About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
It appears we are on the edge of another change in what powers us.
In the animal kingdom we were never the fastest, strongest, hairiest nor the beasts with the sharpest eyesight. We were the animals that compensated.
We basked in the sun and froze at night until something – a lightning strike? – taught us to burn. Fire heated our food, lit the night, and warmed us.
As early as 5000 BCE in Arabia, China, India, and Europe, wind was harnessed to sail across water. We harnessed four-legged animals to increase our speed and endurance over land. We may credit the Dutch with the windmill, but in Persia, almost 800 years earlier circa 500 AD, they used wind to turn water wheels and grind grain. In Greece in the first century AD, a wind mill was used to play a pipe organ.
As early as 500 BCE, the Chinese were using natural gas. The gas leaked in the ground and they used bamboo to “pipe it.” The gas was used to boil water, remove the salt and make it potable.
In America in 1701, a blacksmith recorded using coal. He called it stone coal. He picked it up, threw it on the fire, and was rewarded with a hotter longer burning fire. Nevertheless, wood was the main source of energy in the Colonies. In Berkshire County, as the population grew in the mid-eighteenth century, large swathes of land were denuded and the old growth forests disappeared. The power of the running water in Berkshire rivers turned mill wheels. In Dalton, Zeno Crane tapped into hydropower to make his paper.
Before 1850 wood was the main source of energy in the United States for heating, cooking and producing steam for powering steam engines for the railroads. Other sources of energy were water, wind, coal and some manufactured natural gas. There were street lights in the United States as early as 1816 lit by natural gas made from coal (gasification).
From 1850 to 1945, coal was our main source of fuel. As we added sources, we clung to the old: wood was still an important energy source for heating as well as natural gas for lighting; water and wind were used but used less.
At the turn of the century, the primary source of energy in this country changed. In the early 1900s oil and natural gas were our main fuel sources.
At the end of the 19th century Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated direct current electricity in Menlo Park and William Stanley demonstrated alternating current in Great Barrington. By the end of the 1900s life without electricity was unimaginable.
In 1859, oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. The discovery was nice enough but no one really knew what to do with it. Finally, the substance was refined into kerosene. Kerosene replaced whale oil to light lamps. The refining process left a waste product. The useless byproduct had to be safely destroyed. Debate ensued about methods of waste disposal. Some buried it, others burned it, but all disposed of it. They called it gasoline.
In less than 20 years, gasoline would no longer be a waste product but the energy that drove a new American economic age called the Gilded Age.
In the 20th century gasoline and electricity fired our lives and our imaginations. When oil became expensive and political, nuclear was discussed as were the reintroductions of solar, wind and water. Other alternative energy sources being used today are geothermal and bio mass.
Over time, our primary power source shifted from fire to wind to water, wood, coal, kerosene, gas and oil; from horses to horse power. Each time the primary source of power changed, it changed our lives, our lifestyle, and our impact on the planet. So here we are again. The source may change but our need for energy does not. We need energy to survive whether exhaustible, sustainable or renewable.
Part Two: When the source of energy changed, how did it change us?
