The Wizard and the Prophet2 Read online

  Iran was not the only focus of oil fear. During the First World War, Britain, France, Italy, and Russia made plans to carve up the Ottoman Empire, which had allied against them with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Other than the strategically located Ottoman capital, Istanbul (then Constantinople), the most valuable spoils were the petroleum zones in what are now Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. These were parceled out in a series of covert meetings, but the United States rejected the deal—it would, for example, have awarded Istanbul to Moscow. In the middle of the bickering, Greece invaded the Ottoman Empire, unwittingly igniting the revolution that created modern Turkey. Not willing to interfere, the Europeans gave up their designs on the Ottoman heartland—today’s Turkey—and focused on oil regions, too far away for the revolutionary army to defend. Only in 1928 did the parties agree how to divvy up drilling rights, with Britain winning the proverbial lion’s share.

  From today’s perspective, the frenzy over Middle East oil seems bizarrely disconnected from reality. At the time, two nations dominated petroleum production: the United States, responsible for about two-thirds of it, and the Soviet Union, which pumped an additional fifth. Both were finding petroleum at ever-rising rates. Between 1920 and 1929, U.S. crude-oil reserves nearly doubled, despite constantly increasing consumption. Meanwhile, the Russian oil industry, which had crashed after the revolution of 1917, returned with a roar in the early Soviet period; production almost quadrupled in the 1920s. And new sources were coming online. Venezuela, for instance, went from pumping almost nothing in 1920 to 500,000 barrels a day in 1929. Petroleum was flooding the world.

  Nonetheless, politicians throughout the West continued to invoke the phantasm of an impending petroleum drought. When I searched through an archive of 1920s newspapers, I turned up more than a thousand articles prophesying an inevitable “oil crisis,” “oil famine,” or “oil shortage.” Some of those articles mentioned that oil executives were baffled by the cries of doom. But the overall tone was ominous. “The United States is face to face with a near shortage in petroleum supplies so serious it threatens the very economic fabric of the nation,” cried the Los Angeles Times in 1923. A year later, the Houston Post-Dispatch forecast “oil famine within two years.” “Oil exhaustion in fifteen or twenty years,” said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1925. A special twelve-part wire-service investigation in 1928 flatly decreed, “There is no possible excuse for assuming an adequate future supply of oil.”

  The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In light of the last eighty years of history in these regions, it is hard to view these moves as enduring successes. Coups and attempted coups in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria; oil shocks in 1973 and 1979; failed programs for “energy independence”; wars in Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria—this cancerous relationship, a mix of wrath and dependence, has continued with little change for nine decades. Driven by the recurrent panic of peak oil, it sometimes seems as fundamental to the structure of global relations as the law of gravitation is to the rotation of Earth around the sun.

  Although many other factors, religion notable among them, have had their hand in this state of affairs, it is easy to wish that peak oil had never been invented. But this fantasy may be unreasonable. Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn’t it wholly rational to expect fossil fuels to run out?

  “A Giant Lampshade, Reversed”

  In June 1866 a high school mathematics teacher in Tours, in central France, attached a toy steam engine to a small metal container full of water. Working with a mechanic friend, the teacher placed the device in front of a curved mirror. Shaped like a shallow trough, the mirror focused the sun’s rays on the container. After an hour, the water began to boil. Steam gushed out, driving the steam engine—“a success that surpassed my expectations,” the teacher crowed. It was the first true example of solar power: converting energy from the sun into mechanical force that could accomplish useful tasks.

  Today the math teacher is a historical footnote, but it seems likely that tomorrow he will have a place in the main text. His name was Augustin-Bernard Mouchot. He was born in 1825 in a village southeast of Paris, the youngest of the six children of a poor locksmith. After scrambling his way through school, Mouchot became a teacher, drifting from one position to another in the boondocks. Along the way he gradually acquired professional degrees in mathematics and physics. He was teaching in northwest France in 1860 when a powerful insight set him on a decades-long crusade.

  Like their counterparts in Britain, the French upper and middle classes understood that their prosperity depended on energy from coal. But France, unlike Britain, had little coal and thus was forced to import much of its supply at high cost. Many French people, Mouchot among them, feared that foreigners would stop selling coal to France—or, worse, that the foreign deposits would run out. If that unhappy day arrived, Mouchot warned in a manifesto, French industry would no longer have “the resources that are part of the cause of its prodigious expansion. What will it do then?” In a flash he realized where the solution lay: “The sun! that is to say, a powerful hearth ready to provide its heat for mechanical applications.”

  Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun’s energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky to let sunlight flood into rooms during winter, heating cold interiors. Thousands of miles away, Greek savants expounded the same architectural principles to their disciples. So, later, did the Romans, according to the solar-energy chronicler John Perlin, whose work I am drawing upon here. To heat the rooms in public baths, Romans built giant south-facing windows—those in Pompeii’s caldarium were 6′7 x 9″10.

