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THE ELECTRIC GRID AND THE BATTLE OF THE SYSTEMS

When first cities and then regions began to build electric grids, a decision had to be made whether to use direct current or alternating current. On the side of DC were Thomas Edison and Edison Electric; the champions of AC were Tesla and Westinghouse.

The “battle of the systems” was fought in multiple arenas: legislatures, courthouses, and the court of public opinion. Harold Brown, a New York engineer with a knack for publicity, was hired by Edison to lead the crusade against AC.

At Columbia University in 1888, Brown claimed to demonstrate the danger of AC by using it to electrocute a dog that he first tortured with DC, to the disgust of his audience. He had practiced for the demonstration by using dogs for which he had paid New Jersey children. Undeterred, Brown carried out other public electrocutions of dogs as well as calves and a horse. When George Westinghouse scoffed at these spectacles, Brown publicly challenged him to an electrical duel: “I challenge Mr. Westinghouse to meet me in the presence of competent electrical experts and take through his body the alternating current while I take through mine a continuous current.”
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When the state of New York, with Edison’s advice, carried out the first execution in an electric chair, the criminal, William Kemmler, did not die at first, but squirmed in agony; successive doses of electricity killed him only by cooking him, to the horror of the witnesses. Edison tried to promote “Westinghousing” as a synonym for “electrocution.”

The war was won by AC. After J. P. Morgan eased Edison out, Edison General Electric merged with Thomson-Houston General Electric (later General Electric) and cooperated with Westinghouse to build a Niagara power station that supplied electricity to a local industrial complex and the city of Buffalo, New York. The electric utility industry adopted a synthesis of DC and AC that remains standard today.

The battle of the currents had a gruesome coda. In 1903, her owners decided to put down Topsy, an elephant at a Coney Island amusement park who had killed three people, including a trainer who tried to force a burning cigarette into her mouth. After it was decided that hanging an elephant was impractical, the owners settled on electrocution, and in front of a crowd on January 4, 1903, festooned with electrodes, Topsy collapsed as more than six thousand volts of electricity coursed through her massive body. Edison distributed a motion picture entitled
Electrocuting an Elephant
.

THE ELECTRIC MOTOR

Electricity transformed industrial production by permitting the factory to be located far from the ultimate source of power. Equally important was the adoption by industry of the electric motor.

In 1824, the British scientist and inventor Michael Faraday demonstrated that electromagnetic induction could convert electrical current into rotary motion. Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821 and the dynamo in 1831. Edison made small DC motors in the 1880s, but the industry was soon dominated by the three-phase (polyphase) AC motors that Westinghouse began to sell in 1892.

Electric motors transformed industrial production. In steam-powered factories, steam engines transmitted their motion to the machinery by way of shafts that turned belts and pulleys. Within the factory, small electric motors could now power separate machines. This allowed factories to spread out horizontally on a single story and opened up space overhead for electric lighting or natural light admitted through sawtooth windows. By the 1940s, four-fifths of the power in American factories was supplied by electric motors.
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Electric motors transformed the household as well as the factory. Small electric motors powered refrigerators, washing machines, driers, gramophones, radios, televisions, videocassette recorders, and personal computers.

THE STEAM TURBINE

Most of the world’s electricity in the early twenty-first century comes from steam turbines that use heat generated by coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear energy to turn water into steam. The steam spins the blades of a turbine fan; the mechanical energy is then converted to electricity in a turbogenerator.

