The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery

Now, friends, this is what I call an economic stimulus plan! John Adolphus Etzler, writing in 1836 , recommended a strict diet of solar, tidal, and wind power — and if we followed his recommendations, we’d end up with, well, you know, utopia:

I promise to show the means for creating a paradise within ten years, where every thing desirable for human life may be had for every man in superabundance, without labour, without pay; where the whole face of nature is changed into the most beautiful form of which it be capable; where man maj live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without his labour, in one year more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; he may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, intersect every where the land with beautiful canals, with roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling 1000 miles in twenty-four hours; he may cover the ocean with floating islands moveable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security and in all comforts and luxury, bearing gardens, palaces, with thousands of families, provided with rivulets of sweet water; he may explore the interior of the globe, travel from pole to pole in a. fortnight; he may provide himself with means unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; he may lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments unknown yet; he may free himself.

Not even Barack has that much hope for green renewal. Although, it is rather impressive that it turns out that we can do all of the stuff that he suggested.

From: The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by John Adolphus Etzler

Image: A big turbine and a little barn. flickr/tlindenbaum

 

he who unites the paranormal and the solar

Charles Greeley Abbott wasn’t any ordinary head of the Smithsonian Insitute. One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists and a specialist in all things sun,  he invented one of the first solar cookers, seen above. And he happened to believe in paranormal phenomenon. All around, he must have been a pretty interesting guy, particularly after a few drinks.

Abbott wrote a book in 1938, while director of the Smithsonian, in which he ran down the state of sun science, The Sun and the Welfare of Man. The fascinating thing about this work is that it’s a scientific work about observing and measuring — spots, strength, variability, etc — that happens to include a chapter about “Harnessing the Sun.” It’s hard to imagine an astrophysicist just kind of dropping solar machines into the center of his book, but that’s what Abbott did. And along the way he provided a decently comprehensive history of early solar machines, courtesy of a many-page long quotation from A.S.E Ackerman, first published on US soil in the 1915 Smithsonian Report.

One rarely mentioned project is pictured below.

Here’s what Ackerman had to say about this very, very early solor motor:

A.G. Eneas, in the United States, used the popular truncated, cone-shaped reflector, collecting about 700 square feet of solar radiation. The weight of the reflector was 8,300 pounds.

The boiler was formed of two concentric steel tubes, the two together being incased in two glass tubes with a air space between them and another air space between the inner glass one and the outer steel tube. The water circulated up between the inner and outer steel tubes and down the inner tube. The boiler was placed at the axis of the cone. Its length was 13 feet 6 inche, its water capacity 834 pounds, and steam space 8 cubic feet. Hence the diameter of the outer tube appears to have been 1 foot 2 inches and the concentration of radiation 13.4; i.e. 13.4 square feet of sunshine were concentrated on each square foot of the external surface of the boiler…

The sun-power plant known as the Pasadena one was described and illustrated in the August, 1901, issue of Cassier’s Magazine by Prof. R.H. Thurston and on page 103 of the Railway and Engineering review of February 23, 1901. It is stated to have been designed by, and erected at hte expense of, ‘a party of Boston inventors whose names have not been made public.” …

‘According to newspaper accounts the all day average work performed by the engine is 1,400 gallons of water lifted 12 feet per minute, which is at a rate of 4 horsepower’ …

The Pasadena plant is said to have cost 1,000 pounds and Willsie, writing of it in 190, says it was the “largest and strongest of the mirror type of solar motor ever built.”

Image: Abbot, Charles Greeley. The sun and the welfare of man. (Smithsonian Scientific Series, Volume 2)
New York: Smithsonian institution series, inc., 1938. Scanned by the University of Wisconsin library.

 

the best patent app ever: “sky turbine that is mounted on a city”

This 2005 patent application for a city-mounted sky turbine isn’t historical, but it is totally awesome. Congrats, Manfred Karl Brueckner. It also contains a little bit of amateur history, promising that renewable energy sources will deliver electricity too cheap to meter. While dubious it’s also some of the snappiest writing you’re likely to see in the patent archives.

