What Is Energy? - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 17

shallow seams. New inventions such as steam-driven pumps allowed for larger and deeper
mines. From the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, coal was mined extensively
in England and Scotland, and by 1700 it had replaced wood as the main heating fuel. This
early adoption of coal, and the resulting head start in terms of extraction methods and
technologies, made Britain the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
Thedevelopmentofrailwaysallowedcoaltobetransportedcheaplyoverlongdistances.
Railways are an excellent example of how technical innovation exercised both a pull and
a push effect on energy consumption: large amounts of coal were needed to produce steel
for the railways, and the railways in turn allowed coal to be transported in bulk to the
steelworks.
The Industrial Revolution changed not only the amount of energy consumed but also
the way it was used. While coal sufficed initially as a fuel for locomotives, the internal
combustion engine required high-energy liquid fuels. This led to the discovery of our
most versatile fuel source to date: mineral oil. The ancient Chinese, Babylonians, Persians,
GreeksandRomanshadknownaboutandusedpetroleumasafuelforlightingandheating.
However, it was not until the nineteenth century that mineral oil was used on an industrial
scale. This was partly because it was difficult to extract, but also because it is dirty and
inefficient in its raw state.
In preindustrial societies, most people were much less active at night. Candles and lamp
oil were expensive and therefore used sparingly by all but the wealthy. Instead, people sat
around fires at night, exchanging stories or performing stationary work such as mending
clothes or tools. With the Industrial Revolution came a great migration into cities, rapid
population growth, and the availability of much cheaper, factory-made goods. In cities,
people were less inclined - and usually couldn't afford - to limit their daily work to the
hours of natural light. The explosion in demand for lighting oil begat the whaling industry.
Sperm whales yielded oils that burned far more cleanly and brightly than other animal fats
did. By the time Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, the U.S. whaling fleet
alone numbered 700 ships and was unloading 160,000 barrels of whale oil each year in the
ports of New England (Smil 2008 ) . As whale populations rapidly declined, coal gas and
kerosene came to the rescue - of both the whales and the human consumers.
The world's first oil tycoon was neither a Texan cowboy nor an Arab sheik. Ignacy
Ł ukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist from the town of Gorlice on the fringes of the Austrian
Empire, had experimented for several years with ways of distilling mineral oil. His
breakthrough came in 1853 when the local hospital borrowed one of his kerosene lamps
to conduct an emergency operation at night. Impressed by how brightly and cleanly the
lamp burned, the hospital placed an order for further lamps and fuel. Ł ukasiewicz soon