Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies

by David E. Nye

Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activities changed as new energy systems were constructed, from colonial times to recent years. He also shows how, as Americans incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they became ensnared in power systems that were not easily they made choices about the conduct of their lives, and those choices accumulated to produce a consuming culture. Nye examines a sequence of large systems that acquired and then lost technological momentum over the course of American history, including water power, steam power, electricity, the internal-combustion engine, atomic power, and computerization. He shows how each system became part of a larger set of social constructions through its links to the home, the factory, and the city. The result is a social history of America as seen through the lens of energy consumption.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, School

331 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

David E. Nye is Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark. The winner of the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology, he is the author of Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (1985), Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (1990), American Technological Sublime (1994), Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (1997), America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (2003), and Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (2006) published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially, Consuming Power examines the way American choices regarding technology -- specifically, which technologies to use, and in which ways -- shape society. It's short for the timespan it covers, but dense; the word muscular comes to mind. Nye wastes no words: : every sentence carries with it the meat of facts or analysis. He has grievances with those who believe certain technologies always have particular effects on society, like the introduction of the automobile leading to a society whose transportation infrastructure is wholly oriented toward cars. Human choices created the highways and subsidies cars thrive in, and human choices eroded the rail networks that once tied the nation together. The choices we make regarding which technologies to invest in dictate our future actions, however: the United States will be hard-pressed to move away from an automobile-oriented system if even it badly wants, and needs to. Other nations -- which made different choices regarding the automobile -- have more options.

While this argument has its merits, I think Nye overestimates the role of human choice. We seem to be a species dedicating to following the path of least resistance: if a technology allows us to do a thing, and it occurs to us to do it, we'll happily do it without sitting down and thinking terribly long about the consequences. Geography and history had more to do with Europe's different approach to cars than human choice: Europeans couldn't sprawl around sloppily because they don't have an entire continent of land to waste. At the same time, this criticism reinforces Nye's other argument, that choices dictate future choices. Once arrangements have been made for one system, it's difficult to adopt to another. Europe would find it difficult to impose suburban sprawl on itself. While Nye doesn't have an obvious agenda, he's plainly not impressed with the way Americans have so limited themselves and their future energy options. The course of our energy history, it seems, is have put more eggs into fewer baskets.

Consuming Power is a strong read for those interested in American economy, industry, and energy.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a Review of this book, Peter Bacon Hales points to the contribution the book makes to an understanding of American culture by focusing on the ever expanding consumption of power, especially in "connecting the consumption culture to the energy systems that made its existence possible." (p. 725) In the 19th century, the US moved from human power, to water power, to seam and then to electricity. In the 20th, internal combustion engines took advantage of gasoline. In approaching the book, it is helpful to note that Hales sees the primary contribution of this work of synthesis in what it adds to our understanding of the 19th C.

Further investigation bears this viewpoint out. In his introduction, Nye begins by drawing our attention to the fact that America is today the largest consumer of energy in the world on a per capita basis. We could have gone another way, but we did not. Technology doesn't explain this, culture does. Why, for instance, have Americans built large interstate highway systems and other automobile-centric infrastructure. This was a choice which was made by people, not an inevitable result of automobile technology. As Thomas Hughes as taught us, large systems -- once they have grown to a certain size -- develop technological momentum. We cannot easily abandon the emphasis on the automobile because the system has momentum that limits our maneuver room. He seeks to show in this book how systems of energy gain and loose momentum in America. Muscle power and water dominated until the 1880s and then steam dominated until the 1920s. Beyond 1920, electricity and the combustion engine dominate. Given this periodization, Nye divides his study into three sections "Expansion," "Concentration" and "Dispersion."

Under "Expansion," he covers the early 19th century as the age of "Water and Industry". Up until the Civil War, the dominant system of energy in both North and South was water power.