  Augustin-Bernard Mouchot Credit 56

  Historians used to call the European era after the fall of Rome the Dark Ages. Now we know that scholarship and the arts continued and flourished. Still, use of the sun nearly ceased. Rich people stopped placing glass windows on the south side of their villas and mansions; poor people didn’t orient their shacks to take advantage of sunlight. (In this respect the Dark Ages actually were dark.) Not until the Renaissance did Europeans again collect solar heat, installing glass walls in greenhouses and conservatories. And not until the eighteenth century did natural scientists try to understand why, exactly, “a room, a carriage, or any other place is hotter when the rays of the sun pass through glass.” The quotation is from the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who in 1784 built the first “hot box”—a small wooden box, insulated with cork and topped by sheets of glass. De Saussure put a container of water in his box and took it outside on a sunny summer day. Impressively, the water quickly began to boil.

  Working almost a century later, Mouchot put his own spin on de Saussure’s idea: focusing the sun’s rays with a mirror. To be sure, people had concentrated sunlight with mirrors before—Chinese farmers carried small mirrors to set fires as long as three thousand years ago. But Mouchot was the first to use sunlight and mirrors to boil water and then employ the steam to drive engines.

  Mouchot’s initial efforts attracted enough attention that he was given access to a prestigious military workshop. After three years of sporadic tinkering, he had a working model—the one he tested with a toy steam engine. Elated, he presented his invention to Emperor Napoleon III in September 1866. Soon after, Mouchot began writing the inevitable self-promotional book.

  By then he had moved to a more prestigious high school in Tours, negotiating a reduced teaching load so he could devote more time to his mirrors. Unburdened by family or friends, he spent every moment in his studio laboratory. In 1870 he erected a seven-foot sun engine in the Jardin des Tuileries, in the center of Paris. Onlookers marveled to see an engine without any visible fuel source. A motor that r
an on sunbeams! Little wonder the crowds were excited.

  Unluckily for Mouchot, France declared war on Prussia a few months after he put the machine on display. After a series of military disasters, German forces rampaged through Paris and Emperor Napoleon III fled into exile. In the chaos, the solar engine disappeared forever.

  Mouchot, ever tenacious, assembled another solar engine, mounting it in front of the Tours library in 1874. It had a conical mirror that surrounded the boiler, focusing heat on every side. “A giant lampshade, reversed,” one enthusiastic journalist called it, “turning its concavity towards the sky.” A subsidiary mechanism allowed the mirror to track the sun as it moved through the sky. On a hot, clear day, the apparatus could boil five quarts of water an hour, enough to drive a half-horsepower motor. It was an enormous popular success, attracting crowds of gawkers. But Mouchot was learning the limitations of solar power.

  Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock. Mouchot’s engines were useless at night or on cloudy days—and French skies were often cloudy. Even when the sun shone, the mirrors were costly. One skeptical engineer noted in a review of Mouchot’s work that running a typical one-horsepower steam engine required “about two kilograms [4.4 pounds] of coal.” To drive the same engine with the sun, Mouchot would need a mirror of about 320 square feet. Operating factory-scale machinery would require hundreds of giant mirrors—a huge expense. Meanwhile, French industry was not running out of fuel, as so many had predicted it would. Paris had signed a trade agreement with London, and the nation was awash with British coal.

  In an 1882 demonstration in Paris, Mouchot’s assistant used his solar engine to drive a printing press. Credit 57

  Desperate to save his work, Mouchot came up with a new justification for solar power: as a tool of imperialism. In the 1870s France was conquering Algeria, dispatching thousands of colonists to brand-new villages along the coast. The occupation was hobbled by energy problems; not only did the colony have to import almost all of its coal from across the Mediterranean, it had no railroads to transport it from the ports to those new French villages. Solar power, Mouchot promised, would transform Algeria into a productive adjunct of the French imperium. Winning a government grant, he traveled across the colony, testing solar irrigation pumps and solar distillation plants. In the desert an infection left him nearly blind. A second bout of fever left him mostly deaf. He ignored his afflictions and wrote reports on his demonstration projects that so excited colonial authorities that they asked him to represent Algeria with a sun engine at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Featuring what Mouchot modestly described as “the largest mirror ever built in the world,” the device astounded visitors by running a freezer. Using the sun’s heat to make ice! Mouchot won a gold medal at the exhibition; barely able to see and hear, he became a chevalier in the French Legion of Honor.

  Two years later he gave up his crusade. Blindness and deafness did not defeat him. Coal did. Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn’t work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terribly interested.*2

  Others, though, took up the solar cause, most notably John Ericsson, a Swedish-American engineer famed for his design of the Monitor, the U.S. Navy’s first commissioned iron-clad warship. In 1868, four years after Mouchot’s initial demonstration, Ericsson revealed the solution to the coming “exhaustion of our coal fields”: “the concentrated heat of the solar rays.” Eight years later, in his own self-promotional book, Ericsson proclaimed that he had invented seven types of solar engines, though he hadn’t shown them to anyone. They were, he said, the world’s first true “sun motor”; Mouchot’s device, he jeered, was a “mere toy.”

