The modern world stands on a cairn built by energy conversions in the past. Just as it took many loaves of bread and nosebags of hay to build Salisbury Cathedral, so it took many cubic metres of gas or puffs of wind to power the computer and develop the software on which I write these words. The Industrial Revolution was founded on the discovery of how to convert heat into work, initially via steam. Before that, heat (wood, coal) and work (oxen, people, wind, water) were separate worlds.
To be valuable, any conversion technology must produce reliable, just-in-time power that greatly exceeds — by a factor of seven and upwards — the amount of energy that goes into its extraction, conversion and delivery to a consumer. It is this measure of productivity, EROEI (energy return on energy invested), that limits our choice.
By the EROEI criterion, biofuel is a disastrous choice, requiring about as much tractor fuel to grow as you get out in ethanol or biodiesel. Wind power has a low energy return, because its vast infrastructure is energetically costly and needs replacing every two decades or so (sooner in the case of the offshore turbines whose blades have just expensively failed), while backing up wind with batteries and other power stations reduces the whole system’s productivity. Geothermal too may struggle, because turning warm water into electricity entails waste. Solar power with battery storage also fails the EROEI test in most climates. In the deserts of Arabia, where land is nearly free, sunlight abundant and gas cheap, solar power backed up with gas at night may be cheap.
Fossil fuels have amply repaid their energy cost so far, but the margin is falling as we seek gas and oil from tighter rocks and more remote regions. Nuclear fission passes the EROEI test with flying colours but remains costly because of ornate regulation.
Matt Ridley, “Nuclear Fusion Could Provide Unlimited Energy”, HumanProgress, 2018-04-09.
July 9, 2020
QotD: Energy return on energy invested
April 2, 2020
Fallen flag — the Pere Marquette Railway
This month’s fallen flag article for Classic Trains is the story of the Pere Marquette Railway by Kevin P. Keefe:
C&O’s formal acquisition of the Pere Marquette in 1947 did more than help usher in the postwar merger era; it also closed the book on a railroad with a colorful and quirky history. PM was created in 1900 by the consolidation of three roads: Flint & Pere Marquette; Detroit, Grand Rapids & Western; and Chicago & West Michigan. (The town of Pere Marquette; today we know the place as Ludington. Jacques Marquette, the French missionary and explorer, died and was buried here in 1675, and the name Pere Marquette had been given to the inlet lake off Lake Michigan, the river that feeds into it, and an 1847 community there.)
All three carriers had roots in the lumber industry, so the new Pere Marquette Railroad not only connected important Michigan cities, it also operated a branchline network covering much of the state’s Lower Peninsula. PM’s early corporate history was chaotic, marked by receivership and ownership changes. The Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton acquired PM in 1904 and for a time leased it to various parties, including the Erie Railroad. Thus did Baltimore & Ohio briefly control the PM through its ownership of the CH&D. When Pere Marquette came out of a receivership in 1907, it would be for only five years.
Those early, troublesome times, however, were marked by two strategic steps forward. One was the chartering of the Pere Marquette of Indiana, which built from New Buffalo, Michigan, southwest to Porter, Indiana, allowing PM to reach Chicago, via trackage rights on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (NYC). The second was the lease of the Lake Erie & Detroit River Railway, pushing PM eastward from Walkerville (Windsor), Ontario, to St. Thomas, thence to Suspension Bridge (Niagara Falls), New York, via rights on Michigan Central affiliate Canada Southern, and on to Buffalo on the NYC. Patched together as they were, these additions allowed PM to position itself as a Buffalo–Chicago bridge carrier.
Pere Marquette route map from a 1944 timetable.
Via Classic Trains.