Mankind’ s recorded history began in the stone age,
then continued in the bronze age and the iron age, to our
present age, the industrial revolution. At the present time,
electricity is produced by hydroelectric dams, atomically or
by the burning of hydrocarbons. Production of electricity by
hydroelectric dams is limited and is also destructive to the
environment. The burning of coal deposits mercury and acid
rain into the environment. Toxic ash must also be disposed
of. Nuclear power production is plagued with the problem of
long term storage of radioactive waste. In 1954, Lewis
Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said
that atomic reactors might someday produce such an abundance
of energy that electricity would become “too cheap to
meter”. What nuclear power failed to do, sky power using
the present invention may accomplish. It will be the backbone
of our next age, the solar age, in which all our energy
needs are satisfied by power currently provided by the sun.

 

the world’s biggest wind turbine experiments

As electrification swept across America, it pushed the nation’s long-turning windmills out of commission. Though hundreds of thousands still operated through the 50s and 60s, most farmers opted for the ease and stability of grid power.

But there were holdouts, like Joh Lorenzen of Iowa. A 1975 National Geographic feature by Roger Hamilton,  “Can We Harness the Wind?” tells the story of his tilting for windmills.

Not so many years ago thousands like Mr. Lorenzen generated their own power. Then, during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Rural Electrification Administration crisscrossed the nation’s farmlands with power lines; the West became a windmill graveyeard.

But not on John Lorenzen’s farm. He pointed down his driveway, where overhead lines bypass his cluster of tidy buildings:

“They tried to get me to hook up, all right,” he said, laughing. “But I wouldn’t. There was nothing wrong with wind machines that I could see.”

And sure enough, no matter what electrical gadgetry came along-vaccum cleaner, dishwasher, TV-his wind generator powered it. When the wind does slacken, generally during August, he’s ready with banks of storage batteries.

Not exactly your typical off-grid hippie, right?

Like many of the popular press articles from the mid-70s, it feels more contemporary than it should. They invoke NASA research the same way we reporters do now, to denote that we are entering cutting edge territory.

NASA’s prototype for the future is the 100kW Experimental Wind-Turbine Generator at the Plum Brook test area in Ohio. Its two slender blades span 125 feet, and turn a 100-kilowatt generator. Perhaps 30 homes could depend on it for power.

Although it dwarfs John Lorenzen’s wind generators, the 100kW doesn’t set a record for size. Dr. Joseph M. Savino, a founder of NASA’s wind program, waved to shelves of yellowed books and papers, and told me of wind power’s largely forgotten history in the Soviet Union, Denmark, France, England, and Germany.

In the United States, during the war years of 1941 to 1945, the biggest wind machine in history towered over Grandpa’s Knob, a mountain near Rutland, Vermont. Its two eight-ton blades stretched 175 feet from tip to tip.

What I want to know is: where are all those yellowed books and papers? And are they available as PDFs?

At least some of them are. Take, for example, this typographically fabulous old document from the NASA archives on the motion picture history of the Grandpa’s Knob wind turbines [pdf]. You can even check out a video of its operation.

Image: A man holding a big wrench during the construction of the Smith-Putnam turbine for Grandpa’s Knob. Wind-works.org

A 1975 National Geographic via Get Solar

 

upcoming: the history of green tech in america

I’m working on a book. It’s a history of green technology in America, which you might think would be a very short book in a country that derives more than half its power on coal and with a firm commitment to the internal combustion engine. But you’d be wrong. Though we forget about it when the price of oil is low or the economy shaky but Americans love energy tech when we’re worried about supply.

The way I see it, now is the perfect time to start work on a book like this. Right now the price of oil is low and everyone is running scared from the same companies, ideas, and technologies they embraced mere months ago. If I start now, and finish some time in 2009, the book will be coming off the presses just in time for the next energy price spike, which I think the world has slated for early 2010, after an unexpectedly robust holiday season in 4Q09.

Expect a history populated by quirky inventors and forgotten projects, ill-timed investments and the star-crossed entrepreneurs who loved them. Politically, I hope it will grow the tent for clean energy projects; trying to harness the wind and sun, and the bowels of the earth, is practically an American past time, at least for those who were a little too dorky and analytical for baseball rotisserie leagues.

Reading standard histories of the US, my chosen topic is confined to footnotes, and often weak footnotes at that. In business histories, my history is on the side of the defeated and brushed aside by the fossil triumphalist. Environmental histories tend to ignore those who sought to create rather than preserve, and the complicity (how dastardly!) of Big Oil and the military-industrial complex in the creation of some green technologies seems to stick in their craws. David Elliott summarized the standard thinking about environmentalism in Energy, Society, and Environment: “Subsequently there was a growth in environmental concern among young people, many of whom formed part of a counter-culture which flowered briefly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were often from relatively affluent backgrounds, but they challenged the ideas of the conventional consumerist and materialist society in which they had grown up.”