Agricultural and industrial production were mutually reinforcing, and together they transformed the economy between 1800 and 1860. Factories made better agricultural equipment. Efficient farms released hands for urban employment. Growing cities provided farmers with an expanding base of customers. Canals and railways moved the harvest speedily and cheaply to market, The interdependence relied less on coal than on wood, and less on steam engines than on water wheels and canals. Sailing ships and canal boats were the most important form of transport until the middle of the nineteenth century. Renewable resources - wood for heat and water for power - remained the primary power sources. Though it is useful to contrast the Southern plantation systems with the Northern factories, the steam engine was less important in defining this difference than other cultural and geographic factors. (p. 43)

Nye turns first to a consideration of power systems in the North. The use of water power drove the building of mill downs around water falls. These towns were built on steep hillsides like those of the Brandywine Creek in DE. These mill villages were thoroughly shaped by the water power used to run the mills, and they were abandoned with the gradual ascendancy of steam power. Locating near the falls, the Du Pont factory near Wilmington thrived in the early 19th C retaining its rural character until later in the century with modest start up capital. Most mill towns were small, however, scattered along the many rivers and tributaries in New England. The textile mills of New England were different than these early mill towns in that they required major investment in physical plant. Some were highly successful, in particular those built by the Boston Associates, but many actually failed. Water power was plentiful and it was easy enough to develop excess capacity, such that most firms did not feel the need to adopt steam powered machinery before the Civil War. Well into the 1850s, manufactories remained small in the north and in many the workers successfully kept control over the shop floor. As Sean Wilentz pointed to the bastardization of craft in the shops of NYC, Nye sees this happening unevenly and claims that it was the growth in scale that sealed the fate of workers.

In the South, the large investment in slaves in combination with the logistical difficulties of using water power on a large scale due to the geography of the south conspired to lead the South not to invest in canals, railroads and city building. The plantation itself was a quasi-industrial center (here see Jefferson's Monticello for an excellent example). Pointing to the life story of Solomon Northrup, a free black who was kidnapped in 1841 in NYC and transported to New Orleans as a slave, he shows how resistant to technological innovation the Southern system was. An intelligent and educated black slave, his overseer laughed at his ideas for more efficient transportation -- slavery simply did not encourage maximizing production (p. 57). The economy of raw materials in the South was dependent on world cotton markets. The North bought cotton from the South and then sold the South finished goods.

It was, to repeat, water power that drove the developments in the North up until the Civil War. The Eerie Canal 1825 was symbolic of the achievement that linked urban markets with the hinterland. Later it would be the railroads, but they were still too expensive in the 1850s to be adopted by most farmers. It was along the Erie Canal that the towns of Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo grew up. The preponderance of canal transport in this period is interesting when contrasted with the later arrival of RRs. Canal travel in more "democratic" in that anyone can use the canal and there is no benefit to restricting the stops -- the RR maximized efficiency by restricting the number of stops. Yet this democratic mode of transportation fostered regional rather than national markets. Not until the age of steam powered RRs could a truly national market emerge.

As part of his section on "Concentration," he discusses "Cities of Steam" and "Power Incorporated." Beginning with "Cities of Steam," he describes overlapping power systems.

Steam power came to the city in two stages: first as transportation and later as manufacturing power. Both dramatically changed American landscapes. The steamboat transformed the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri and Hudson rivers into highways, which were connected into a national water transport network by canals. Starting in the 1840s, the railroad network extended this system further, accelerating the flow of people, goods, and information. (p. 71)

Adoption of steam power allowed manufacturing to arise in cities which did not have exploitable sources of water power. Worchester, Fall River and Providence were transformed into centers of manufacturing only with the introduction of steam powered machinery. The Railroad worked to annihilate time and space, drawing markets closer and changing people's perceptions at the same time. By the 1850s, railroad companies were already promoting the recreational uses of travel (personal life arising out of proletairianization seems premature in the antebellum world but maybe not ...) In contrast to the North, where steam power transformed cities into manufacturing center, the South chose low energy solutions. Steam power, though available to the South, retained its rural character. A community of skilled mechanics did not evolve in the South to provide the self-reinforcing drive for innovation.

