Posts Tagged by Thomas Edison
PBS’s “Electric Nation”
| May 1, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
The PBS special “Electric Nation” is a reasonably fair-minded and certainly non-hysterical treatment of the various modes of how we in the U.S. generate electricity. Personally, had I written the show, I would have been quite a bit more hysterical, emphasizing the utter insanity of our business-as-usual approach to fossil fuels and our failure to form a workable energy policy, even in the face of:
• Global climate change
• Ocean acidification
• Peak oil
• Empowering terrorist and other anti-American regimes
• Escalating rates of lung disease
Yet they were good enough to quote Thomas Edison’s famous simile regarding our shortsightedness when it comes to energy:
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy–sun, wind and tide.”
Edison Predicted Cheap Energy
| December 31, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
132 years ago today, Thomas Edison first demonstrated his incandescent lightbulb and told spectators: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
Not a bad prediction, when you think about it. Few people grouse about the price of electricity, which is one of the main reasons that the migration to renewables is so difficult; in many ways, we’re trying to fix something that at first blush doesn’t appear to be really broken. It’s only in the very recent past that we began to realize that our system of delivering energy to a world population had huge hidden costs.
As we enter the new year, let’s all pledge to heighten the awareness of those costs, and do everything we can to push the planet in the direction of clean energy sources.
130 Years After Edison and Tesla — Some Progress in Electric Motors
| October 8, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Efficiency |
It’s been 130 years since Edison and Tesla did their thing in the late 19th Century, putting the theoretical work of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell to practical use. No offense to those who’ve made contributions during the intervening years, but there have been astonishingly few breakthroughs in this field over an enormous period of time.
Here, I discuss something that I do, in fact, believe to be a major breakthrough.
Energy-Related Paradigm Shifts
| September 2, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’m pleased to see that blogger Frank Eggers has become active here, who writes:
As one of the comment-posters stated, too little attention is being given to reducing the need for driving . . . With better urban planning, people could often walk where they need to go, ride a bicycle, or use public transportation. But with scattered development, public transportation cannot be made efficient.
This is all true. And I do think I see the seeds of this thinking in young people leaving college with the relevant degrees to get into this subject professionally. Clearly, however, such change will be a long time in the making.
Another issue slowing down the reduction in driving is simply individuals’ resistance to change. I’m reminded of Thomas Edison, who, when he introduced alternating current in the late 19th century, recognized that it represented a scary paradigm shift for American consumers, and wanted to “mess with” that paradigm as little as possible. So, to suggest a way in which electricity could replace gas for room lighting, he put his new lights in the wall sconces where the gas lamps had been. Previously, one could only light a room from the walls, since gas lamps on the ceiling would have brought the whole place down in flames. Even though Edison wished he could show the world a breakthrough in illuminating a room with the more practical and effective ceiling lighting, he wanted to introduce no more change than was absolutely necessary.
My point here is that the best ideas of the generation and use of energy are those that call upon people to make the least change in their attitudes and behaviors. This, btw, is my chief concern about the Commuter Car in the previous post; it calls upon the automotive consumer to make a radical shift in perception, and it’s unclear to me how that will be embraced.