In the ensuing years, the rectangular PM logo would largely disappear from view, although the road’s eventual 12 E7’s wore the script Pere Marquette train name, along with C&O identification, into the mid-1950s, thanks to equipment trust restrictions. PM’s three GE 70-tonners of 1947 were sold, but a few of its 16 EMD switchers (2 SW1’s of 1939 and ’42, 14 NW2’s of 1943–46) carried PM lettering into the 1960s, and C&O kept PM’s color pattern of yellow front-end bands with red pinstriping on a blue body on 11 more EMDs of 1948 that came fully lettered C&O: NW2’s 1850–1856 and E7’s 95–98.
As for the famous Berkshires, they, along with all of Pere Marquette’s steam locomotives, were retired by 1951. Eleven found a temporary reprieve on C&O’s Chesapeake District in Kentucky and West Virginia, but only for a few months. Two, 1223 and 1225, survived as display items in Michigan, and as a student at Michigan State University, I became involved with the restoration of the 1225, which today occasionally operates on excursions.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the Pere Marquette’s last equipment order as an independent railroad was in 1947 for six of EMD’s 1,500 h.p. BL2 “branchline” diesels, Nos. 80–85. Chosen to negotiate PM’s web of secondary lines — most of them rooted in the road’s origins as a logger — the homely diesels were as quirky and as singular as the PM itself. Pointedly, even though they sported the “speed striping” as found on the E7’s, the BL2’s were delivered in full “Chesapeake & Ohio” lettering.
Pere Marquette 1225, a Berkshire 2-8-4 steam locomotive, passes through Alma in March 2009.
Photo by Chelseyafoster via Wikimedia Commons.
The Pere Marquette also had a maritime division and one of their ships had a disastrous voyage (via Wikipedia) 110 years ago:
The Pere Marquette operated a number of rail car ferries on the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers and on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. The PM’s fleet of car ferries, which operated on Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Milwaukee, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, were an important transportation link avoiding the terminal and interchange delays around the southern tip of Lake Michigan and through Chicago. Their superintendent for over 30 years was William L. Mercereau.
Pere Marquette 18
On September 10, 1910, Pere Marquette 18 was bound for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Ludington, Michigan, with a load of 29 railroad freight cars and 62 persons. Near midnight, the vessel began to take on massive amounts of water. The captain dumped nine railroad cars into Lake Michigan, but this was no use — the ship was going down. The Pere Marquette 17, traveling nearby, picked up the distress call and sped to assist the foundering vessel. Soon after she arrived and she could come alongside, the Pere Marquette 18 sank with the loss of 28 lives; there were 33 survivors. Her wreck has yet to be located and is the largest unlocated wreck of the Great Lakes.
March 19, 2020
The undifferentiated “labour lump” fallacy in Keynesian grand schemes
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why old fashioned “shovel ready” infrastructure projects are no longer a viable way to address large scale employment needs:
Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.
We still get some slavering at the thought that in economic hard times we just get everyone off digging ditches. We get to hear Woody Guthrie singing again or something. The mass ranks of peasants dying at the Belomors Canal. Or maybe the navvies building the railways, it’s always difficult to know which historical episode they’ve got in mind.
Any economic down turn is always met with cries of “go build something” and they always do envision some mass mobilisation of labour to do it. The current one seems to be “insulate every house in the country and create jobs in every constituency”. The bit that is always missed being that most people haven’t a clue about how to do such work. The division of labour and specialisation have seen to that.
[…]
Having the diversity advisers – and this is a lovely thought even so – navvie the railways into being is going to be about as effective as having the navvies – and this is a lovely thought even so – doing the diversity advising. Division and specialisation of labor means the one is not a substitute for the other.
It’s only in GuardianWorld that labour is such a lump that can be allocated as the Commissars wish. Which presumably means their economics pages are written by the sports desk which does, to be fair, explain a lot about that output.
March 14, 2020
The still-secret “settlement” between the federal government and five hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en
Chris Selley points out some of the disturbing features of the as-yet-unrevealed agreement between Her Majesty’s Canadian government and five unelected First Nation chiefs that eventually got the railways running again:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
For starters, we still don’t know the details of the arrangement, struck earlier this month between Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and federal and provincial government officials, that allowed for pipeline work to resume. Those details could well represent positive progress on establishing just what the Wet’suwet’en’s legal claim on their lands — affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1997 — really means. But did the government have any business negotiating with the chiefs in question in the first place?