Turning to the use of coal as fuel, Nye tracks the development of coal mining in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, near coal supplies, was early transformed to a center of railroads and heavy industry. But the adoption of coal as a fuel was uneven. Many railroads and steam boats used wood well into the middle of the century and manufacturers were slow to move to coal-fueled steam power into the 1850s. The passage to coal-fueled steam was the passage that marked the American entry into the world of dark satanic mills that Jefferson had sought to avoid. Coal mines were dangerous, steam powered river boats suffered many catastrophes in the 1830s and 40s, and steam boilers caused major explosions in NYC and Hartford, CT in the 1850s. Yet, the American society of the time was convinced that these were acts of god not bad management. Indeed, the dangerous mines were often a test of local bravado as Anthony Wallace has shown. The remarkable resistance to limitations on steam power is best seen inside this cultural matrix. The shift that occurred at mid century can be seen in the language of the country. Early in the century, agricultural metaphors for work prevailed and then later we started talking in the language of steam (p. 90).

The apotheosis of steam power occurs at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 (Philadelphia). Here the huge Corliss steam engine powered the exhibits. The exhibit prefigured the networked city that would spread across the continent in the next several decades. It also increasingly put families of the middling sort at the mercy of a rising skilled class of blue collar workers who maintained the networked city. Life for the middle class which did benefit from the networked city became more complicated. The networked city featured gas lighting and better sanitation for the better off. The underside was darker, since this networked city did not share its benefits with all. Women in particular bore the brunt of this uneven development in cities, as they struggled to provide for their families' survival. And on the "frontier" the benefits of the networked city were also rarely felt, though the impact of the steam power system was increasingly felt in other ways.

Turning next to "Power Incorporated," Nye considers the rise of the corporate form of organization in the context of steam power.

Was a homesteading farmer on the high plains in 1870 really a part of the steam-powered economy? What did he have to do with corporations in Chicago or New York? His sparsely furnished sod hut, as revealed in old photographs, appears so primitive that to say that it was in some sense "industrial" seems absurd. Nevertheless, the homestead was very much part of a high-energy society. The steel plow the farmer used to break the plains, the barbed wire that fenced his cattle, and his metal tools were industrial products, as was the camera that was used to make a picture of his house. This farmer produced cash crops for a national market that was accessible only by railroad. His sod hut was only temporary shelter to be used until he had time to erect a better house, generally with a balloon frame of pre-cut wood hammered together with factory-produced nails. Gone were the heavy beams and the time-consuming work of making mortice-and-tenon joints. The homesteader was not a peasant; he was a specialized farmer deeply enmeshed in the capitalist system. He was a speculator in land and a consumer linked to distant markets. Without a system of steam-powered transportation, a farm concentrating on a few products would not have made economic sense. The farmer's existence was underwritten by institutions that were all but invisible where he lived. Chief among these was the corporation. How had corporations emerged, and how were they related to the power system? (p. 104)

This sets the stage for the problem. Early industrialization had proceeded primarily via family and local networks. The incorporation laws passed by most states by the time of the Civil War, gave legal life to the corporate form. Businesses that focused on infrastructure (such as canals, railroads, steam ships, telegraph companies, mines and steel mills) all took advantage of the corporate form as a way of raising the requisite capital, while protecting the personal fortunes of investors. The increase in the scale of these enterprises and the increased prestige of the military form of organizational hierarchy, lead to the changes in the way these corporate entities behaved. This change, however, took time. Railroads resisted the use of telegraph technology for more than a decade, opting to do things "by the book" and using published schedules.

And what was happening at this time on the labor front? Both indenture and apprenticeship had largely died out by the 1840s, thereby freeing up labor to seek its own avenues of employment. Management in the corporate form was also freed from the constraints of the family firm, freed to allow for the employment of managers who would run the business on a more efficient basis than the old family proprietors. Yet the corporate form only worked when there were efficiencies to scale either in production or in distribution. The example of iron stove manufacture is cited here, as the opening up of canals in the 1820s made fuel and iron readily available in upstate NY where the production of cast iron stoves boomed from 1835-1860. At the same time the market for stoves provided further incentive as people moved westward. The same thing happened with the plow and reaper manufacturing sector, as migrants moved to the Ohio Valley in the west the infrastructure that made manufacture of these implements possible enabled the companies producing them to do so efficiently and at a profit. Cyrus McCormick took advantage of the canals and railroads in Chicago to sell his combines to the western market. Shifting focus to the western market, he describes the rapidity with which the American expropriated Indian lands and then brought them under cultivation.

