Routes of Power

Energy and Modern America

Christopher F. Jones

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674970922, 9780674728899
• eBook ISBN: 9780674419629
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: History

The fossil fuel revolution is usually rendered as a tale of historic advances in energy production. In this perspective-changing account, Christopher F. Jones instead tells a story of advances in energy access—canals, pipelines, and wires that delivered power in unprecedented quantities to cities and factories at a great distance from production sites. He shows that in the American mid-Atlantic region between 1820 and 1930, the construction of elaborate transportation networks for coal, oil, and electricity unlocked remarkable urban and industrial growth along the eastern seaboard. But this new transportation infrastructure did not simply satisfy existing consumer demand—it also whetted an appetite for more abundant and cheaper energy, setting the nation on a path toward fossil fuel dependence.

Between the War of 1812 and the Great Depression, low-cost energy supplied to cities through a burgeoning delivery system allowed factory workers to mass-produce goods on a scale previously unimagined. It also allowed people and products to be whisked up and down the East Coast at speeds unattainable in a country dependent on wood, water, and muscle. But an energy-intensive America did not benefit all its citizens equally. It provided cheap energy to some but not others; it channeled profits to financiers rather than laborers; and it concentrated environmental harms in rural areas rather than cities.

Today, those who wish to pioneer a more sustainable and egalitarian energy order can learn valuable lessons from this history of the nation's first steps toward dependence on fossil fuels.

1

Coal’s Liquid Pathways

SOMETIME IN THE FALL of 1820, a group of men piloting crude wooden rafts piled with coal pulled into a wharf on the eastern side of Philadelphia. In one sense, there was nothing remarkable about their journey: farmers, traders, and lumbermen had been rafting goods down the Delaware River to the region’s main trading center for decades. Upon closer inspection, however, two things were unusual. First, the boatmen had begun their expedition on the recently improved Lehigh River, a waterway whose steep falls, shallow pools, and jutting rocks had previously frustrated attempts to deliver goods from the Lehigh Valley. Several hundred workers had spent much of the previous two years creating dams, stone walls, and hydrostatic gates that funneled, constrained, and directed the flows of the Lehigh River. Their efforts had altered and regulated the river to suit the needs of human commerce. The second distinctive fact about this group was the cargo: anthracite coal. Although Philadelphia craftsmen were accustomed to using bituminous coal from Britain, Nova Scotia, and Virginia, there was no active trade in what many called “stone coal.” The city’s coal market was small and well stocked; there was no pent-up demand for anthracite. In fact, the men had great trouble finding customers. It was much easier to break up their wooden rafts to sell as used lumber than it was to convince Philadelphians to pay for stone coal.

The names of these boatmen have been lost, and their arrival does not seem to have merited attention from local newspapers. But with the advantage of historical hindsight, the revolutionary nature of their journey is clearer. Over the next forty years, anthracite coal would trigger profound changes in the economy, environment, and society of the mid-Atlantic. Stone coal would be used to forge iron, build railroads, power steam engines, propel boats, and warm the homes of burgeoning urban populations. It would create great wealth, support the growth of eastern seaboard cities, and enable the development of an industrial economy. As residents of the mid-Atlantic became accustomed to using coal, their appetites for fossil fuel energy grew at a dramatic rate. While in 1820 the beleaguered men from the Lehigh Valley had difficulty selling a few hundred tons of coal, by the dawn of the Civil War consumers required annual deliveries of several million tons to maintain their way of life.

How did this happen? The advent of new production techniques, a common explanation for energy transitions, is not sufficient to explain the adoption of anthracite coal. People had been bringing anthracite coal out of the ground for many decades before 1820 without creating a substantial market. Moreover, there were few innovations in coal mining during this time that explain the industry’s rapid expansion. We get a better answer when we focus our attention on the anonymous boatmen, for they signify the critical importance of transport networks. Anthracite was found in rural regions distant from the urban markets of the eastern seaboard. Hauling coal in wagons overland was time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. Under such conditions, only small quantities of anthracite could be shipped, and buyers had few incentives to change their energy consumption practices.

The improvements on the Lehigh River pioneered a landscape of intensification linking transport systems, boosters, and consumers. In conjunction with alterations of the Schuylkill, Delaware, Lackawaxen, and Susquehanna Rivers, canals made it possible for anthracite coal to be shipped cheaply, abundantly, and reliably to eastern seaboard cities. Once in markets, boosters encouraged consumer demand by creating new applications for anthracite, teaching users how to burn it in homes and factories, and advertising its benefits. Over time, consumers responded favorably to these encouragements and demand grew rapidly. These forces operated in a synergistic feedback cycle whereby canals increased supply, boosters found new applications for coal, and consumer demand encouraged the expansion of transport networks to further increase supply. The limits and negative feedback loops of the organic energy regime were soon replaced by the mineral energy regime’s pattern of continual growth.