Tait-Day doesn’t think so. The Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en, she told the committee, is “not accountable to the (Wet’suwet’en) nation.”
“By refusing to hear from elected councils, these governments have without merit prevented the most credible current governing voices from being heard,” she told the committee. “The Indian Act system must be reformed, but that does not invalidate the role of the elected councils. While imperfect, they continue to speak for the people until a better model is implemented.”
Even setting aside the exclusion of elected councils, the negotiations were of dubious legitimacy. They weren’t with the hereditary chiefs per se; rather, they were with the hereditary chiefs who oppose the pipeline. Not all do, and some support it — including Tait-Day, Gloria George and Darlene Glaim, founders of the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition. For their apostasy, male chiefs simply stripped them of their titles. This is not in dispute: “We’ve stripped the names from three female hereditary chiefs for supporting the pipeline,” John Ridsdale, whose hereditary title is Chief Na’Moks, told APTN News in 2018. “A name is more important than money.”
Using the title of Chief Woos, Frank Alec has become the leading public face of the anti-pipeline hereditary chiefs. On his behalf, Canadians both Indigenous and non-Indigenous have shut down rail lines and blocked access to the B.C. legislature and marched in the streets. Until 2018, the title of Chief Woos belonged to Glaim. He took it from her precisely because she dared support the pipeline and the benefits that will flow from it to her people.
“By negotiating directly with (the Office of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en), Canada and British Columbia give legitimacy to a group of bullies and abusers of women,” Tait-Day told the committee. “We cannot be dictated to by a group of five guys.”
March 5, 2020
Fallen flag — The Clinchfield Railroad
This month’s fallen flag article in Classic Trains magazine recounts the story of the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio, later known as the Clinchfield Railroad:
Clinchfield Railroad SD40 locomotive number 3002 at Spartanburg, SC in February 1968.
Roger Puta photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The Clinchfield was different. It was conceived by men who had the vision and resources to do things right. It was built to the highest engineering standards of the early 20th century. It never went through a financial failure or reorganization. Indeed, the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway was the antithesis of traditional railroad evolution.
In 1902, a wealthy regional businessman, George L. Carter, began stitching together an integrated industrial enterprise to develop vast coal deposits in the Clinch (River) Fields of southwest Virginia and to deliver the coal across the southern Appalachian mountains to markets in the Carolinas and to ships calling at Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Carter, from whom Howard Hughes could have learned a thing to two about secrecy, operated using the South & Western Railway banner. The name said everything … and nothing. The S&W was chartered from any point on the Atlantic Ocean to any point on the Great Lakes. Carter agents seized by legal means and/or physical occupation key terrain features through the mountains in competition with the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Southern Railway.
Clinchfield Railroad map. The Clinchfield’s 277-mile, 5-state line stretched from Elkhorn City, Kentucky, to Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Map via Classic Trains.Within that generous charter was the idea of building a railroad to haul coal south and merchandise in both directions between the Midwest and the Southeast. The plans also incorporated development of several on-line cities to consume coal and make products from regional resources to diversify and grow the freight business. Finally, a steamship line was organized to move coal beyond the ports to customers in the Caribbean.
By 1905, Carter realized he needed far more capital than he could personally provide. Reluctantly, he managed to convince Blair & Co., a big Wall Street investment house, to finance the project. M. J. Caples, an engineer with mining and railroad experience, laid out and then built a magnificent low-grade, high-capacity railroad. Tunnels, steel viaducts, generous fills, and rocky cuts appeared as needed. More than 4 percent (almost 10 miles) of the line was underground in 55 tunnels. With construction of the 277-mile railroad well advanced, its name was changed to Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway in 1908.
