The fossil-fuel revolution: The saltation and the century it built
Understanding Energy / Module 5: The fossil-fuel revolution Part 4 of 5The 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.
4.1 Between 1867 and 1914 the technical foundations of modern life appeared
A saltation is a leap rather than a gradual step. Smil uses the word for the years 1867 to 1914, which he regards as the most remarkable concentration of technical invention in history, with only Han dynasty China as a rough parallel in a very different way.
The list is long. Dynamite came in 1867. The telephone and Otto's four-stroke engine both arrived in 1876. Durable light bulbs and the first central power plants appeared between 1879 and 1882. Parsons's steam turbine followed in 1884, and Benz's car in 1886. Transformers and Tesla's AC motor came in the late 1880s, radio in the 1890s, the working diesel engine in 1897, powered flight in 1903, and Fritz Haber's synthesis of ammonia from the nitrogen in air in 1909, which would later feed billions.
The 1880s stand out. In a single decade the world gained electricity systems, turbines, transformers, the first cars, steel-framed skyscrapers and the Hall-Heroult process (1886), which made aluminium cheap enough for everyday use by smelting it electrically.
Materials changed as dramatically as machines. Bessemer converters and open-hearth furnaces turned steel from a costly specialty into a bulk material for rails, ships, bridges and buildings. Reinforced concrete and the first synthetic plastics appeared.
A new way of inventing also took hold. Edison, Siemens, Tesla, Parsons, Diesel and Haber combined scientific understanding with systematic experiment and industrial backing. Research laboratories and engineering firms made invention a planned activity rather than a matter of lone tinkering. Patents, technical journals and international exhibitions spread new ideas quickly between Britain, Germany, France and the United States.
| Year | Invention | What it still does today |
|---|---|---|
| 1867 | Dynamite | mining, quarrying, construction |
| 1876 | Four-stroke engine; telephone | cars and gensets; telecommunications |
| 1882 | Central power plant (Pearl Street) | the template for every grid |
| 1884 | Steam turbine | most thermal and nuclear electricity |
| 1886 | Gasoline car; aluminium smelting | mass motoring; light metals |
| 1897 | Diesel engine | ships, trucks, tractors, gensets |
| 1903 | Powered aircraft | aviation |
| 1909 | Ammonia synthesis | nitrogen fertiliser for about half of humanity |
- Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 (2005) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'The great saltation of 1867–1914'
- Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World (2020) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'The great saltation of 1867–1914'
4.2 The 20th century transformed the world mainly by scale
If the years before 1914 supplied the ideas, the decades after supplied the scale. Smil borrows a line from the physicist Philip Morrison: the deepest effects came from quantity, scale and magnitude rather than from changes in kind.
Energy conversion shows this clearly. Turbogenerators grew past 1 GW. Gas turbines, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, powered jet aircraft and later became efficient power station engines. Nuclear fission was added after 1950. Each was either a refinement of an older principle or added to a system the saltation had built.
Production was reorganised. Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies, and above all Henry Ford's moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913, made mass production the norm. Automation, numerical control and robots followed in the second half of the century.
Transport and information sped up. The Boeing 707 began jet service in 1958, and the wide-bodied 747 first flew in 1969. Malcom McLean's standard steel container, first shipped in 1956, cut the cost of moving goods so far that it underpins today's global supply chains. The transistor (1947), the integrated circuit (1958) and the microprocessor (1971) started the electronic age.
Performance of old ideas multiplied. The 1901 Mercedes 35 engine produced about 4.4 watts per cubic centimetre of cylinder volume; the 2000 Mercedes S500 produced about 45, ten times more from the same basic concept. Smil also stresses the costs: mass consumption, pollution, weapons of mass destruction and new dependence on complex, fragile systems. He leaves open whether this burst of capability will prove durable or turn out to be a short episode in history.
- Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (2006) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'Transforming the 20th century'
- Smil, Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made (2021) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'Transforming the 20th century'
4.3 Every one of these advances rested on fossil energy
It is worth pausing on how much of the saltation and the century after it depended on coal, oil and gas. Steel came from blast furnaces fed with coke. Aluminium smelting needed huge amounts of electricity, at first largely from hydro, later from coal. Cement kilns burned coal. Ammonia synthesis, when Carl Bosch scaled up Haber's process, took its hydrogen first from coal and later from natural gas. Cars, trucks, tractors and aircraft ran on refined oil.
The electrical system was also mostly fossil-fired. Hydro stations such as Niagara were important, but in most countries coal-fired steam turbines became the backbone of supply, joined later by oil, gas and nuclear plants. Even the information age, which appears weightless, depended on electricity from these stations and on materials made with fossil heat.
This is why Smil treats the fossil-fuel revolution and the technical saltation as one story. The inventions provided ways to convert energy into useful services. Fossil fuels provided the energy in quantities large enough, cheap enough and steady enough for those conversions to reach billions of people. Neither would have transformed the world without the other.
It also explains the scale of the task now facing the world. Replacing fossil fuels is not a matter of swapping one fuel for another in a few machines. It means providing low-carbon routes for steel, cement, ammonia, plastics, long-distance transport and reliable electricity, the very pillars the saltation built on coal and oil. The inventions of 1867 to 1914 are still with us; the open question is whether their energy supply can be replaced as thoroughly as their designs were refined.
- Smil, How the World Really Works (2022) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'Fossil-fuelled civilization'
- Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 (2005) · via Smil Mastery Course, M5 'The great saltation of 1867–1914'
See it in the table
Gas Natural gasAl AluminiumSt SteelCem CementH2 HydrogenNH3 AmmoniaDC Data centresCheck your understanding
Which period does Smil call the great saltation?
The two generations before the First World War produced most of the modern world's core technologies.Which of these was NOT invented in the saltation?
The transistor came in 1947, after the saltation.According to the Morrison line Smil uses, what drove the 20th century's biggest impacts?
Most gains came from scaling and refining earlier inventions.