by Vaclav Smil
Inventors of the new technical age and the entrepreneurs who translated the flood of ideas into new industries and thus formed new economic and social realities (sometimes they were the same individuals) came from all regions of Europe and North America, but in national terms there can be no doubt about the leading role played by the United States. Surpassing the United Kingdom to become the world’s largest economy during the late 1860s was only the beginning. Just 20 years later Mark Twain’s introduction of a Yankee stranger (preparatory to his imaginary appearance at King Arthur’s court) sounded as a fair description of the country’s technical prowess rather than as an immodest boast of a man who
learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannons, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log. (Twain 1889:20)
The most prominent innovations that marked the end of the era just before WWI were the successful commercialization of Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis, introduction of the first continuously moving assembly line at the Ford Company, and Irving Langmuir’s patenting of coiled tungsten filament that is still found in every incandescent lightbulb (figure 1.8). The first accomplishment was perhaps the most important technical innovation of the modern era: without it the world could not support more than about 3.5 billion people (Smil 2001). The second invention revolutionized mass production far beyond car assembly. The third one keeps brightening our dark hours. Last pre-WWI years also brought a number of fundamental scientific insights whose elaboration led to key innovations of the 20th century. Robert Goddard’s concept of multiple-stage rocket (patented in 1914) led eventually to communication and Earth observation satellites and to the exploration of space. Niels Bohr’s model of the atom was the conceptual harbinger of the nuclear era (Bohr 1913).
I readily concede that there are good arguments for both extending and trimming my timing of the Age of Synergy. Extending the 1867–1914 span just marginally at either end would make it identical to the Age of Energy (1865–1915), which Howard Mumford Jones defined for the United States simply as the half century that followed the end of the Civil War (Jones 1971). He used the term energy not in its strict scientific sense but in order to describe the period of an extraordinary change, expansion, and mobility. Trimming the span to 1880–1910 would shorten the era to the three exceptionally inventive decades that were marked by an unprecedented concatenation of innovation, incipient mass production, and shifting consumption patterns. Other choices are possible, even if less defensible; for example, opting for the three decades between 1875 and 1905 would cover the time between the introduction of Otto’s four-stroke internal combustion engine and the publication of Einstein’s first relativity paper (Einstein 1905) that some interpretations could see as the start of a new era.
FIGURE 1.8. Three illustrations that accompanied Irving Langmuir’s U.S. Patent 1,180,159 (1913) for an incandescent electric lamp show different kinds of coiled filaments that resulted in higher conversion of electricity to light. These drawings and the patent specification are available at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
But one choice I am deliberately ignoring is the dating of well-known longwave economic cycles whose idea was originally formulated by Kondratiev (1935), elaborated by Schumpeter (1939), and embraced by many economists after WWII (Freeman 1983; van Duijn 1983; Vasko, Ayres, and Fontvieille 1990). Datings of these waves vary. The second Kondratiev cycle commenced between 1844 and 1851 and ended between 1890 and 1896, which means that my preferred dating of the Age of Synergy (1867–1914) would be cut into two segments. Perez (2002) distinguished three stages of economic growth associated with technical advances during that period: Age of Steam and Railways (the second technical revolution) that lasted between 1829 and 1874, the Age of Steel, Electricity, and Heavy Engineering (third revolution, 1875–1907), and the Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production (fourth revolution, 1908–1971).
I ignore these periodizations not because I am questioning the validity and utility of the long-wave concept. I am actually an enthusiastic proponent of studying the cyclicity of human affairs, but the historical evidence forces me to conclude that the Age of Synergy was a profound technical singularity, a distinct discontinuity and not just another (second, or second and third) installment in a series of more-or-less regular repetitions, a period that belongs to two or three debatably defined economic cycles. My concern is not with the timing of successive sequences of prosperity, recession, depression, and recovery but with the introduction and rapid improvement and commercialization of fundamental innovations that defined a new era and influenced economic and social development for generations to come.
Even a rudimentary list of such epoch-defining artifacts must include telephones, sound recordings, lightbulbs, practical typewriters, chemical pulp, and reinforced concrete for the pre-1880 years. The astonishing 1880s brought reliable incandescent electric lights, electricity-generating plants, electric motors and trains, transformers, steam turbines, gramophone, popular photography, practical gasoline-fueled four stroke internal combustion engines, motorcycles, cars, aluminum production, crude oil tankers, air-filled rubber tires, first steel-skeleton skyscrapers, and prestressed concrete. The 1890s saw diesel engines, x-rays, movies, liquefaction of air, wireless telegraph, the discovery of radioactivity, and the synthesis of aspirin.
And the period between 1900 and 1914 witnessed mass-produced cars; the first airplanes, tractors, radio broadcasts, and vacuum diodes and triodes as well as tungsten lightbulbs, neon lights, common use of halftones in printing, stainless steel, hydrogenation of fats, and air conditioning. Removing these items and processes from our society would not only deprive it of a very large part of its anthropogenic environment we now take for granted but also would render virtually all 20th-century inventions useless as their production and/or functioning depend on an uninterrupted supply of electricity and the use of many high-performance materials, above all steel and aluminum.