Coal began flowing across the 242 miles from Dante, Va., to Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1909 while the owners and engineers debated how to cross the Cumberland mountains into the Ohio River valley. Between 1912 and 1915, a 35-mile extension including what was then the 10th-longest tunnel in the U.S. created a through route connecting Chesapeake & Ohio at Elkhorn City, Kentucky, with the three major southeastern carriers (Seaboard at Bostic, North Carolina; Atlantic Coast Line and Southern at Spartanburg). In constant-value dollars, the five-state CC&O was the most expensive railroad ever built in the U.S.
February 22, 2020
How Switzerland Managed to Remain Neutral with WWI and WWII Raging Around Them
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February 21, 2020
Justin Trudeau, Prime Empathizer of Canada
The Prime Minstrel channels his inner Bill Clinton, although he just manages to avoid saying that he “feels our pain”:
A strange thing happened Tuesday morning. That strange thing was … an important and interesting exchange on the floor of the House of Commons. It happened during routine proceedings, and not in the Punch-and-Judy exchange of question period. The leaders of the various parties in the House stood and outlined positions on the rail blockades being conducted around the country in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.
First came the prime minister. “People are troubled by what they have been witnessing this past week,” he said. Our empathizer-in-chief, the emotional mascot of Confederation, was about to go to work. “Young, old, Indigenous and newcomers are asking themselves what is happening in the country … On all sides, people are upset and frustrated.”
The next three words out of his mouth were: “I get it.” Huh. Is that the sort of thing you say when you’ve actually gotten it? If a friend called you up in a shattered emotional state because he had just lost his job, as people are starting to lose jobs to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests, would you say “I get it”?
Beyond this tin-eared reassurance, Trudeau did not have much specific to say, and what there was seemed to contradict itself. “Our government’s priority is to resolve this situation peacefully, but also to protect the rule of law in our country,” he promised. “That is a principle we will always stand up for.” One would have thought the role of a prime minister was to apply the law rather than to “stand up for” it. He gave his usual spiel about the myriad of ways in which the federal government has failed First Nations, again speaking as though someone else were in charge. Certainly very little of it is his own fault: the government he leads has “invested more than any other … to right historic wrongs.”
Trudeau worried aloud that Canada might become “a country where people think they can tamper with rail lines and endanger lives,” but he seemingly renounced the use of force (it’s not “helpful”) against protesters who openly discuss sabotage. What the prime minister means when he talks of the “rule” of something called “law” has been left imperfectly clear.
Chris Selley suggests the government’s fecklessness will continue to prevent any solutions being implemented:
The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm.
This week has been particularly windy.
[…]
The situation is ludicrous: Because Ontario’s independent provincial police won’t enforce a court injunction, the federal public safety minister seems to be in discussions with B.C.’s solicitor general about whether B.C.’s independent provincial police might back off enforcing a different injunction.
And the worst part of this absurdist theatre festival is how difficult it is to imagine a better alternative. Conservatives continue to call on Trudeau to somehow fix the problem, but the way Canada is set up, it’s really not a federal issue. The RCMP might have some jurisdiction over the railway as federally regulated infrastructure, said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, but that hasn’t happened in past cases. It wouldn’t even be up to Trudeau to send in troops: under the Emergencies Act, Roach said, a provincial solicitor-general has to request it.
These are structural issues that any PM will face. Indeed, the biggest difference between the Liberals’ approach to this blockade and the Conservatives’ approach to the 2013 Idle No More protests, which included a 13-day blockade of a CN line in southwestern Ontario, has been one of rhetoric and engagement. The Conservatives talked tougher, but Aboriginal Affairs rebuffed CN’s request to intervene. (Those protesters eventually obeyed a court injunction and left.) The Liberals needlessly tie themselves in knots and insult our intelligence — they know no other way — but they clearly believe it’s their job to broker some kind of resolution.
It’s tough to say which approach is likelier to work. At this point odds seem to favour “neither.” If you have a better, workable idea to get the trains moving, for God’s sake get on the horn to Ottawa.
