Heat (43 page)

Iron tools—the defining characteristic of the Iron Age—came to different parts of the world at different times. They came first to the Middle East, around three thousand years ago, but spread quickly to India and Europe. Ignoring a few sites in North America where trade routes may have introduced iron tools relatively early, the Iron Age did not spread to the Americas until the time of European colonization. Similarly, the Iron Age came to Australia with European explorers and colonies.

A paper by Keith Branigan, Kevin Edwards, and Colin Merrony, “Bronze Age Fuel: The Oldest Direct Evidence for Deep Peat Cutting and Stack Construction?”
Antiquity
76, no. 293 (2002): 849–55, describes a stack of peat cut for fuel around 2000 BC in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. The individual bricks of peat held imprints of fingers and thumbs. The degree to which peat was used as fuel in the Bronze Age and Iron Age is not well known, but it seems obvious that people would have used peat before they would have cut and carried firewood from beyond the immediate vicinity of their homes.

According to Robert Galloway in
A History of Coal Mining
(London: Macmillan, 1882), indoor open hearths were still in use in the late 1800s in Ireland and the highlands of Scotland: “The smoke from fires so situated pervaded the whole apartment, and made its escape by a hole in the roof, or by the doorway—a primitive arrangement to be met with even at the present day in some parts of the Highlands of Scotland and west of Ireland, where peat fuel is still used.”

Benjamin Franklin’s worries in 1744 about fuel shortages appeared in his self-published essay “An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-Places,” and again four decades later in his comments about firewood demand outstripping supply in France, which appeared in his letter to John Ingenhousz, in Vienna, titled “On the Causes and Cure of Smoky Chimneys,” written on August 28, 1785. The letter is preserved in
The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Volume VI
, published in Boston in 1884 by Charles Tappan and readily available online.

John Evelyn’s
Fumifugium
was reprinted many times—in 1772, 1825, 1930, 1933, 1944, 1961, and 1976. The 1944 printing was by the National Society for Clean Air. I used the 1976 reprint, by the
Rota
at the University of Exeter, which is a facsimile of the 1661 version. It is available online at www.archive.org/stream/fumifugium00eveluoft#page/n5/mode/2up. The preface offers a short biography of Evelyn, describing him as a “connoisseur of cities.” He did not look favorably on London.

Lord Macaulay was a British intellectual and politician active in the first half of the nineteenth century. His comments about chimney taxes come from
The Complete Works of Lord Macaulay, History of England
, which was completed by his sister after his death in 1859. This book has been digitized and is available from Google Books. The Pepysian Library refers to the collections of Samuel Pepys, which, at the time of his death, included thousands of volumes, including copies of his diaries. Per his instructions, the library was bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys was a chronic diarist from 1660 until 1669. His work became an important source of primary information and firsthand impressions, including impressions of the plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, which he described as “a lamentable fire.”

The 1842 Parliamentary Commission report—which, in addition to the twelve-year-old girl’s testimony, included comments about miners as “dregs” who practiced polygamy—was the “First Report of the Commission for Inquiring into Employment of Children in Mines and Manufacturers, 1842.” The report is also quoted by Barbara Freeze in her book
Coal: A Human History
, and she attributed it to J. U. Nef’s
The Rise of the British Coal Industry
(London: Frank Cass, 1966).

The account of Charles Dickens’s plans to write an article on child labor comes from Peter Kirby, “Early Victorian Social Investigation and the Mines Commission of 1842,” Manchester Papers in Economic and Social History, no. 66 (University of Manchester, 2009). Kirby’s article references a letter written by Dickens in 1841: “I have made solemn pledges to write about [mining] children.”

Charles Dickens’s interview with a coal miner was published as “A Coal Miner’s Evidence,”
Household Words
, December 7, 1850.

When Dickens published
Bleak House
, he was criticized for giving some credence to the existence of spontaneous human combustion. Dickens defended himself in the preface of an 1868 edition of
Bleak House
, claiming, “I do not willfully or negligently mislead my readers. Before I wrote that description, I took pains to investigate the subject.” Since then, others have defended the existence of spontaneous human combustion, but if it in fact exists, it occurs very rarely and without any currently plausible explanation. For readers prone to anxiety, there are far better things to worry about than the possibility of spontaneously combusting while reading
Heat
.

John Holland, in
The History and Description of Fossil Fuels, the Collieries, and Coal Trade of Great Britain
(London: Whittaker and Company, 1835), described the draining of the River Garnock. His description was based on “the Scotch newspapers.” No one was killed in this incident.

The title of Edward Somerset’s
The Century of Inventions
(1655) refers not to one hundred years of inventions but to one hundred inventions. He described both the basic workings of the steam engine and also various tasks to which it could be applied, including the pumping of water. Charles Partington of the London Institution, a science society prevalent in the 1800s, wrote a letter to Doctor George Birkbeck, president of the London Mechanics’ Institution, that was included as an introductory note in an 1825 reprint of
The Century of Inventions
: “As a connecting link in the History of the Steam Engine, I know that your attention has been directed to the Marquis of Worcester’s
Century of Inventions
, and that its merits were duly appreciated by you at a very early period of Life.” Beginning on page 101, this edition includes a description of the history and mechanics of steam engines, along with excellent sketches, including improvements brought about by James Watt. The description argues that Somerset’s book contains all the information one would need to understand the workings of Savery’s steam engine. This may be true, but it is equally true that Somerset’s work lacked the detail that would be needed to build or patent a steam engine.