Although my dating (1867–1914) of the Age of Synergy differs from Gordon’s (2000) timing of the second Industrial Revolution (1860–1900), we share the conclusion that the development and diffusion of technical and organizational advances introduced during those years created a fundamental transformation in the Western economy as it ushered the world into the golden age of productivity growth that lasted until 1973 when OPEC’s sudden quintupling of oil price introduced years of high inflation and low growth (figure 1.9). Neither the pre-1860 advances nor the recent diffusion and enthusiastic embrace of computers and the Internet are comparable with the epoch-making sweep and with the lasting impacts of that unique span of innovation that dominated the two pre-WWI generations.
An excellent confirmation of this conclusion comes from a list of the 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements that the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) released to mark the end of the second millennium (NAE 2000). No fewer than 16 of the 20 listed categories of engineering achievements had not just their genesis but often also a considerable period of rapid pioneering development during the two pre-WWI generations. These achievements are headed by electrification, automobiles, and airplanes, include telephone and air conditioning and refrigeration (numbers 9 and 10), and conclude with petrochemical techniques and high-performance materials (numbers 17 and 20).
FIGURE 1.9. A century-long declining trend of crude oil prices (expressed in constant monies) ended with OPEC’s first round of sudden price increases in 1973–1974. Based on a graph in BP (2003).
Another list, commissioned by the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program (an institution that recognizes and rewards innovation) and assembled by polling 1,000 American adults in November 1995, was topped by four inventions that were introduced and considerably developed before the WWI. With 34% of all responses, the automobile ranked as the most import
ant invention of modern times, followed by the lightbulb (28%), telephone (17%), and aspirin, which was tied, with 6%, for the fourth place with the personal computer, the highest-ranking of all post-WWI innovations (Lemelson-MIT Program 1996). Finally, in van Duijn’s (1983) list of 38 major innovations that shaped the course of six key 20th-century growth sectors (steel, telecommunication, cars, aircraft, illumination, and photography), 23 (60%) were invented between 1867 and 1914.
A few revealing comparisons are perhaps the best way to impress an uninitiated mind by the scope and impacts of the period’s remarkable innovations. During the first generation of the 19th century, everyday life of most people was not significantly different from that of the early 18th century. Even a well-off New England farmer ploughed his fields with a heavy wooden plough pulled by slow oxen. Poorly sprung carriages and fully rigged sailing ships were the fastest means of transport, and information—leaving aside the limited network of optical telegraphs built in France and a few neighboring countries (Holzmann and Pehrson 1994)—traveled only as fast as people or animals did.
Illumination came in meager increments of tallow candles or smoky oil lamps. Recycling of organic wastes and planting of legumes were the only manageable sources of nitrogen in agriculture, and average staple grain yields were only marginally above the late medieval levels. One of the key inescapable social consequences of these realities was the fact that even a very large agricultural labor force was unable to feed adequately the slowly growing populations. Despite the fact that more than four fifths of the work force was required to produce food through taxing labor, large shares of rural population did not have even enough bread, meat was an occasional luxury for most people, and recurrent spells of serious food shortages were common in Europe while frequent famines were affecting Asia (Kiple and Ornelas 2000; Smil 1994).
One hundred years later, a single small tractor provided traction equal to that of a dozen of large horses, and the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia made it possible to supply optimum amounts of the principal macronutrient to crops. Highest crop yields rose by roughly 50%, and average food supply in all industrializing countries was well in excess of even liberally defined nutritional requirements. The age of steam locomotives was about to give way to more efficient and more powerful diesel engines and electric motors, shipbuilders were installing new powerful steam turbines, and the luminosity of Edison’s original lightbulb was greatly surpassed by new lights with incandescing tungsten wires.
I must close this brief recounting of fundamental pre-WWI advances by emphasizing that I have no interest in forcing the concept of the Age of Synergy or exaggerating the era’s importance (although that would be hard to do). I am not promoting any simplistic, deterministic, techniques-driven interpretation of modern history. I would never argue that adoption of particular technical advances determines the fortunes of individual societies or that it eventually dictates convergence of their behavior. Identical machines and processes deployed as a part of a democratic, fairly transparent society that is governed by enforceable laws and engaged in promoting private enterprise will have very different effects compared to those they could bring when operating as a part of a dictatorship where autarky and the lack of accountability foster mismanagement.
Nor am I claiming that nearly all of the 20th-century technical accomplishments were either direct derivatives (albeit improved and mass-produced in unprecedented quantities) or at least indirect descendants of innovations introduced during the two pre-WWI generations. But it is indisputable that these enduring innovations were indispensable for creating the 20th century, and it is also possible to forecast with a high degree of confidence that many of them will not lose this importance for generations to come. And so it is in order to understand better where we have come from and where we are heading that I will portray the genesis of those enduring innovations and appraise their legacy. But before I begin this account of the pre-WWI advances and of their defining importance for the 20th century, I will take one more brief, comparative look at the era’s accomplishments and their enduring quality.
