Between 1860 and World War I, there was a remarkable transition from reliance on the power of wind and water and the physical exertion of humans and animals to other sources of energy. This transition had begun in the first half of the nineteenth century but dramatically gained momentum in the second half. In 1850, more than three quarters of all power was furnished by animal energy, and human energy produced more power than machines did. On the eve of the Civil War, water power was far more important than steam power in the United States. During the 1870s, steam surpassed water as a source of power. Then two additional influences hastened the phasing out of the ancient water wheel and the more recently developed water turbine: (1) the ever-increasing efficiency of the steam engine, along with the increased safety of high-pressure boilers and (2) the opening up of vast and apparently inexhaustible supplies of coal as a result of the transportation revolution. By 1890, relatively few factories—mostly in the textile and paper industries—used direct water power, although gristmills and sawmills were still powered by this source.
At the time when steam engines had gained an unquestioned ascendancy, electricity appeared on the scene. Like steam, electricity was not a new source of energy; it was a new means of using energy generated either by the flow of water or the burning of fuel. But electricity brought about a remarkable improvement in the utilization of the older sources of energy. Because electric power is flexible and divisible, the power plant could be separated from the manufacturing establishment by long distances, and the cumbersome devices required to change the to-and-fro motion of the steam engine into rotary motion and then to transmit this motion were no longer necessary: The energy required to turn either a small or a large motor was readily “on tap.”
By World War I, one-third of the nation’s industrial power was provided by electricity, far more than in any other country. Nearly one-half of all urban dwellings had electric lights, although more than 98 percent of all farm families were burning kerosene lamps after dark.
The raw materials that produced energy were changing as well as the forms in which it was used. In 1890, coal was the source of 90 percent of the energy furnished to manufacturing; in the years just before 1920, coal remained the source of at least 80 percent of all industrial energy. But petroleum was rapidly growing more important, and hydropower was recovering. Within 25 years, petroleum and natural gas would become strategic fuels, although the transportation and manufacturing industries were planted squarely in the age of coal as late as 1920.
Steel manufacture required unprecedented amounts of capital in the form of great furnaces and mechanical aids as well as skilled workers who were able to judge when the time was ripe to tap Bessemer converters such as these.
World History