February 14, 2020
The reaction to the Mohawk blockade near Belleville shows that VIA Rail isn’t a serious company
Mohawk protesters began blocking the main CN and VIA line between Toronto and Montreal near Belleville nearly a week ago. The police, having learned so often that the government and the courts won’t back them up, did little to try to get the blockade lifted other than to prevent active confrontations with the First Nations activists. Canadian National announced that they were being forced to park trains all over Eastern Canada as a result of the blockade and that deliveries of goods would be snarled for quite some time even after service is allowed to resume. VIA rail, on the other hand, seems to care not a bit about the thousands of travellers who have been stranded mid-journey and made no apparent efforts to bring in buses or any other arrangements. Chris Selley says this proves that VIA is not an essential service even in their own minds:
“The 6424” by Stephen Downes is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Of all the bad news to befall VIA Rail this week, with the cancellation of all its trains between Toronto and Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal — that’s roughly 50 per cent of its ridership and 60 per cent of its revenues — the worst news might be just how little news it has made. Mostly, the Mohawk blockade of the CN main line near Belleville, Ont., has been treated as a side story to the anti-pipeline protests and arrests in the British Columbia interior.
That’s what it is in the grand scheme of things: The battle between Wet’suwet’en members and chiefs and the federal government speaks to much larger, existential questions about the future of the Canadian economy, about the Liberal government’s reconciliation agenda, about the very nature of the Canadian federation and the rule of law. This blockade, launched in the name of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en, just means people have to take the bus, or fly, instead of the train.
But that’s no small inconvenience, no small expense. Canadians in general are not quick to anger, but very few of the VIA refugees interviewed by various news outlets sounded even slightly furious, which they had every right to be. When protesters from the same First Nation blockaded the same set of tracks six years ago, VIA properly exhibited some concern with getting their customers to their destinations and put on replacement buses.
This time around, no buses. No suggestions. No response to media inquiries asking why there are no buses. Just a cancellation notice on the website and a fare-thee-well. At a time when VIA is seeking untold billions from the federal government to build a new Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal route and run vastly more trains, this does not bespeak a company that takes itself very seriously.
[…]
And never mind VIA, what sort of country lets a few people close down a key piece of national infrastructure, in violation of a court injunction — not for an hour or a day, but literally indefinitely? For a time it wasn’t even clear whose job it was to enforce the injunction: On Sunday an Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson told Global News it was up to the CN Police Service. On Tuesday, a CN spokesperson told the National Post it was up to the OPP, and indeed, late Tuesday OPP officers warned protesters to leave or they would be forced out. Perhaps the threat of massive economic disruption finally lit a fire under them: earlier in the day, CN had said it was considering shutting down huge parts of its freight network across the country. Had it just been rail passengers, though, the idea of this side-protest dragging on for weeks or even months seems absurdly plausible.
VIA Rail 918, a General Electric model P42DC locomotive, at Belleville, Ontario on 23 December 2008.
Photo by Martin Cathrae via Wikimedia Commons.
While VIA may not be serious, others are extremely serious:
Left-wing blogs have been offering instructions and maps during the #ShutDownCanada protests on how to blockade and destroy train tracks and other pieces of Canada’s infrastructure, according to True North.
Two websites in particular, these being North Shore and Warrior Up, have instructed demonstrators how to damage Canada’s pipelines, roads and railways.
In some of North Shore’s posts, for instance, they told their readers to stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en tribe by destroying train tracks. In this article, the author makes it perfectly clear that he wants to damage Canada’s economy at large.
More absurdly, however, the article then went on to instruct the reader on how to compose a chemical mixture that destroys steel rail tracks — taking particular care to describe how not to leaving fingerprint or DNA evidence.
Thursday evening, VIA Rail announced their whole passenger network would be shut down until further notice: Service cancellation notice.
January 29, 2020
QotD: The Golden Gate Bridge
Tim Cavanaugh, “Why Kill Yourself…”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-01-20.