Envisioning Canals

The history of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal trade begins over 250 million years ago when the land was flat and marshy. Tall trees and large ferns dominated the landscape. As plants and animals died, many fell into the swamps and decayed in an oxygen-poor environment. With the passage of time, this mass of plant and animal debris formed a brown spongy matter known as peat. This process repeated itself countless times, occasionally interrupted by deposits of mud and sand that formed layers between the peat formations. Then geological forces went to work. Over millions of years, a combination of pressure from the layers above and heat emanating from the earth’s core drove moisture and gases out of the peat, turning it into coal; at the same time, the layers of sand and mud were solidified into sedimentary rocks. Most of the world’s coal was formed in a similar manner. Depending on the amount of time and strength of the geological forces, more gas and water was removed from the peat, leaving behind deposits of concentrated carbon. Peat first became lignite, then semi-bituminous, and eventually bituminous coal, categories that refer to the relative percentage of carbon left in the material.

In northeast Pennsylvania, however, one additional step occurred. The clash of tectonic plates raised the flat land into mountains, creating additional pressure as the earth was folded over itself. This drove additional amounts of volatile material out of the coal, leaving deposits of nearly pure carbon, known to us as anthracite coal. Such geological activity is relatively rare: most of the world’s coal reserves are variations of lignite or bituminous. The many layers of coal in a single place combined to provide northeast Pennsylvania with a unique underworld: three-quarters of the earth’s anthracite reserves were squeezed into an area spanning less than 500 square miles. The high percentage of carbon in anthracite has several implications. It gives it a hard, shiny appearance like obsidian, and it is difficult to ignite because of the lack of impurities. But once lit, anthracite burns hotter and cleaner than other coal varieties, making it a particularly effective fuel for homes and factories.¹

In the early nineteenth century, coal played a minor role in American life; organic energy sources provided the vast majority of the mid-Atlantic’s needs. Much like the rest of the United States—and indeed, as in most of the rest of the world except certain parts of Britain, Germany, and Belgium—human muscles, animals, falling water, and firewood provided the energy for farming, producing goods, heating homes, and cooking food. Craftsmen in early American cities, including Philadelphia and New York, consumed small amounts of coal, as did a few homeowners. Some who lived in northeastern Pennsylvania near outcrops of anthracite also burned it in homes and workshops. These uses of coal, however, were the exception rather than the rule. Most entrepreneurs built manufacturing enterprises along the falls of rivers or in rural areas where firewood was abundant. The large majority of the population was engaged in agriculture and relied almost wholly on organic energy sources in their daily lives. The mid-Atlantic was an organic energy regime—a world in which nearly all energy and goods were derived from the land.

Muscles, water, and wood were not limiting factors for mid-Atlantic residents at the time. As European observers had noted since arriving in the New World, the abundance of forests and land offered what seemed to be limitless possibilities. The region included several rivers with falls that could be used to power mills, and large amounts of unsettled land that could feed plenty of draft animals. Given the low population density and small energy demands of the region’s farmers, merchants, and craftsmen, shortages were not a chronic condition for most of the mid-Atlantic. Compared with their European counterparts, mid-Atlantic residents lived in a world of energy abundance where “poor American farmers could boast of burning bigger fires than could most European nobles.”²

Despite the abundance of organic energy sources, in the early 1800s a heterogeneous group of Philadelphia merchants, scientists, industrialists, politicians, and citizens became interested in anthracite coal. Many people had known for several decades that there was coal in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. As early as the 1770s, farmers and craftsmen in Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley were regularly using anthracite. By the 1790s, large deposits had been identified in the Lehigh Valley, and small amounts of anthracite from the Schuylkill region were being marketed in Philadelphia in the 1810s. Moreover, Philadelphia blacksmiths, nail smiths, distillers, and the Water Works were already using bituminous coal imported from Britain, Nova Scotia, and Virginia. While the trade was small—in 1784, Philadelphia imported around 500 tons of coal, just over 1,000 tons by the early 1790s, and merely 3,000 tons per year by the 1810s—boosters were enticed by the potential profits in replacing foreign imports with domestic supplies.³