The full title of the book on steam engines by Dionysius Lardner and James Renwick is
The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated, with an Historical Sketch of Its Invention and Progressive Improvement, Its Applications to Navigation and Railways; with Plain Maxims for Railway Speculators
(New York: A. S. Barnes, 1865). Today this book would interest steam enthusiasts, but it does not convey a simple understanding of steam engines and their workings. Steam engines are not “familiarly explained” in this book, but for highly motivated and patient readers, they are explained well enough through text and illustrations. As an example: “The fuel is maintained in a state of combustion, on the bars, in that part of the tube represented at D; and the flame is carried by the draft of the chimney round the curved flue, and issues at E into the chimney. The flame is thus conducted through the water, so as to expose the latter to as much heat as possible.”

Lardner and Renwick also described concerns regarding traction. An engine might be able to turn wheels, but would the wheels propel the cart or simply spin, to no good effect? They described an approach to traction that modeled itself after the legs and feet of an animal, rather than wheels: “It will be apparent from this description, that the piece of mechanism here exhibited is a contrivance derived from the motion of the legs of an animal, and resembling in all respects the fore legs of a horse. It is however to be regarded rather as a specimen of great ingenuity than as a contrivance of practical utility.” It was important for inventors to ascertain “that the adhesion or friction of the wheels with the rails on which they moved was amply sufficient to propel the engine, even when dragging after it a load of great weight.”

Stephenson’s first train, the
Blücher,
was named after Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, a Prussian general who helped to defeat Napoleon. Blücher was known for his utter hatred of the French.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comments about coal as a portable climate come from his 1860 essay “Wealth,” which was part of
The Conduct of Life
, a book that today might be sold from the self-help shelves of major bookstores. In this essay, he suggested that we call coal “black diamonds.”

Chauncy Harris’s description of Europe just after the war comes from “The Ruhr Coal-Mining District,”
Geographical Review
36, no. 2 (1946): 194–221. Harris was a geography professor in Chicago, well known in the field for his work on Soviet geography, an especially important topic during the Cold War. He died in 2003.

One important source for information about the history of the oil industry is Daniel Yergin’s amazing book
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). Two decades later,
The Prize
is now dated, but it remains amazing in its scope and insightfulness about an extremely complex industry. One can only hope that Yergin will eventually write a sequel to explain how things have changed since
The Prize
was published. Another important source is William Brice’s
Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
(Oil City, Pa.: Oil Region Alliance of Business, Industry, and Tourism, 2009), which includes many pages of original correspondence and other documents from the time of Drake.

Bissell is often credited with the idea of drilling for oil, but there remains some controversy over this point. Drake may originally have taken the idea to Bissell. Salt wells were common in the area, and it is easy to imagine that drilling for oil would have occurred to more than one person. Similarly, the exact date on which oil was found in the Drake well is a matter of some uncertainty. Some of the early accounts listed dates that did not exist, such as “Saturday August 18, 1859,” and “Saturday August 28, 1859,” but the eighteenth was in fact a Thursday that year, and the twenty-eighth was a Sunday. Adding to the confusion, neither Drake nor Smith realized they had struck oil until the day after the well had struck oil. In any case, most historical accounts give the date as August 27, 1859, and I have followed that convention here.

Cable drilling or percussion drilling is still used today, but only for shallow wells and more commonly for water wells than for oil or gas wells. Rotary drilling, commonly used in modern oil and gas fields, uses a spinning bit similar to that of drill bits used by carpenters.

Uncle Billy Smith’s account of the Drake Well fire comes from an article in the
Titusville Weekly Herald
, January 15, 1880, reprinted in part in William Brice’s aforementioned
Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
.

The Derrick’s Hand-Book of Petroleum
(Oil City, Pa.: Derrick Publishing Company, 1898) presents the statistics of the nascent petroleum industry, from 1859 to 1898, with information on exports, field operations, market quotations, and other details. It remains available in both paper and electronic versions.

The well names come from William Wright’s
The Oil Regions of Pennsylvania
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865), reprinted as an Elibron Classic in 2005. To my knowledge, individual wells are seldom named today, but the practice of naming oil fields continues—for example, Northstar, Liberty, Burger, Klondike, and Alpine are Alaskan oil fields, and Thunderhorse is an oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.

The words in the flier for Kier’s Petroleum were preserved in J. T. Henry,
The Early and Later History of Petroleum, with Authentic Facts in Regard to Its Development in Western Pennsylvania
(Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers, 1873). The newspaper article praising rock oil in 1892 was quoted in P. H. Giddens,
Pennsylvania Petroleum, 1750–1872, a Documentary History: Drake Well Memorial Park
(Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947). Mark Twain’s words came from a handwritten letter addressed to J. H. Todd, dated November 20, 1905. An electronic copy of the letter is widely available and frequently quoted.

The stories of the
Elizabeth Watts,
the
Zoroaster,
the
Moses
(a third vessel not mentioned in the text), and the
Glückauf
(a fourth vessel not mentioned in the text) are well known and often repeated. Which of these, if any, should be thought of as the first true oil tanker depends on how oil tankers are defined. Unlike the
Elizabeth Watts,
the
Zoroaster
had built-in tankage, but the tanks were not part of the hull of the ship. The
Moses,
another Nobel ship, is sometimes said to be the first tanker to use the inside of its hull as a tank. The
Glückauf
(German for “lucky” or “get lucky”) used its hull as a tank but also included extensive plumbing and some safety features common on modern oil tankers. The
Glückauf,
despite its name, ended its life in 1893 on a beach at Fire Island, New York, where sport divers still explore its scattered remains.