green tech history
research notes for a forthcoming book by Alexis Madrigal
Wired.com staff writer
energy and science
Remember some of this stuff? Share your thoughts with me:
alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com
Recent Tweets- alexismadrigal: @brainpicker What an insane infographic! I love it. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @EKMadrigal hey! Glad to see you have joined the Twitter world. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: One thing I love in a restaurant: when the route to the bathroom is through the kitchen. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @tcarmody oh hell yes, of course. November 7, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @tcarmody Loved the tweets this morning. Read them all at once, squinting at my phone, lying on an air mattress in west LA. November 7, 2009
- alexismadrigal: Just spent half an hour talking with 81 year old Polly Dwyer, who has lived in the same Cape Cod in Levittown for 55 years. November 6, 2009
- alexismadrigal: The Stinson "Flying Station Wagon" — no, really, it's a plane that can land on golf courses. http://yfrog.com/j6fx3j November 6, 2009
- alexismadrigal: What was that selling? Listerine, of course:It puts the man back in your vacation. http://yfrog.com/0h7foj November 6, 2009
- alexismadrigal: "If you ask me, a man-less vacation is no vacation at all," she says. http://yfrog.com/eblmjlj #lifeads November 6, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @eliotfrick In that spirit, I'd drive. We have an old Mercedes running on biodiesel from veggie oil. (Not a generalizable solution: haha.) November 6, 2009
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the outboard brain of Alexis Madrigal
wired.com staff writer energy, science, technology. working on a book about the forgotten green technologies of America
- Recent Tweets:
- alexismadrigal: @brainpicker What an insane infographic! I love it. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @EKMadrigal hey! Glad to see you have joined the Twitter world. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: One thing I love in a restaurant: when the route to the bathroom is through the kitchen. November 8, 2009
- alexismadrigal: @tcarmody oh hell yes, of course. November 7, 2009
- Madrigal’s Writing
- Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper June 17, 2009This is the first of a new series of photographic posts that I’ll be doing based on my reading of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. In it, he describes the disorientation that people experience when their sense of “technological time” is thrown off by the juxtaposition of what they think of as old [...]
- The Great Migration February 7, 2009I’m moving. Or at least this blog is moving over to it’s own, real domain. For the last few months, alexismadrigal.wordpress.com has been where www.greentechhistory.com takes you. Now greentechistory.com is its own site. If you go there, it should look pretty familiar because it’s exactly this blog reproduced over there. Being horrifically […]
- The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age February 6, 2009At the beginning of the industrial revolution, right when Watt was getting his steam engine going, there were no centralized power plants. It was hard to move steam, so you put the coal-fired engines right where you needed the power. Electricity changed all that because it was easier to move electrons. But the old model of [...]
- Solar Cells vs. The Atomic Gadget for Your Desk February 5, 2009Many people know that the solar cell was invented at Bell Labs, helped along by the men who created the silicon semiconductors that underpin electronics. But a far less well-known story today is the nearly simultaneous creation of what were known as “atomic batteries” by Bell Labs’ arch-rival, RCA, in 1954. As described in John [...]
- Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity February 4, 2009Electricity 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 wit […]
- Technological Change Does Happen, a Reminder January 30, 2009It’s impossible not to laugh while watching this local San Francisco news broadcast. It tells the story of “the first step in newspapers by computer,” the delivery of copy via Compuserve to people like Richard Halloran, whose tagline, in place of say, citizen or CEO, is “Owns Home Computer.” There’s something poignant abou […]
- “A Road Not Taken” — Tracking Carter’s Solar Panels January 29, 2009In the wake of the energy crisis and impending collapse of the nuclear power industry, Jimmy Carter installed some solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came to power, he pulled them down, like all symbolically. But, wait, then what happened to them? Turns out that both Google and a [...]
- Faulkner on the Automobile, 1935 January 28, 2009In 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 […]
- The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry January 27, 2009The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman. In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that [...]
- Coal the Anti-Hero January 20, 2009Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use. In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant […]
- Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper June 17, 2009
- Shared Links
- Italy’s (Cheap?) Nuclear Renaissance Keith Johnson
- Know Your Trees (author unknown)
- Polluting Power: China’s Top 10 Power Companies cmcelwee
- Best of Times, Worst of Times: Two Economies, by design Douglas
- Talking with Cathy Marshall about tags, digital archiving, and lifestreams Jon Udell
January 6, 2009 at 7:22 am
[...] the history of green technologies in America, and to map these on a Google Maps mashup called the Green Tech Map. While the effort is just getting underway, Madrigal is hard at work on a book about this history [...]