Philadelphia’s anthracite boosters were not deterred by the modest scale of the existing coal trade. Booster logic is future-oriented; the present matters far less. And Philadelphia’s anthracite boosters had a clear imagination for the future, derived from observing events across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the previous century, Britain had entered a remarkable period of economic and industrial growth fueled by coal. British industrialists used coal to power large textile mills that enabled the nation to leapfrog all its economic competitors. Coal had led to financial gain, industrial growth, and military strength. Several Americans hoped the young republic would follow a similar path. Thomas Cooper, for example, a professor of chemistry at several American colleges, observed in the early nineteenth century: “In this country every suggestion that brings forward the importance of coal to the public view is of moment: we know little of its value in Pennsylvania as yet. All, all the superior wealth, power and energy of Great Britain, is founded on her coal mining.”⁴

But how to develop Pennsylvania’s anthracite resources? As contemporary observers knew, mining anthracite was not a major challenge. The erosion of the Appalachian Mountains over millions of years had left coal seams exposed to the surface in many places: at those sites, a pickax, shovel, and brute strength sufficed to gather anthracite. Transport was another story. The mountainous terrain and lack of good roads meant that the Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Wyoming Valleys were poorly connected with the urban centers where potential consumers lived. Moving coal by wagons was expensive, and only small amounts could be transported overland. The reality in the early nineteenth century was that it cost more to ship coal eighty miles overland than it did to import it three thousand miles from Britain.⁵ Simply put, the places where American coal could be found were not part of the trade hinterlands of cities like New York and Philadelphia.

When pondering the transport options for the fuel that would eventually pioneer the transition to a mineral energy regime, anthracite boosters turned to the shipping medium most characteristic of the organic energy regime they lived in: water. The buoyancy of water reduced friction, thereby lowering the amount of labor required to move goods. For example, one heavy horse could pull a canal boat carrying between thirty to fifty tons while two draft horses were needed to pull a four-ton wagon overland. Mules provided most of the power for American canals, and three of them could pull a boat loaded with more than a hundred tons of coal.⁶ In short, water was desirable because it was an energy-saving device for those who lived in a world where energy was correlated with personal exertion. But these benefits were not always available. Rivers could freeze in the winter, be reduced to a small trickle in the summer, and flood during the spring snowmelt. Rapids could wreck boats in some seasons while exposed rocks along the river bottom could grind trade to a halt in other seasons.

Boosters knew that the Schuylkill and Lehigh Rivers offered a more promising outlet for coal than overland routes, but these waterways could not be used reliably in their natural state. They had variable water levels, steep falls, and jutting rocks that made it difficult for boats to travel downstream. If these rivers could be improved, though, a profitable trade could result. An anonymous analysis from 1821, for example, argued for the virtues of canals: “[Coal] is an article of too much weight in proportion to its value, to bear a transportation by land … The immense mines of it in this state, are therefore of no value at present; but make the water communication, and they at once become a source of employment and wealth.”⁷ Josiah White, pioneer of the Lehigh Canal, made a case for the links between coal, canals, and economic growth explicitly: “The steam engines spread all over England are said to perform many times over the labor of the entire population of that country. The coal for those engines comes on their canals … Canals are the foundation of their wealth.”⁸

Natural limitations did not dissuade anthracite’s boosters. Given the potential advantages of water transport in an organic energy regime, they believed they could follow the lead of many other societies that had altered waterways to fit their needs.⁹ They knew that water improvements could take several forms. If a river had a bottleneck at a particular place, they could remove dangerous rocks, build a dam to submerge a set of rapids, or create a short canal around a waterfall. Another option was to create temporary dams, called pond freshets, to build up a pool of water: when a dam was opened, it would release a long wave of high water that could transport goods even during the dry season. Finally, boosters could choose to build a canal, which involved creating a separate channel for the water on one edge of the river, constructing dams and locks at points where the river fell, and establishing a tow path along the entire length so that mules could pull boats.

Which type of river improvement was appropriate depended on who was using the river for what purpose. For example, a farmer who needed to ship goods to market would care about the navigability of the river at harvest time but might have little concern for the river’s depth since the total amount of goods being shipped was relatively small. A merchant in a city at the mouth of the river would care about the difficulty of shipping goods upriver to prospective customers. Lumbermen cared primarily about the ability to ship lumber throughout the year, but this task could be accomplished with relatively shallow water levels; they were, correspondingly, common users of pond freshets. Coal transporters, because they envisioned shipping large quantities of a heavy commodity, demanded river improvements that exceeded the needs of previous users. They required deep canals that would allow large boats to travel up and down rivers f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Coal’s Liquid Pathways
• 2. The Anthracite Energy Transition
• 3. Pennsylvania’s Petroleum Boom
• 4. Pipelines and Power
• 5. Taming the Susquehanna River
• 6. The Electrification of America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index