Thus, environmentalism was seen as an objection to mainstream American society, not the means for its survival. And that’s where green tech is different. Green tech is about enabling people to continue their materialistic lives, for good or for ill.

As Peter Lunde, an engineer, put it in the introduction to his 1979 technical manual, Solar Thermal Engineering, “If we are clever enough, the sun will be the energy source to heat and cool our structures, provide us with hot water, and supply us with energy to continue industrialization.” [emphasis mine]

That’s a profoundly different mindset from the supposed hippie, anti-stuff environmentalism that has supposedly suffused alternative energy folks since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring invented the destruction of the natural world genre.

My argument won’t be that classic conservationist environmentalism is a bad thing or shouldn’t be continued, but I will try to rewrite the history of the movement to include figures that have been less ideologically pure, but more technically innovative.

This space will serve as my scratch pad and my notebook. Keep your eyes peeled if you want to catch glimpses of futures we almost had.

Image: From the DOE archives. A drilling rig for a Texan geothermal experiment from the 1970s. Original caption: “THE RIG IS CAPABLE OF DRILLING TO DEPTHS OF 20,000 FEET AND IS BEING USED IN DOE GEOTHERMAL GEOPRESSURED EXTRACTION PRO-JECT IN BRAZORIA COUNTY, TEXAS, SOUTH OF HOUSTON. IN EARLY NOVEMBER, DRILLING CREWS HAD REACHED THE 14,500 FOOT LEVEL, MARKING THE BEGINNING OF THE GEOTHERMAL ZONE WHERE NATURAL HEAT, HEATED PRESSURIZED WATER AND NATURAL GAS ARE NORMALLY TRAPPED. BOTTOM HOLE TEMPERATURE AT THE 14,500 FOOT LEVEL WAS APPROXIMATELY 300 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT.”

 

the iphone has been purchased

Expect more mobile updates. Pictures. Thoughts from the road.

 

Scientists identify machinery that helps make memories

"These endosomes are like little memories waiting to happen," Ehlers said. "They are reservoirs of neurotransmitter receptors that brain cells deploy to add more receptors to a particular synapse. More receptors equals stronger synapses."

via Scientists identify machinery that helps make memories

 

biological ruins

Rising temperatures, due to greenhouse gas-induced climate change, is deflowering the forest around Thoreau’s favorite pool of water. Some plants change their flowering times in response to temperature. Others don’t and it’s slowly killing them off. More than a quarter of the species that Thoreau meticulously noted in his field journals are gone already.

Concord’s forests are an enormous biological ruin slowly being eroded by the forces of non-nature. These flowers are the detail on the faces of the sculptures. Then the trees will fall like pillars and the stillness will set in, non-life accumulating on top of life until there’s no green left at all, a Mayan ruin’s history run in reverse.

 

you haven’t heard this green energy idea before

A novel approach to extract energy from flowing
water currents. It is unlike any other ocean energy or low-head
hydropower concept. VIVACE is based on the extensively studied
phenomenon of Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV), which was first observed
500 years ago by Leonardo DaVinci in the form of “Aeolian Tones.” For
decades, engineers have been trying to prevent VIV from damaging
offshore equipment and structures. By maximizing and exploiting VIV
rather than spoiling and preventing it, VIVACE takes this ‘problem’ and
transforms it into a valuable resource for mankind.

Via :: Vortex Hydro Energy

This idea, fresh out of the University of Michigan, just got a big boost from the bailout bill, too. Hydrokinetic energy projects now get the same favorable tax treatment that solar projects do all the way through 2016.

 

PWT Environmental Cleanup : Port of Ridgefield, WA

At present the plume is in a shallow underground aquifer. The plume is approximately four acres in size and may contain some 100,000 gallons of wood treating chemicals. The plume threatens to contaminate a deeper, regional aquifer as well as nearby Carty Lake on the adjoining Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, and Gee Creek, a salmon/steelhead bearing stream.

Via PWT Environmental Cleanup : Port of Ridgefield, WA

My hometown Superfund site. $48 million and counting. I’m hoping to make this cleanup effort — and the difficulties of getting the proper funding, etc — the centerpiece of a much larger piece about how communities deal with Superfund sites (and others located on the so-called National Priorities List), trying to environmentally reannex these industrially abused spaces back into civic land.