Nye points to the increasing efficiency of agriculture as a precursor to the assembly line of Henry Ford. By the early 20th C farm production was highly mechanized. In the post-Civil War era, meat packing became a major industry as well. Mechanized canning of food also proceeded apace. First to feed soldiers, then to feed cowboys, mechanized food preservation boomed in the latter half of the 19th Century. The handicraft of canning was transformed into an industrial process at the same time as the American tobacco company adopted the Bonsack machine to produce a vast quantity of cigarettes. The progress in food preservation was not an unalloyed good for farmers, however, as the economic slowdown of the late 19th C was to show. The consolidation of oil wholesaling and distribution under Standard Oil allowed for greater efficiencies but also lead to a careless attitude toward the environment, with oil being so inexpensive that there was no financial incentive to protect the environment from spills. Overall, however, Nye argues that the weakness of countertrends (labor agitations) allowed for greater efficiency in contrast with Europe where the weaker positions of corporations necessitated the slowing of the division of labor and the continuation of the craft tradition of the guild system.

[Chelsea Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this for grad school in a History of Energy in the United States. Nye does an amazing job of taking a grand scale of the history of energy use in the U.S. and streamlines to a chronological time of sorts of how we came from using wood and man power to the nuclear power we do today.

Nye explains how we left one energy for another and why. Sometimes it was demand or ease of use and supply, other times it is political or capitalist. This book is written in a way for anyone to understand and follow along. It is void of the academic jargon that a lot of books like this get bogged with. This is not a complete or detailed history of energy use in the U.S. but it is a nice starting point that hits on the major forms of energy.

Nye also, though not a lot explains the human element and how energy shaped us as a nation and people. He also shows how our choices in energy shaped our cities and towns as well as our way of life. The effects energy had on society is covered pretty well, again this book does not go into great detail on one thing. It really is an overview of the U.S. energy history.

Very well written, and held my attention. As a grad student who is focusing on climate and weather and the effect human activity is having on both this is a good overview to see how and why we use the energy that we use vs. some other form. To understand the history of energy I feel will help we in my future studies of climate and what is cause such rapid climate change.

[Cana McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

needed to skim for a project. nye gives a really straightforward overview of how human choices of energy technologies lead to cultural changes and consumption patterns. a little outdated at this point maybe? but can see an easy throughline bw this and, say, a book like timothy mitchell’s carbon democracy

[rowaelinisbae · Rating 3 out of 5]

it felt like this text had very little substance based on concrete evidence. okay overall though.

[Mohammad Jalali]

I liked how Nye reviews the history of energy systems and talks about “technological momentum”. It was interesting how he connects them to social constructions and culture and then discusses how the US became the greatest power-consuming nation in history.

Though the way he looks at the history of energy use in the 19th century can be hardly fit with more complex situations in the 20th century, but his book gave me some ideas to think about the roots of current social constructions that demand energy. I wouldn’t take into account the big role of culture and social variables in defining energy demands and making innovations before reading this book.

I think he properly presents how cultural choices are significant parameters in any given time, but I disagree with him that looking at the relations between energy systems and consumption is not a matter of tracing out cause and effect relationships. After reading this in the introduction chapter, I was looking to see how understanding cause and effect relationships are not critical in his view, but in fact I was able to imagine cause and effect relationships in most of his stories, considering the fact that social constructions were the main causes of technological momentum in the 19th century. By the way, I think this book is one of those necessary books for any decision or policy maker in the energy sector, and of course for students!

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of interesting facts in this book but it's a slog to get through. I read it for my energy bookclub and skimmed a lot of parts b/c it was too tedious. Good information though.