January 19, 2020
“… if the Constitution is a threat to killer whales, why, then, to hell with the Constitution”
Colby Cosh reviews the sad tale of the British Columbian government’s defeat before the Supreme Court of Canada over pipelines:
“Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa” by daniel0685 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
So … yeah, that didn’t go real well. On Thursday the province of British Columbia sent its chosen representative, lawyer Joseph Arvay, to the Supreme Court to plead the oral case for B.C.’s law regulating bitumen in pipelines. John Horgan’s government had attempted to establish its own permit regime for pipeline contents, which are, under accepted constitutional doctrine, a federal responsibility. The B.C. Court of Appeal had wiped out the provincial law unanimously last summer.
Arvay’s task was widely recognized as a Hail Mary pass. But things got even more awkward as the hearing commenced and the justices of the Supreme Court interrogated him on his province’s logical, environmental, and even economic premises. An appellate court’s disposition is sometimes hard to ferret out in its hearings, but this one was so rough that Arvay was reduced to grumbling “If I’m not going to win the appeal, then I don’t want to lose badly.” Alas, the judges did not even see the need to deliberate over their reasons: they at once, and as one, ruled against B.C.
Which is not to suggest that Mr. Arvay didn’t do the best possible job. If we’re sticking with the football metaphor, the problem all along was the game plan. Given the clear federal responsibility for interprovincial pipelines, as “Works and Undertakings connecting … Provinces,” the B.C. government had no choice but to downplay the conflict between the purpose of its proposed environmental permits and the purpose of the ones the federal government hands out. Arvay had to try to convince the ermine gang that a law applying exclusively to the contents of a pipeline wasn’t a regulation of the pipeline.
“The only concern the premier, the attorney general and the members of the government have had is the harm of bitumen,” Arvay protested. “It’s not about pipelines. They’re not anti-pipelines, they’re not anti-Alberta, they’re not anti-oilsands, they’re not anti-oil.”
It’s enough to almost make one sympathetic to the more radical strategy of argument pursued at the hearing by Harry Wruck, a lawyer for Ecojustice Canada who appeared as an intervener supporting B.C. Wruck put before the Supreme Court the same idea he had presented to the BCCA: if the Constitution is a threat to killer whales, why, then, to hell with the Constitution.
Cursus honorum – Aediles
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January 7, 2020
“HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible”
The British government recently reviewed the ever-escalating sums for the proposed HS2 high speed passenger rail connection that began at some £30 billion, then climbed to £50 billion, then £80 billion, and the latest estimate is up to £110 billion. Even by other countries’ high speed rail boondoggles, that is a breathtaking cost escalation. If, as it should, the government cancels the HS2 project, what happens to the money that was budgeted for the fiasco?
The figures used to justify HS2 were “fiddled” and that the project is most unlikely to deliver value for money — that’s the verdict of Lord Berkeley, the deputy chairman of the recent review into the project. He’s right of course and not solely because he’s repeating what I argued more than a year ago.
HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible. The government can mourn the money wasted and go off and do something else. Some suggest the HS2 money should be taken and spent on northern railways. Or as Lord Berkeley himself would prefer, on commuter lines in the Midlands.
But those offering these suggestions are making a very fundamental mistake: the real question is not which project most deserves this slab of funding, but whether the state should be spending this money at all.
This is not to say government should not be involved in funding any big infrastructure — everyone except the most hardcore anarchists accepts that state involvement in the economy is sometimes appropriate. But when it does intervene, it ought to be because there is an ironcast case for the betterment of the general population. That’s equally true whether we are talking about taxing to spend money now, or borrowing on the assumption that future benefits will pay back the debt incurred.
So, where does this leave the HS2 money? At some point it was decided that spending £30 billion, £50 billion, £80 billion or now as much as £110 billion on some nice choo-choos was an idea that justified taxing the public. Now it’s clear and obvious that it isn’t. Deciding afterwards that the government must spend all those billions on something else transport-related is missing the point entirely.