While Thomas Edison is a household name, few have heard of Charles Parsons. And yet he was one of the founders of the modern electrical industry. The son of a famous astronomer, William Parsons, third earl of Rosse in Ireland, Parsons graduated from Cambridge with a first-class honors degree in mathematics. He made an unusual choice for someone of his background and became an engineer. In 1884, he was the head of the electrical equipment division of Clarke, Chapman and Co., which manufactured ship engines near Newcastle in Yorkshire. Parsons developed a steam turbine that made electricity both abundant and cheap. In 1888, he installed steam turbines at a Newcastle power station. In 1889, he founded his own company to equip military and civilian ships with turbines. In 1897, he demonstrated the
Turbinia
, an experimental ship that was the fastest in the world. Parsons licensed his turbine technology to Westinghouse in the United States. Parsons’s steam turbine cost only a third as much as early steam engines, had an eighth of the weight, and occupied only a tenth of the space.
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Water turbines provide roughly a fifth of global electricity today.
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The age of electricity might just as well have been called the age of coal. Americans obtained twice as much energy from wood as from coal in 1876. But in 1900, coal provided 71 percent of America’s energy supply, wood 21 percent, and oil, natural gas, and hydropower less than 3 percent each.
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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, coal still provided by far the majority of the energy used to generate electricity in American power plants.

THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE

After electricity, the most important transformative technology of the second industrial revolution was the internal combustion engine.

Internal combustion engines come in two varieties, both invented in Germany in the nineteenth century: the Otto engine and the Diesel engine. In the 1860s, numerous inventors experimented with engines driven by explosive mixtures of gas or oil and air. After a Belgian inventor, Jean-Étienne Lenoir, developed a gas engine between 1859 and 1876, the German inventor Nikolaus August Otto developed the four-stroke engine. In 1878, Otto patented an engine that used coal gas as a fuel. In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach adapted Otto’s engine to use gasoline. Early electric cars and steam-powered cars could not compete with the performance of cars with gasoline engines. In the same year, 1885, Karl Benz built the first automobile, powered by a gasoline engine of his own design.

Rudolf Diesel’s engine, patented in 1892, was based on a different approach. High pressure caused the fuel to ignite spontaneously. Diesel engines are more efficient, with energy conversion ratios of 40 percent, compared to 30 percent for the best gasoline engines. Cheaper but heavier, they were quickly used for trucking, rail, and shipping, but not aviation, in which lighter kerosene was employed. Because of high gasoline taxes in Europe, nearly half of passenger automobiles ran on diesel fuel by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In 1891, Émile Lavassor established what remains the basic design of the automobile, down to the electrical ignition and the carburetor. The automobile industry benefited from the earlier development of the bicycle industry. Widespread use of bicycles followed the development of the safety bicycle by a British inventor, John K. Starley, in 1885. In 1888, an inventive veterinarian in Ireland, J. B. Dunlop, put the first pneumatic tires on the wheels of his son’s tricycle. First the spread of bicycling and then the use of automobiles produced a demand for modern roads and highways.

Internal combustion engines were soon used not only for automobiles but also for planes, boats, tractors, and small devices like lawn mowers. During World War I diesel engines were used in ships and submarines and became the basis of global shipping.

MAGICAL MATERIALS

Many other technologies were part of the second industrial revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often they served the most important technologies, as rubber served the electric industry and the oil industry served the automobile industry.

In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake drilled a petroleum well in Pennsylvania; his original goal was to substitute kerosene for costly whale oil in lamps. As the oil fields of Pennsylvania were depleted, new fields were discovered in Texas and California and abroad, in Dutch Indonesia, the Baku fields on the Caspian Sea, Romania, Mexico, Venezuela, Trinidad, and Iran. After World War II, new oilfields were developed in the Middle East, Nigeria, Siberia, and Alaska. By 1960, oil surpassed coal as the primary fossil fuel in the world.
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When electric lighting replaced kerosene lamps, oil found a new use, as a fuel for cars, trucks, tractors, planes, and ships. Natural gas (methane), at first considered a worthless by-product of crude oil, began to be used for heating and transportation.

