The fossil-fuel revolution

By the end you will be able to

• Explain why coal could supply energy at scales that wood and charcoal never could
• Trace the chain from coke and iron to the steam engine, the railway and the steamship
• Describe how oil and the internal combustion engine, and then electricity, created new qualities of energy service
• Identify why the years 1867-1914 laid the technical foundations of the modern world
• Use current data to judge how deeply fossil fuels are still embedded in the world economy

Contents

1. Part 1 Coal and the great transition

   The move from wood to coal was the most consequential change in how humans get energy. It did not start with the steam engine and it did not happen everywhere at once. It began with households and workshops in one small country, spread nation by nation over two centuries, and only around 1900 tipped the whole world from plant fuels to fossil ones.

   • England went first because wood ran short and coal lay close to the surface
   • Coal broke the land limit that had capped every earlier civilisation
   • Energy transitions are slow, national and uneven
2. Part 2 Coke, iron and the steam engine

   Coal provided heat first. To become the engine of industry it needed two more inventions: a way to make iron without charcoal, and a machine that turned heat into motion. Coke solved the first; the steam engine, improved step by step over a century, solved the second. Together they gave the world railways, steamships and mechanised factories.

   • Coke freed iron from the forest
   • Newcomen to Watt: the slow climb of steam efficiency
   • High-pressure steam made engines mobile and reshaped transport
3. Part 3 Oil, engines and electricity

   In the second half of the 19th century two new things joined coal. Oil, a liquid fuel easier to move and store, found its way first into lamps and then into compact engines. Electricity, which is not a fuel at all, became a way of delivering energy to any point and turning it into light, motion or heat at will. Both remade daily life.

   • Oil began as lamp fuel and became the leading fuel of the 20th century
   • Internal combustion engines got light enough to move cars and lift aircraft
   • Electricity is a new quality of energy, not a new fuel
   • Electric motors rebuilt factories and made light almost free
4. Part 4 The saltation and the century it built

   Smil argues that the modern world was invented in a burst lasting just two generations, from 1867 to 1914. Almost everything that defined the 20th century, from power grids to cars to fertiliser, appeared in that window. The rest of the century mostly took those inventions and made them bigger, faster, cheaper and universal.

   • Between 1867 and 1914 the technical foundations of modern life appeared
   • The 20th century transformed the world mainly by scale
   • Every one of these advances rested on fossil energy
5. Part 5 Fossil-fuelled civilisation today

   Two centuries after the transition began, fossil fuels still underpin nearly everything modern societies do. They feed us through fertiliser and machinery, build our cities through steel and cement, and move almost all our goods. The benefits are vast and very unequally shared, and the costs, above all carbon dioxide, are now global.

   • Fossil fuels still supply about 87% of the world's primary energy
   • Each of us commands dozens of energy servants
   • The benefits came with costs that are now global
6. Wrap-up Key terms, try it in the table, final quiz, sources