January 4, 2020
Looking back at the ’20s … the 1620s
In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention, he takes us back to what he calls the “transformative 20s” of the seventeenth century:
St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden (built 1631-8) by Inigo Jones.
Photo by Steve Cadman via Wikimedia Commons.
The 1620s saw an upsurge in major projects to transform Britain’s landscape. Engineers from the Dutch Republic like Cornelius Vermuyden came to straighten its rivers, build canals, and even drain its marshes, converting them into pasturage and farmland — in the decades that followed, they would even begin to drain the Great Fens. The cityscapes changed too. The former theatre designer and architect Inigo Jones — by 1615 the Surveyor-General of the King’s Works — introduced classical architecture from the continent, drawing upon the rules of beauty and proportion that had been set down by Vitruvius in the first century BCE and resuscitated in Renaissance Italy by Andrea Palladio. Jones’s influence transformed England’s palaces, churches, cathedrals, and even Covent Garden square, to reflect his ancient Roman ideal.
But the environment, built or natural, would be most transformed by the experiments of a few individuals with fossil fuels. Dud Dudley, an illegitimate child of the 5th Baron Dudley, in the 1620s experimented with smelting iron with peat and coal. Dudley was not the first to do so — the patent on using coal instead of charcoal to work iron had been sold on from person to person since at least 1589 — but his experiments were among the most influential. The famous Abraham Darby, who achieved commercial success in applying coal to smelting metals in the early eighteenth century, was Dud Dudley’s great-great-nephew.
Sir Robert Mansell (1570/71–1652), by an unknown artist.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.The decade also saw major new attempts to use coal as a fuel in other processes, such as glass-making. Although the patent on using coal to make glass had been around since at least 1610, by the 1620s Sir Robert Mansell had bought out the partners who owned it and was pouring a fortune into setting up glassworks at Newcastle. In this case, the transformation was institutional. Mansell’s political connections allowed him to widen the terms of his patent, such that he even tried to ban all other kinds of glass in England, regardless of whether they were made using other fuels, or even imported. Usually, patents of invention were for things entirely new, and were not supposed to interfere with existing English industries. But over the course of the 1610s, various abuses like Mansell’s came to light. King James I, eager for cash, had sold monopolies on ancient trades, as well as the new — one crony was even awarded a patent for inns and alehouses. Mansell’s patent, along with the others, was attacked in Parliament in the 1620s, and even revoked. The outcry ultimately led to the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 — the earliest patent legislation in England, which sought to regulate the royal practice of granting them. (Ironically, Mansell was so well-connected that he managed to get his controversial glass-making patent renewed and then exempted from the new Act.) The Statute of Monopolies was the only English patent legislation in force during the Industrial Revolution — there was no more patent legislation until 1852.
Finally, the ’20s saw a transformation of science. It was the decade in which Francis Bacon published some of his most significant works, on how to collect, refine, and systematise human knowledge for the good of humankind. He set out a comprehensive programme for the organisation of science and invention, with his utopian work New Atlantis setting out his ideal R&D lab – “Salomon’s House”. (Despite these high-minded aims, Bacon was also Mansell’s brother-in-law, and as attorney-general had helped draft the controversial glass-making patent. In 1621 he was convicted, fined, and even briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London for his role in the corrupt early patent system, though he appears to have been a scapegoat.)
December 28, 2019
American railways are simultaneously world-beating and terrible
That’s because, as Sean Smith and Peter Earle point out, there are two very different entities running on America’s rails:
Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) locomotive 5399, Kansas City Southern (KCS) 4807, and 1890 westbound on the BNSF Emporia Sub near Timberland Blvd West of Northgate Street in Olathe, Kansas.
Photo by Tyler Silvest via Wikimedia Commons.
American railways are the envy of the world.
Many might shake a collective head at that statement. In the case of passenger rail that is an appropriate reaction. Since it was pieced together – a government-constructed Franken-rail system built of numerous bankrupt railways which were essentially nationalized – Amtrak has been a reliable money sink, losing tens of billions of dollars since 1970.
