Dr. Thomas G. Andrews is the Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado.
As of 1860, the United States was an industrial laggard. Great Britain, France, and Germany each produced more goods than their transatlantic counterpart. By 1900, however, U.S. industrial production exceeded “the combined manufacture of its three main rivals.” Why, and with what consequences?
Rise of Fossil Fuels
Most textbooks provide at least a few glimpses of the transformation of the U.S. into a fossil-fueled nation: a photo of child laborers outside a Pennsylvania coal mine, a statistic on rising coal production, perhaps a brief mention of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 (in which Colorado National Guardsmen killed 18 men, women, and children during a miners’ strike in southern Colorado).
Aside from these disconnected tidbits, though, textbooks offer little insight into the profound historical significance of energy, nor do they provide a coherent interpretation of what the adoption of fossil fuels portended for the nation’s economy and environment.
Well into the 1800s, the American economy was almost exclusively an organic economy, one in which people met their needs by harvesting energy and materials from the earth’s surface ecosystems.
Food, fuel, shelter, motive power, clothing, and virtually every other necessity of life—Americans obtained all of these from plants, animals, falling rivers, and blowing winds. The growth potential of organic economies remained sharply constrained by the limited ability of people to tap into the sun’s energy through farms, windmills, waterwheels, and the like.
By contrast, the new form of mineral-intensive economy pioneered in Britain during the late 1700s, and imitated in the U.S. and beyond in the centuries since, encountered no such limits. Instead of drawing upon limited flows of energy through surface ecosystems, mineral-intensive economies accessed much greater supplies of energy by extracting ancient stocks of energy from beneath the earth in the form of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
For the rest of this article: https://brewminate.com/coal-and-the-industrial-revolution/