Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal

This is an incredibly incomplete and thin timeline. It’s offered here for recreational purposes only. Don’t hurt yourselves.

I’ll be adding about a thousand more events and projects and better sourcing as time permits. And, obviously, feel free to send in suggestions for more items. Most links currently will point you back to my reading list.

PRE-INDUSTRIAL

1621: George Yeardley constructs first windmill in the colonies in present-day Virginia at the Flowerdew Hundred plantation. (Righter)
1712: Thomas Newcomen invents the atmospheric steam engine, the first working converter of coal energy for power.
1769: James Watt improves Newcomen’s machine and sets off the industrial revolution with his efficient steam engine. One of the coal-powered machine’s first uses? Coal mining.

THE ERA OF STEAM

1783: Henry Cort figures out puddling for making wrought iron, the dominant metal before it was replaced by steel.
1823: The Swede Jons Jakob Berzelius isolates silicon for the first time.
1836: John Adolphus Etzler advocates capturing solar, tidal, and wind power to create an American utopia. (Etzler) John Ericsson co-invents the propeller; he’ll later become obsessed with solar machines. Maybe he should have gotten into wind?
1839: Edmund Bequerel discovers photovoltaic effect, i.e., that sunlight can be directly converted into electricity. (Butti)
1840: 55,000 waterwheels in use in America. (Righter)
1850: Wind-power, primarily through pushing boats around via their sails, does 1.4 million horsepower-hours of work, more than water (0.9 hp-hours) and coal (0.4 hp-hours) combined. (Righter)
1855: Bessemer invents his eponymous process for making steel out of pig iron, leading to radical price drops in the cost of the material. It sets the stage for the steam turbine.
1857: Halladay Wind Mill Company founded by Daniel Halladay, a Connecticut engineer who perfected the so-called “American windmill.” Within a few years, six million of this cheap, portable mill could have been found dotting the West, pumping water for irrigation. (Righter)
August 27, 1859: Edwin Drake drills the world’s first biography. (Black)
August 1860: Augustin Mouchot shows off his first solar engine to Napoleon III. (Collins)
1870: A Swedish immigrant of considerable engineering repute,  John Ericsson, develops a “sun-motor” driven by parabolic trough mirrors. (Romm)

THINGS TURN CRUDE — AND ELECTRIC

1873: Petrolia oil region in Pennsylvania begins to run out of petroleum. (Black)
1881: Jacques Arsene d’Arsonval proposes tapping the thermal energy stored in oceans. (DOE)
1882: First hydroelectric power plant in US installed in Wisconsin. (Coyne)
1884: Charles Fritts creates first working solar cell. Made from selenium, it had an efficiency of about one percent. (Lund)
1888: Charles Brush builds his enormous 56-foot in diameter windmill. The device was mounted on a 60 foot tower and generated 12 kilowatts of energy, which could be stored in 12 complex batteries. (Righter)
1892: Boise, Idaho gets its first taste of geothermal power in the form of heat pumped from local hot springs. The system ends up serving 200 homes and 40 downtown businesses. (Waag)
1897: Electric cabs hit the streets of Manhattan. The Electric Vehicle Company had up to several hundred before failing in 1907.
1897: Wright Wave Motor constructed in Manhattan Beach, California. It still exists, “buried in the sand at the foot of the present pier in Manhattan Beach.” (Miller)
1900: Rudolph Diesel shows off his eponymous engine at the 1900 World Fair in Paris, the Exposition Universalle. “The engine was constructed for using mineral oil [ed: petroleum], and was then worked on vegetable oil without any alterations being made,” Diesel later wrote. (Knothe)
1903: The first waste-to-energy facility to produce electricity begins operation in New York.
1903: The solar tower, a sort of greenhouse windmill, is suggested by Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes of Spain in the trade journal, La Energia Electrica.
Spring 1904: First full-sized power plant built by Willsie Sun Power Company in St. Louis. It generated six horsepower.
1907: Three hundred electric cabs burn in the Electric Vehicle Company’s garage.

