Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity

Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for. It once held great mystery and excitement, at least for the geeks of the mid-19th century, like Clifford Pyncheon, a bed-ridden felon with an interest in metaphysics, in the passage below. After all, electricity had been associated with lightning and lightning was no good for anybody. This substance you couldn’t see and that you could only detect by the raising of the hair could make a dead frog’s legs jump as if it were alive (“It’s ALIVE!”).

In this passage, we see that old view of electricity — the demon, the angel — with the later, functional view of electricity. Clifford screams passionately! The old man just talks about the application, the telegraph, and its impacts on the social world of the day.

“Then there is electricity — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain instinct with intelligence! Or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, “it is an excellent thing — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers.”

The Pyncheon family, by way of making them more interesting to you, were real, and kin to  Thomas Pynchon, the master of the paranoid tech novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables,

 

Faulkner on the Automobile, 1935

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

 

Big Oil Literature: Lot’s Wife as Barrel of Crude

I picked up a hilariously awesome and quite informative book, The Rise of American Oil, at a secretive bookseller on 17th and Mission. Through a locked gate and up three outdoor-carpeted flights of stairs, I found a smorgasbord of strange books including this 1948 paean to crude by Leonard M. Fanning. It’s blurbed by a bunch of midcentury oil company executives including Jake L. Hamon, an Ardmore, Pennsylvania oil baron apparently writing from beyond the grave as he’d been murdered in 1948. Hamon wrote, “You have been able to translate the story of oil into literature.”

And indeed, Fanning argued for the place of oil in literature, opening his introduction with a brief review of the appearances that petroleum had made in the world’s literature and myths. He glosses oil’s Roman appearances, the knowledge of the natives of Burma, the far East’s early oil-lit, and the burning oil springs of Baku in the Caucasus, but it’s this next line that caught my eye.

“In the Scriptures the word translated ’salt’ is used indiscriminately for common salt, niter, and bitumen or petroleum,” we read.

Leaving aside the veracity of this testimony about Hebrew scripture, this could lead to an incredible energy-focused rewrite of a classic Old Testament scene. You think of Lot’s wife, running from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah turning at the last second to see the destruction of the city visited upon it by archangels and — because she disobeyed God — turning into a pillar of salt or maybe Genesis 23-28 should read like this:

The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

But his looked back from behind him, and she became a barrel of oil.

And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord: And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

The weird thing is: the story actually makes more sense this way. God warns that if you look back, you’ll be “consumed” — and oil burns a lot better than salt. (Shortly, thereafter, you’ll recall, Lot’s daughters get him really drunk and then sleep with him. Which is neither here nor there, but part of the story anyway.)

Turns out, Fanning and I are not the only ones with such imagination. Zion Oil and Gas Inc’s founders believe that the Bible reveals the location of vast amounts of hydrocarbons reserved solely for Israel. Here’s a bit of teaser text from the video, which is required watching:

“At least one company believes that God not only has provided this natural resource for the land and people of Israel, but that it’s promise and discovery are actually predicted in the pages of Holy Scripture,” we hear, and that company is publicly-traded on the American Stock Exchange under the ticker, ZN. It’s got a market cap of about $67 million.

Zion Oil and Gas: A Special Company, With a Special Task, In a Special County

 

the scholarly history of american energy and the corporate futures of Big Oil

Trolling for resources on the first oil boom/bust, I came across a class historian of technology, Peter Shulman (now at Case Western), taught at MIT called “Energy and Environment in America: 1750-2005.”

The syllabus is a brilliant resource for history of energy and industrialization fans. Here are the books are articles I culled from the list:

• The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Milton Keynes and Judy Wajcman
  This appears to be very influential, cited over 800 times. Here’s a quick (in academic circles) overview of the research and literature surrounding the social shaping of technology [pdf].
• Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880-1940, David Nye
  “Using Muncie, Indiana, as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture.”
• Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, Deborah Fitzgerald
  A bonus for this title — the first 40 or so pages in PDF courtesy of Yale University Press
• Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black
  “Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley’s descent into environmental hell.”
• The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Adam Rome
  “the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States”
• Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, Daniel Horowitz
  “Through carefully selected documents that bring together the high-level White House decision-making process and the national conversation about energy, Daniel Horowitz helps students understand both the crises of the 1970s and the continuing relationship between American economic and foreign policy.”

And a special note on a text included in Shulman’s class, Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, edited by George Marcus.

Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but Shell, Chevron, and the rest of the Big Oil companies put out scenarios about the future of energy that you can only call science fiction. They even give the divergent future worlds they describe catchy, one-word names — Scramble, Blueprint — as if they were a restaurant you might trek across town to visit after glimpsing it through the window of a cab on a foggy night. Shell’s latest visions come with videos and flash animations. One video, transcript here [doc], seems to be talking about our real world:

In the Scramble world, events outpace actions. Security of energy supply and fears of losing economic ground shape decision-making. For the next 10 years, people from all walks of life join in the debate about energy and climate change. But no one seems truly wedded to action on a large scale. Governments generally choose solutions that are politically straightforward, and local. They prefer to rely on indigenous energy sources.  So coal makes a big come-back in some regions, despite its higher emissions… Drivers stay with liquid fuels. With oil becoming harder to find and produce, biofuel use grows rapidly. In the Scramble world, no one is prepared to change the status quo. Dealing with today’s problem takes priority. By the 2020s, life has become volatile and uncertain.  Energy availability is often tight.  Severe weather events are blamed on a lack of previous action on climate change.