  There is reason to question whether Ericsson—a gifted engineer, but also a pioneer in vaporware—actually made a single solar machine. Zealously secretive, he wouldn’t allow visitors to his laboratory, often refused to allow his inventions to be examined even by their financial backers, and repeatedly promised new breakthroughs that never appeared. In 1888, soon after another premature announcement, he had a heart attack and died. The engine “occupied his thoughts up to his last hour,” one obituary reported. “While he could hardly speak above a whisper, he drew his chief engineer’s face close to his own, gave him final instructions for continuing the work on the machine, and exacted a promise that the work should go on.”

  Ericsson failed as a solar inventor but nonetheless had a true vision for the future, which he broadcast in manifestos and articles. Tomorrow, he avowed, would be as clean and luminous as sunlight itself. It would be a world without smokestacks or toxic furnaces or lightless coal mines. Buoyed on a refulgent tide of free solar power, communities everywhere would provide themselves with heat and light from millions of local solar engines. A new era of universal prosperity!—all from harnessing the inexhaustible light of the sun. It was the first articulation of what would, in the 1970s, become a rallying cry for Prophets: clean, cheap, distributed power, a global tapestry of light and energy generated and distributed on the level of the neighborhood, the farm, the workshop.

  John Ericsson insisted that his sun motor design (shown here in an 1876 drawing) owed nothing to Mouchot’s design. Credit 58

  Today’s version of Ericsson’s Prophetic vision was first put together by Amory Lovins, an environmental activist with no formal degree. In 1976 Lovins published an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs that introduced the “soft path” for energy—the ideas that inspired water advocates twenty years later to invoke a “soft path” for water. The hard path, Lovins said, consists of distributing ever-increasing amounts of energy from big, integrated facilities: giant power plants, giant pipelines, giant tankers. All are massive, brittle, and ecologically destructive; all require control from repressive, technocratic bureaucracies. The soft path, by contrast, consists of bottom-up power generation from networks of renewable sources. It is small-scale, flexible, and respectful of environmental limits; it fosters community control and democracy. Lovins, needless to say, was a soft-path guy.

  These ideas attracted enormous attention—and vehement condemnation from shocked energy executives. But neither Lovins nor Ericsson was offering anything new. Their vision of the soft path was simply an extension of the millennia-old, pre-modern power system, with individual stacks of wood for each home replaced by individual assemblages of mirrors (Ericsson) or windmills and solar panels (Lovins). What was novel in the long term was the opposing vision of the Wizards, initially formulated in the early nineteenth century by a man named Frederick Winsor.

  Half genius, half fraud, Winsor helped create an institution so fundamental to modern life that it is almost invisible: the power utility. Born in Braunschweig, Germany, he saw an experimental gas lamp in Paris in 1802 and was immediately hooked. (The gas was “coal gas,” a flammable mix of methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide made by heating coal in an oxygen-free oven.) Leaving behind a mass of unpaid debts, he immigrated to England, changed his name from the overly Teutonic Friedrich Albrecht Winzer of his birth to the eminently English Fred Winsor, and began a frenzy of “secret” experiments that he publicized at every opportunity. His work, he said, was creating “the most prolific source for the wealth of nations, that ever was recorded in the history of the world.” A font of blarney, bunk, and braggadocio, Winsor constantly fell out with his partners and was so careless with money that at the moment of his greatest success he had to flee abroad to escape his creditors. Nonetheless, he changed the world.

  Winsor was the first to realize that energy, like water, could flow through pipes from a central location, the equivalent of a well. By building a network of pipes that pumped gas from big central p
lants, he could charge for energy, monitoring customers’ usage and cutting them off if they failed to pay their bills. After multiple legal and financial battles Winsor’s Gas Light and Coke Company opened its doors in 1812. It was the beginning of the hard path. Within eight years the firm was feeding gas along 120 miles of London street mains to about thirty thousand lamps. Competitors arose: by 1825, every big city in England had at least one gas-lamp firm. Similar enterprises quickly appeared in other nations; the first U.S. gas-light company, for instance, was established in Baltimore in 1816. Decades later, when electricity became common, its inventors followed Winsor’s model, creating high-tech, consolidated distribution companies that fed power through wires—“pipes,” in effect—to faraway customers.

  Father Himalaya’s Pyrheliophoro, seen here in a 1904 photograph, marked both the apex and the end of the first solar-power movement. Credit 59

  Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation. Either way, utilities have become a prominent feature of the contemporary landscape. Economically speaking, the advantages of Wizard-style, hard-path centralization and scale were so overwhelming that until recently efforts to promulgate Prophet-style distributed power systems almost vanished.