COAL AND OIL WIN

1913: Frank Shuman installs a 55-horsepower concentrated solar power water-pumping station in Meadi, Egypt. Though it can pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute, it requires 200 square feet of solar collector to generate each horsepower. (Perlin)
1916: Henry Ford shows his stripes as a big biofuels fan, saying, “All the world is waiting for a substitute for gasoline. The day is not far distant when, for every one of those barrels of gasoline, a barrel of alcohol must be substituted.” (Ford)
1917: Libbey-Owens puts its new and improved sheet glass process into commercial production. The cost of glass drops.
1921: First geothermal power plant at The Geysers in California.
1929: Solar heating industry thrives in Death Valley before easy availability to natural gas wipes out the industry.
1930: Georges Claude builds the world’s first ocean thermal energy conversion plant in Cuba. The plant generated 22 kilowatts of electricity, but wasn’t actually a net producer of energy. Storms destroyed the facility. (DOE)
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocates $7 million to construct a tidal energy plant on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay. The project eventually falls apart after two dams were constructed.
1935: George Keck achieves 15-20 percent fuel savings by introducing passive solar design to the Wilde house in Watertown, Wisconsin.
1938: US produces 60 percent of the world’s oil. (Ely)
1939: First MIT solar house built. (Butti)
1940: Hydroelectric energy provides 40 percent of US electricity needs.
1941: Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont. At 1250 kilowatts, it’s an order of magnitude larger than any other wind generator. (Putnam, Power from the Wind)
1942: Germans invest heavily in synthetic fuels, a.k.a. coal-to-liquids technology, creating roughly half of their diesel from the technology.
March 26, 1945: Blade breaks off the Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine, and the operation is shuttered by the S. Morgan Smith Corporation. (Putnam)
1947: Your Solar Home published. The book, created by a glass company, showed off the passive solar home designs of 49 architects, one for each state, plus the District of Columbia. Alaska and Hawaii were not part of the Union yet.
1950: Of an estimated six million windmills once working in the Western United States, 300,000 water pumping windmills and 100,000 electricity generating windmills remain, although they only generate about a million horsepower per day.
1951: Ohio State University establishes a program to research so-called “dual fuels” made from corn and cottonseed oil. (Knothe)
1950: United States provides 52 percent of the world’s crude oil.
1953: Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations.
1954: The first practical solar cell — using silicon not selenium — was designed and built by Bell Laboratories.
1960: The Geysers geothermal plant opens, operated by Pacific Gas and Electric.
1964: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion gets a serious look in a doctoral thesis submitted by James H. Anderson at MIT.
1964: NASA launches the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory with a 1-kilowatt array of solar cells.
1966: George Lof and his colleagues publish, World Distribution of Solar Radiation out of the University of Wisconsin. This work is a landmark in the necessary quantification of the world’s renewable energy resources. This is infrastructure data on which others built projects.
1968: Cal-Tech and MIT hold a Solar Electric Car Race from Cambridge to Pasadena. As the nation burns. (Monji)
Fall 1968: The first Whole Earth Catalog debuts, under the direction of Stewart Brand. (Kirk)

CRISIS, ROUND 1: THE POST EMBARGO WORLD

October 17, 1973: Arab oil embargo begins. Price of oil skyrockets and a world energy crisis ensues, stimulating thousands of alternative energy projects. (Wilkins)
November 7, 1973: Richard Nixon delivers major energy speech, announcing ‘Project Independence,’ with the goal “that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on foreign energy sources.” (Beattie)
1974: The Los Alamos National Laboratory issued a patent for their method of mining the enormous amount of heat energy trapped in the Hot Dry Rocks.
January 9, 1975: The Energy Research and Development Agency is created.
1975: 150,000 windmills still operating across US.
1975: Jon Naar wanders the nation and takes thousands of photographs of homes using or saving energy in interesting ways.
1975: Cal-Tech introduces windmill engineering course.
December 30, 1975: Stephen Hugh Salter receives a patent for a new “apparatus and method for extracting wave energy.” (Salter Patent)
1976: $12 million in wind research from ERDA. [Nat'l Geographic]
Mid-70s: “The USA adopted a ‘high tech’ aerospace approach to wind power development, with the emphasis on increasingly large complex prototypes like the 2.5MW Boeing/NASA ‘Mod 2′ series.”
1978: Lockheed, the Dillingham Corporation and the State of Hawaii construct an ocean thermal energy conversion system. They were the first to demonstrate the possibility an OTEC system that generated more electricity than it required.
January 1979: National Energy Plan released. (Beattie)
March 28, 1979: Three Mile Island nuclear power plant meltdown.
June 20, 1979: President Jimmy Carter dedicates a solar hot water heating system on the West Wing of the White House.
1980: The Department of Energy’s funding for solar photovoltaic research peaks at $150 million. (NREL)
1981: Gasoline prices peak.
1984: Luz International installs a solar thermal electric generating station in Harper Valley, California.
December 31, 1985: Solar residential tax credits expire. (Beattie)

THE CALM

1986: Energy prices crash.
April 26, 1986: Chernobyl nuclear reactor melts down.
1989: Chem Systems estimates that ethanol could be produced for 80 cents a gallon ethanol from woody biomass.
1990: Bush administration allocates $1.5 million to look into ways to spur domestic photovoltaic manufacturing. (NREL)
June 1992: Rio de Janeiro Environmental Summit
1992: Energy Policy Act of 1992 passed. (Beattie)
1994: Enron proposes to invest $150 million in a 100 MW solar plant.
1997: United States provides 10 percent of world’s crude oil.
1999: Hawaii’s Natural Energy Laboratory tested a 250 kilowatt OTEC plant.

THE STORM

Hat tips: @paleogeek, Forest Gregg, George Mokray

Image: Library of Congress, DN-0000938, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.