. Opposed to this public sentiment was but one interest powerful enough to menace the success of a vigorously conducted campaign. That interest was the bituminous coal trade.”

If you’re interested, check out the rest of his report. It’s fascinating stuff that probably deserves its own post.

[Image: Waverly truck ad clipped out of larger image at Chuckstoyland, which has an incredible amount of old automobile stuff.]

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 which may affect living and working conditions in America in the next 10 to 25 years.”

The Technological Trends and National Policy serves as a kind of technological State of the Nation address. I could probably pull out a million interesting factoids, but I was particularly struck by the commonsense way they thought about power. The “power available” to someone wasn’t just what came out of the wall, it was all the systems that used power, particularly cars, planes, etc.

“Transportation systems, which include motor vehicles, railroads, marine propulsion, and airplanes usually carry their own power generating equipment,” they wrote.

In other words, they recognized a car for what it is: a gasoline fueled power plant attached to wheels. Thinking of a car this way, the committee included vehicle engines’ horsepower in a table of other power sources. That doesn’t seem particularly interesting, but take a look at the numbers; they’re eye-popping.

Cars were a horsepower reservoir almost 15 times larger than the combined output of the country’s central and industrial power plants.

I decided to run the numbers for today’s overpowered vehicle fleet. (The math is below.) Turns out we have something on the order of 51 billion peak horsepower sitting in our driveways. That’s an incredible 38,276 gigawatts of power available. That absolutely dwarfs the nameplate capacity of our electrical power plants, which total up to a mere 1,087 gigawatts. In fact, each week of 2008, a horrible year for car sales, almost 38 gigawatts of capacity rolled into the streets of America.

Just to be clear, every week, cars with a total 52 million horsepower are sold. That’s 80% of the horsepower available to American industry in 1935. And that economy defeated Hitler. It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but it should make us think.

There are three things that I take away from this. One, the current size and power of our cars and trucks is just stupid. The Tata Nano, with its 33 horsepower engine, is the way to go. (If all of the world’s cars looked like that, going electric would also be a lot easier.) Let’s merely note here that the average American passenger car has 7.5 times as much horsepower as the Nano and yet both vehicles will get you to the grocery store or to Nevada or wherever.

Second, the people of just one hundred years ago would be awed by the amount of horsepower every American has access to. The funny thing — the irony, perhaps — is that we no longer need that amount of horsepower to do anything useful. The people of the prairie were scratching and clawing for every kilowatt hour of useful work they could wring out of some oil or the wind. The people of Omaha these days don’t need anything like the direct energy services of their forerunners. Regular folks produce little of their own food or goods or housing and yet they energy falling out of their pockets.

Third, and here’s the hopeful part — no sane country would encourage its consumers to get on the technical and performance treadmill that led us to this point. Who would want this piece of the American technological infrastructure and set of consumer expectations? It’s resource inefficient and expensive. I wouldn’t expect the Chinese to follow our path to the American car anytime soon.

Calculations: It’s hard to figure average horsepower of all American cars because it changes from year to year and the vehicle fleet is a mix of ages. So, let’s just make some simple assumptions based on Christopher Knittel’s data from an Institute of Transportation Studies report.

Let’s simplify a bit and say that cars are 55% of the fleet and light trucks 45%. The average new car has 247 horsepower now and had 110 hp back in 1980. Let’s just say the average car has about 200 horsepower. The average light truck’s got 236 horsepower now, up from 138 in 1980. Let’s call that an average of 210. Do the math. 51 billion horsepower sitting in our driveways.

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 strength his lost will probably be improved.”

[Source: The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History]

In this chunkily high-minded description of the changing role of the horse in the face of motorization, we find the wonderful phrase “insensitive strength” standing in for motor vehicles. Insensitive here not meaning brutish or unable to enjoy a good cry, but in its first and now-obsolete meaning: inanimate. As always, The Oxford English Dictionary:

Not sensitive 1. Destitute of feeling or consciousness (in general); not sentient; inanimate. Obs.
1610 HEALEY St. Aug. Citie of God 471 Though man be not insensitive, yet this sence of his..is justly termed rather death then life.
a1694 TILLOTSON Serm. (1743) IX. clxxvi. 4110 This faculty is that which constitutes the difference between sensitive and insensitive creatures.
1713 DERHAM Phys.-Theol. IV. i. 85 Sensitive or insensitive Creatures.

Image: Alfred Fuhrman via the California State Library.

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. Atop which industrial consciousness emerges.

Image: flickr/rnair