Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact Vaclav Smil OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Creating the Twentieth Century This page intentionally left blank Creating the Twentieth Century Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact Vaclav Smil 1 2005 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright ᭧ 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smil, Vaclav. Creating the twentieth century : technical innovations of 1867–1914 and their lasting impact / Vaclav Smil. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-516874-4 ISBN: 0-19-516874-7 1. Technological innovations—History—19th century. 2. Technological innovations—History—20th century. I. Title. T173.8.S615 2004 609'.034—dc22 2004054757 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface This book has been on my mind for more than three decades. My first musings about the technically exceptional nature of the two pre-WWI generations go back to the late 1960s, before Eva and I escaped from a newly invaded province of the Soviet Empire to Pennsylvanian ridge and valley countryside. I worked on some of its topics (for other publications) during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, and I finally began to write it in 2002. In the words that my favorite composer used in dedicating his quartets, it is the result of lunga, e laboriosa fattica—and yet I wish that the task could continue. I have a selfish and an objective reason for this: further immersion in the world of pre-WWI innovations would bring more revelations, surprises, and confir- mations, and I would also like more space as there are many topics that I addressed only cursorily, many reflections and considerations that I had to leave out. At the same time, I have always followed Faraday’s great dictum— work, finish, publish—and so here is my incomplete and imperfect story of one of the greatest adventures in history, my homage to the creators of a new world. My great intellectual debt to hundreds of historians, engineers, and econ- omists without whose penetrative work this volume could not have been writ- ten is obvious, and I must thank Douglas Fast for completing the unusually challenging job of preparing more than 120 images that are an integral part of this book. And I offer no apologies for what some may see as too many numbers: without quantification, there is no real appreciation of the era’s fun- damental and speedy achievements and of the true magnitude of its accom- plishments. Metric system and scientific units and prefixes (listed and defined below) are used throughout. Finally, what not to expect. This is neither a world history of the two pre-WWI generations seen through a prism of tech- nical innovations nor an economic history of the period written with an en- gineering slant. The book is not intended to be either an extended argument for technical determinism in human affairs or an uncritical exaltation of an era. I am quite vi preface content to leave its genre undefined: it is simply an attempt to tell a story of amazing changes, of the greatest discontinuity in history, and to do so from a multitude of perspectives in order to bring out the uniqueness of the period and to be reminded of the lasting debt we owe to those who invented the fundamentals of the modern world. Or, to paraphrase Braudel’s (1950) remarks offered in a different context, I do not seek a philosophy of this great discon- tinuity but rather its multiple illumination. Contents Units and Abbreviations ix 1 The Great Inheritance 3 2 The Age of Electricity 33 3 Internal Combustion Engines 99 4 New Materials and New Syntheses 153 5 Communication and Information 199 6 A New Civilization 259 7 Contemporary Perceptions 303 References 313 Name Index 337 Subject Index 343 This page intentionally left blank Units and Abbreviations Units A ampere (unit of current) C degree of Celsius (unit of temperature) g gram (unit of mass) h hour hp horsepower (traditional unit of power ϭ 745.7 W) Hz hertz (unit of frequency) J joule (unit of energy) K degree of Kelvin (unit of temperature) lm lumen (unit of luminosity) m meter Pa pascal (unit of pressure) s second t metric ton (ϭ 1,000 kg) V volt (unit of voltage) W watt (unit of power) Prefixes n nano 10Ϫ9 µ micro 10Ϫ6 m milli 10Ϫ3 c centi 10Ϫ2 h hecto 102 k kilo 103 M mega 106 G giga 109 T tera 1012 P peta 1015 E exa 1018 ix This page intentionally left blank Creating the Twentieth Century 1 The Great Inheritance “You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted...” “Is not that a rather large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair. “I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you...” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1894) Imagine an exceedingly sapient and durable civilization that began scanning a bubble of space, say 100 light years in diameter, for signs of intelligent life about half a billion years ago. Its principal surveillance techniques look for any emissions of organized electromagnetic radiation as opposed to the radio fre- quencies emitted from stars or light that originates from natural combustion of carbon compounds (wildfires) or from lightning. For half a billion years its probes that roam the interstellar space have nothing to report from nine planets frontispiece 1. Technical advances that began to unfold during the two pre-WWI generations and that created the civilization of the 20th century resulted in the first truly global human impacts. Some of these are detectable from space, and nighttime images of Earth (here the Americas in the year 2000) are perhaps the most dramatic way to show this unprecedented change. Before 1880 the entire continents were as dark as the heart of Amazon remains today. This image is based on NASA’s composite available at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html. 3 4 creating the twentieth century that revolve around an unremarkable star located three-fifths of the way from the center of an ordinary-looking spiral galaxy that moves inexorably on a collision course with one of its neighbors. And then, suddenly, parts of that star system’s third planet begin to light up, and shortly afterward they begin to transmit coherent signals as two kinds of radiation emanating from Earth’s surface provide evidence of intelligent life. A closer approach of the probes would reveal an organized pattern of night- time radiation in the visible (400–700 nm) and near-infrared (700–1,500 nm) part of the electromagnetic spectrum produced by electric lights whose density is highest in the planet’s most affluent and heavily populated regions (see the frontispiece to this chapter). And from scores of light years away one can detect a growing multitude of narrow-band, pulsed, modulated signals in frequencies ranging from less than 30 kHz (very low radio band) to more than 1 GHz (radar bands). These signals have their origins in fundamental scientific and technical advances of the 1880s and 1890s, that is, in the invention of durable incandescent electric lights, in the introduction of commercial generation and transmission of electricity, in production and detection of Hertzian waves, and in the first tentative wireless broadcasts. And all of these capabilities became considerably developed and commercialized before WWI. That was the time when the modern world was created, when the greatest technical discontinuity in history took place. This conclusion defies the com- mon perception of the 20th century as the period of unprecedented technical advances that originated in systematic scientific research and whose aggressive deployment and commercialization brought profound economic, social, and environmental transformations on scales ranging from local to global. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed an enormous expansion of increas- ingly more affordable and more powerful computing and of instantaneous access to the globe-spanning World Wide Web, and they have been singled out as a particularly remarkable break with the past. This is as expected ac- cording to those who maintain that the evolution of our technical abilities is an inherently accelerating process (Turney 1999; Kurzweil 1990). This common impression of accelerating technical innovation seems to be borne out by a number of exponential trends, perhaps most notably by the fact that the number of transistors per microchip has been doubling approximately every 18 months since 1972. This trend, known as Moore’s law, was predicted in 1965 by Intel’s cofounder, and it continues despite repeated forecasts of its im- minent demise (Intel 2003; Moore 1965).