The Distance Traveled
An effective way to appreciate the distance traveled between 1867 and 1914 is to contrast the state of our understanding of the world in the early 19th and the early 20th century with the realities at the very beginning of the 21st century. This could be done perhaps most impressively by contrasting the degree of comprehension that a competent scientist of one period would have when, just for the sake of this thought experiment, we would transport him 100 years into the future. If Antoine Lavoisier (figure 1.10), one of the founders of modern chemistry, were not guillotined during the French Revolution’s Age of Terror in 1794, he would have been 70 years old in 1813. A few men alive at that time could have equaled his comprehensive understanding of natural sciences and technical advances—but for him the world of the year 1913 would hold countless inexplicable wonders.
FIGURE 1.10. Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)—the greatest chemist of the 18th century and an accomplished polymath—would view most of today’s technical achievements with utter incomprehension. Portrait from E. F. Smith Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Steam turbines in large power plants, high-voltage transmission lines, electric lights and motors, oil drilling rigs, refineries, internal combustion engines, cars, radio broadcasts, x-rays, high explosives, high-performance steels, synthetic organic compounds and fertilizers, aluminum, and airplanes—all of these and scores of other machine, materials, objects, and processes would stun and puzzle him, and most of them would be utterly incomprehensible to his lay contemporaries. In contrast, were one of the accomplished innovators of the early 20th century—Edison or Fessenden, Haber or Parsons—be transported from its first decade to 2005, he would have deep understanding of most of them (and actually created some of them) and at least a highly competent familiarity with the rest of the items listed in the preceding paragraph. Moreover, he would not need a great deal of explanation to understand many devices and processes that he never saw at work but whose operation is so clearly derived from the foundations laid down before WWI.
This legacy of the pre-WWI era is definitely most obvious as far as energy sources and prime movers are concerned. As already stressed, no two physical factors are of greater importance in setting the pace and determining the ambience of a society than its energy sources and its prime movers. Global fossil fuel era began sometime during the 1890s when coal, increasing volumes of crude oil, and a small amount of natural gas began supplying more than half of the world’s total primary energy needs (Smil 1994). By the late 1920s biomass energies (wood and crop residues) provided no more than 35% of the world’s fuels, and by the year 2000 their share was about 10% of global energy use. The two prime movers that dominate today’s installed power capacity—internal combustion engines and steam turbines—were also invented and rapidly improved before 1900. And an entirely new system for the generation, transmission and use of electricity—by far the most versatile form of energy—was created in less than 20 years after Edison’s construction of first installations in London and New York in 1882.
The only new primary energy source that has made a substantial commercial difference during the 20th century was nuclear fission (in 2000 the world derived from it about 16% of electricity), but due to its arrested development it now contributes globally less heat than does the burning of wood and crop residues (Smil 2003). The only 20th-century prime mover that entered everyday use after 1914 was gas turbine. Its development took off during the 1930s, and it led both to stationary machines for electricity generation and to the era of jet-powered flight. Naturally, the stories of nuclear fission and gas turbines will feature prominently in this book’s companion volume.
In order to appreciate the lasting legacy of the epoch-making innovations introduced between 1867 and 1914, in this book I concentrate on four classes of fundamental advances: formation, diffusion, and standa
rdization of electric systems (chapter 2); invention and adoption of internal combustion engines (chapter 3); unprecedented pace of introducing new, high-performance materials and new chemical syntheses (chapter 4); and the birth of a new information age (chapter 5). These topical chapters are followed first by introducing some additional perspectives on that eventful era and then by a brief restatement of its lasting legacies (chapter 6). After closing with a look at two major trends that had governed the 20th century—creation of high-energy societies and mechanized mass production that is aimed at rising the standards of living—I end with a look at contemporary perceptions of the pre-WWI achievements (chapter 7).
And although this is a book about inventions, improvements, and applications of techniques and about the power of applied scientific understanding, I wish I could have followed concurrently those fascinating artistic developments that took place during the two pre-WWI generations. Not only were they remarkable by any historic standards, but, much as their technical counterparts, they had set in place many tastes, preferences, and sensibilities that could be felt during the 20th century. Moreover, the world of technique left many brilliant imprints on the world of arts. One of my great favorites is Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola’s (1883) masterful portrait of the new world of spreading affluence and frenzied mass consumption set in the late 1860s that was closely modeled on his thorough studies of large Parisian department stores of the early 1880s (figure 1.11). And the restlessly kinetic pre-WWI futurist paintings by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, or Marcel Duchamp evoke the speed and the dynamism of a new age driven by electricity and motors as no technical specification can.