Rubber was another key technology of the second industrial revolution, important for electrical insulation as well as for its use in automobile tires. In the 1840s, the American inventor Charles Goodyear succeeded in using a blend of sulfur, latex, and white lead to create “vulcanized” rubber. In 1852, when Goodyear sued a rival in Trenton, New Jersey, for infringement of his patent, he was represented by Daniel Webster, while another great American lawyer, Rufus Choate, represented his opponent. Webster brought all his oratorical gifts to bear in describing the new substance: “It is hard like metal and as elastic as pure original gum elastic. Why, that is as great and momentous a phenomenon occurring to men in the progress of their knowledge, as it would be for a man to show that iron and gold could remain iron and gold and yet become elastic like India Rubber.” Webster contrasted Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber with the older kind, which tended to melt in heat and grew rigid with cold: “A friend in New York sent me a very fine cloak of India Rubber, and a hat of the same material. I did not succeed very well with them. I took the cloak one day and set it out in the cold. It stood very well by itself. I surmounted it with the hat, and many persons passing by supposed they saw, standing by the porch, the Farmer of Marshfield.”
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Goodyear won his case but thanks to further patent litigation he died in debt.

In 1842, Goodyear gave some samples of his product to Stephen Moulton, a British businessman, and they made their way to the Scottish manufacturer Charles Macintosh, who had independently created the waterproof garment that bore his name. But it was in the late nineteenth century that the rubber industry grew rapidly, to supply tires first for bicycles and then for cars.

Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, founded in 1893, became the largest rubber manufacturer in the United States and the world. The Firestone tire business was founded by Harvey Firestone, a mechanic who worked in Akron, Ohio, at his cousin’s factory, putting rubber tires on horse-drawn carriages. Henry Ford visited in 1895 and adopted Firestone’s solid rubber tires for the rims of the metal wheels of his cars. In later years, Ford, Firestone, and Edison vacationed together. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, the founder of B. F. Goodrich, adapted the pneumatic tires devised by Michelin in France to American automobiles.

Until the early twentieth century, rubber continued to be derived from rubber trees. Seeking to avoid dependence on the British rubber plantations in Indonesia and Malaya, Firestone established his own rubber plantations in Liberia while Ford tried but failed to do the same in Amazonia in Brazil. Between World War I and World War II, American and German chemists learned how to make artificial rubber. This allowed the United States to make a million tons of rubber a year during World War II, even after Japan had conquered Southeast Asia.

Although steel was superior to wrought iron, in premodern times its cost limited its use to valuable implements like swords and plowshares. In 1856, Henry Bessemer discovered a method to make steel cheap. The Bessemer converter, followed by other innovations, radically reduced the cost of steel, benefiting existing industries like railroads and making possible entirely new uses for steel—in the framework of skyscrapers, for example.

Germany, with its superior system of state-funded research universities, led the world in the development of scientific chemistry and the chemical industry. German scientists and industrialists learned to create synthetic substitutes for natural dyes like indigo. Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and Alwin Mittasch devised the Haber-Bosch process for creating artificial ammonia used in fertilizers and explosives, including dynamite, which was developed by the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel, who used his fortune to endow the Nobel prizes. The Germans also learned to create artificial potash or potassium, an ingredient of fertilizers, as a substitute for the variety derived from plants. The use of fertilizers produced by the chemical industry rather than nature made possible a revolution in agricultural productivity, as did the falling costs of steel farm implements and the development of tractors and other machines using internal combustion engines.

Plastics were another transformative technology spawned by the chemicals industry. John Wesley Hyatt, an American, devised celluloid, the first plastic, in 1869, and Leo Baekeland, a Belgian immigrant in the United States, discovered Bakelite in 1907.
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Applied chemistry also transformed medicine, by supplying disinfectants, anesthetics, and aspirin (discovered by Felix Hoffman and manufactured by the German firm Bayer AG—thus Bayer Aspirin).
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Canned food first became important during the Civil War and later allowed growing urban populations to eat preserved meat, vegetables, and fruit. As early as 1870, refrigerated beef was shipped from the United States to Britain, and in 1876 Charles Tellier, a French engineer, devised the first refrigerated ship, the
Frigorifique
.
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The development of small-scale refrigerators for the home helped to revolutionize domestic life.