Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal

• 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

  

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• Recent Posts

  • Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper
  • The Great Migration
  • The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age
  • Solar Cells vs. The Atomic Gadget for Your Desk
  • Hawthorne, 1851: Hyperbolic and the Functional Views of Electricity

• Pages

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    • Wind
      • Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine

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• Recent Tweets

  • alexismadrigal: Sinatra's old house in Palm Springs. Pretty awesome. http://yfrog.com/1ylthwj January 2, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: Making a list of some Palm Springs modern houses to check out. Sinatra, check. Dinah Shore, check. Neutra, check. January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: RT @mattyglesias: Wikipedia, almost no impact on measured GDP, but a major advance of the past decade, yes? January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: RT @publichistorian: I entered @doingitwrong's micrononfiction contest about "B-list holy grails"; you should too! http://bit.ly/8BTr8B January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: @mat Thanks! @clarajeffery and I do follow each other. What we need to do is meet! January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: A happy new year from the ace hotel in palm springs. Where it is like a very sophisticated campus rager. January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: In carpeted apartments across the land, there are people mixing warm vodka and cranberry juice... January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: @doingitwrong I just got it going after my domain name triumph. So much prettier than other platforms at the low levels of effort. December 31, 2009
  • alexismadrigal: @GarySoup interesting and sad, I would say. Thanks again for the scoop! December 31, 2009
  • alexismadrigal: @tigerbeat Full disclosure: I'm also annoyed she didn't credit my story break or @garysoup, who Tweeted the news. December 31, 2009

• Top Posts

  • the putnam-smith wind turbine schematic
  • About
  • hans ziock of los alamos on creating protocells
  • Petrolia: the landscape of america's first oil boom
  • The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age
  • The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry
  • Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine
  • World Oil Price Chronology - 1970-2007
  • Solar Towers and Their "Spatial Byproducts"
  • The 75-foot, 8-ton Failure that Ended a Renewable Energy Era

•  

  January 2010

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• Archives

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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: Sinatra's old house in Palm Springs. Pretty awesome. http://yfrog.com/1ylthwj January 2, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: Making a list of some Palm Springs modern houses to check out. Sinatra, check. Dinah Shore, check. Neutra, check. January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: RT @mattyglesias: Wikipedia, almost no impact on measured GDP, but a major advance of the past decade, yes? January 1, 2010
  • alexismadrigal: RT @publichistorian: I entered @doingitwrong's micrononfiction contest about "B-list holy grails"; you should too! http://bit.ly/8BTr8B January 1, 2010

• Madrigal’s Writing

  • 2009’s Sleepy Sun Finally Woke Up in December December 31, 2009
    2009 will go down as the sun’s third quietest year on record, under-shone only by 1913 and 2008. Two hundred-sixty of the year’s 365 days (71 percent) were sunspotless. Last year saw 266 sunspotless days, while the sun had no spots on 311 of the days in 1913. It was only a very active December that kept 2009 [...]
  • 2009's Sleepy Sun Finally Woke Up in December December 31, 2009
    The sun has kept researchers guessing: Last year, the sun had the fewest sunspots seen since 1913. This year, the sun had an even quieter year before a series of sunspot eruptions in December. This long, deep solar minimum could finally be ending.
  • NASA Narrows Robotic Missions to 3 Contenders December 30, 2009
    NASA selected three finalists on Tuesday to be the agency’s next cheap, robotic exploration mission. Depending on which wins, a probe will head for Venus, the moon, or a near-Earth object no later than 2018. The latter two missions would include the return of samples, while the Venusian lander would test the planet’s composition much like [...]
  • NASA Narrows Robotic Missions to Three Contenders December 30, 2009
    NASA selects three finalists for new, "cheap" ($650 million) missions. They're looking at sending a lander to the surface of Venus or probes that would return material samples from an asteroid or a basin on the moon.
  • How Algal Biofuels Lost a Decade in the Race to Replace Oil December 30, 2009
    For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil. But now that collection has largely been lost. National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction d […]
  • Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time December 29, 2009
    The fastest man-made object ever built, the Pluto-bound New Horizons probe, is now closer to the former planet than Earth, just a little under four years after its launch. It’s currently traveling at about 31,000 miles an hour and is located about 1.527 billion miles from Earth. “Today, 29 Dec 2009, New Horizons crossed a milestone boundary […]
  • Collar Tech Tracks Wolf’s North Pole Treks December 28, 2009
    During the 24-hour darkness of an arctic winter, a wolf pack’s tough life continues. Battling temperatures that reach 70 degrees below zero, a pack travels hundreds of miles across the landscape. A collar affixed to a wolf named Brutus beams back their coordinates to U.S. Geological Survey researchers. It would be impossible for humans to track [...]
  • Famous San Francisco Sea Lions Abandon Their Pier 39 Post December 28, 2009
    The blubbery sea lions at Pier 39, one of San Francisco’s smelliest and most famous tourist attractions, are gone. During the last week of November, they left the wooden docks on which they’ve spent the last 20 years and no one knows if they’ll be coming back. “We have no idea where they moved on to [...]
  • Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper June 17, 2009
    This 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, 2009
    I’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 […]

• 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