But there’s hope. We do not have to take that nasty path, which might end up with consumers getting angry about the whole Big Oil thing. Instead, we can manage and plan our way out of the energy mess. All we need is, is… a Blueprint. It’s improbable story sounds like Barack:

The world of Blueprints shows what can happen when actions outpace events. Groups of seemingly disconnected people in California – venture capitalists, farmers, politicians – collaborate around opportunities for profitable action on climate change.Publics put international pressure on governments for change.  Smart investments in modern facilities improve air pollution, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions all at the same time. This isn’t a sudden outbreak of altruism.  It’s a recognition of shared interests, new opportunities for profitable business, and the benefits of taking action before it’s forced by circumstances. In the world of Blueprints, local actions spread and join up – like the C40 megacities pact of mayors and others, experimenting and sharing good practices around carbon emissions, transport and energy efficiency.

And of course the good world is what Shell wants. Because what’s good for the world is good for Shell, and vice versa. Of course.

In any case, these scenarios have a long and fascinating history, requiring, as they do, the application of the principles of fiction. Here’s a chapter from Corporate Futures that deals with the writing and editing of a set of Shell scenarios [pdf]. It’s structured as a Q&A between Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor (and now director of LBJ’s library) who wrote the 1992 scenarios, and Robbie Davis-Floyd, a cultural anthropologist at UT-Austin, who share a “mutual fascination with myth.”

Flowers described Shell’s reasoning for making up the future ahead of time:

And they said, well, it’s actually not only false to have straight-line forecasting, but it’s dangerous because you can be lulled into thinking you do know the future, that you have the story for the future, and that the future is the past, put into the future. So what they decided to do instead was to build self-conscious stories, that is, they would call them “stories,” and to build two of them, equally persuasive, based on the same statistical beginning point and statistically told, that is, told in economic language, for thirty years into the future. They would spend three years putting this together with a team of twenty or so from all over the world, and then they’d spend the next year disseminating them in workshops around the world, so that what you got was a common culture based on not a story about the future but two stories about the future.

Seems a bit like a stall tactic, huh? Or at the least a bit of Sophistry, even if it was sophisticated and filled with charts and tables and good faith. What’s really interesting about this is that Shell finally got around to picking a scenario for the first time this year.

Blueprint it is, from now on.

But it being a social media heavy world now, and all 2.0 and stuff, Chevron one-upped Shell and came out with Energyville, a SimCity game designed to teach you how hard it is to power the world. I’m sure a post-doc somewhere is out there analyzing it as literature, and rightly so.

Sometimes, when I went to get deep on something, I just open up the log-in screen and listen to the piano-and-string heavy musical loop over and over. The problem is that I see an important event — someone dying/living, a mother holding a baby for the first time, a son coming of age — and then the loop ends and the vision fades, sometimes before I even recognize the faces of the people.

The game is all part of Chevron’s advertising campaign: Will You Join Us? This morning, I saw a San Francisco bus idling, fully-encased in the slogan.

 

yellow coal, our only hope for a new motive power

This story, Yellow Coal, written by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in the 1920s deserves some kind of geek medal for imagining the exact current nature of the climate weirding and anticipating the X-Prize competition we would invent to solve it. Astounding.

The economic barometer at Harvard University had continually pointed to bad weather. But even its exact readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its energies. Oil wells were running dry. The energy-producing effect of black, white and brown coal was diminishing yearly. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snow-caps, melted by the perennial summer, could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine-generators would stop.

The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled round like a dervish dancing his last furious dance.

If nations had ignored political strictures and come to each other’s aid, salvation might have been theirs. But adversity only exacerbated ideas of jingoism, and soon all the New and Old World Reichs, Staats, Republics and Lands — like the fish on the desiccated bottoms of erstwhile lakes — were covered with a viscous sheath, swathed in borders like the filaments of cocoons, and raising customs duties to astronomical levels.

The one agency of an international sort was the Commission for the Access of New and Original Energies: CANOE. To the person who discovered a new energy source, a motive power as yet unknown on earth, CANOE promised a seven-figure sum.

 

BLDGBLOG: comp lit construction

I do wonder, meanwhile, if the temporary micro-culture of the construction site has been adequately documented by architectural historians. Industrial yards have certainly had their day, from documentaries about WWII dockworkers to historical surveys of Solidarity; and construction sites have obviously long been a focus for painters and photographers.

But have literature and history given the attention due to sites of architectural assembly?

Do we need a Construction Site Reader – the comparative literature of massive construction sites?

BLDGBLOG: The Comparative Literature of Massive Construction Sites

Hell yes we do!

I remember working commercial construction for a measly week one summer in college. The men on the job charted their lives by the projects they’d worked on, where they’d built the walls, framed the doors, destroyed the second level.

“You know that McDonald’s over in Salmon Creek. I drywalled that. The Betty’s Bento place too and the Hi-School Pharmacy two three years ago,” said the composite sketch of my former comrades.

Combine that with the bedrock from the Library of Congress’ Built in America collection of “50,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century,” and you’d be on to something.

Image: The Fordyce Bathhouse, a 1915 spa in the Ozarks, described in the the Built in America collection at the Library of Congress: “Praised by its original owner as ‘the most practical, complete, and luxurious bathhouse in the world,’ the Fordyce Bathhouse in Hot Springs stands today as a reminder of the international health-spa craze of the first half of the twentieth century.”