Any traveler that has used Amtrak to any significant extent has firsthand experience with the crumbling infrastructure, frequent delays, and general unpleasantness that accompanies U.S. passenger rail service. Even the oft-cited bright spot of Amtrak, the “high speed” Acela system (which shuttles between Boston and Washington D.C) pales in comparison when compared to high-end passenger rail systems in Western Europe, Japan, and China.
Bullet trains routinely travel at least 200 mph, whereas Acela trundles along at a pedestrian 84 mph, and there is no indication (and probably no intention) of that gap closing anytime soon.
U.S. passenger rail services in general are money-losing and antiquated versus their global counterparts, an inarguable (and to public transport proponents, embarrassing) fact. Passenger rail is just one part of the story, and serves as an excellent example of how not to manage a rail system. In fairness, efforts to turn Amtrak around (mainly through aggressive cost cutting) do seem to be having an impact, as current year losses total a shade under $30 million. It’s an admirable effort to be sure, but decades of losses, poor service, and general mismanagement cannot be ignored.
The U.S. freight railway system, conversely, is the envy of the world, and this is not hyperbole or chest thumping; the facts back it up. Since the Staggers Act of 1980, which deregulated freight rail, improvements have been substantial. U.S. freight railways carry 81% more ton-miles of freight, and costs have fallen 46%. (It isn’t common for an industry to increase its capacity by 81% while reducing costs by nearly half.) That level of success has even been noted by the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies, which might be surprising, given the common assumption that Europe has a monopoly on rail excellence.
Compared side by side, it seems a conundrum: Amtrak limps along, still relying upon billions of dollars worth of taxpayer-financed subsidies, while U.S. freight railways evince growing profitability and capacity amid rapidly falling costs. Why are U.S. freight rails so profitable when U.S. passenger rail – sometimes traveling the same routes, on some of the same rails – remains a perennial money pit?
New Amtrak Viewliner diner Atlanta deadheading on the eastbound Capitol Limited at Point of Rocks in November 2017.
Photo by Mark Levisay via Wikimedia Commons.
December 20, 2019
Anton Howes on the “improving mentality” of the British industrial revolution
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at some of the “bottom-up” educational initiatives that helped create and shape the industrial revolution:
I stumbled across a speech the other day, delivered by Dr Olinthus Gregory — the mathematics teacher at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich — to the Deptford Mechanics’ Institution. The mechanics’ institutions, or institutes, were created by working men pooling their savings to pay for lectures, libraries, educational equipment, news-rooms, and book clubs. They spearheaded Britain’s bottom-up approach to adult education, with the classes held in the evenings after work. But they’re a story for another time.
Diagram of a Watt steam engine from Practical physics for secondary schools (1913).
Wikimedia Commons.What caught my eye was Gregory’s speech. Delivered in 1826, Britain’s industrial prowess was already obvious to many. The Industrial Revolution was already in full swing. Gregory paints the picture perfectly:
Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, the arts, and sciences, useful and ornamental, in a copious and inexhaustible variety, enhance the conveniences and embellishments of this otherwise happy spot. Cities thronged with inhabitants, warehouses filled with stores, markets and fairs with busy rustics; fields, villages, roads, seaports, all contributing to the riches and glory of our land.
But there was more to be done. After all, everything can always be improved (an attitude that I call the improving mentality):
Recollect farther, that every natural and every artificial advantage is susceptible of gradual progression, and trace the yearly elevation to higher perfection. New societies for improvement … new machines to advance our arts and facilitate labour; waste lands enclosed, roads improved, bridges erected, canals cut, tunnels excavated, marshes drained and cultivated, docks formed, ports enlarged: these and a thousand kindred operations which present themselves spontaneously to the mind’s eye, prove that we have not yet attained our zenith, and open an exquisite prospect of future stability and greatness.
Progress had been made, but there was always room for more.
As for the causes, Gregory had some interesting observations. Important, he said, was coal: “more valuable to us than the gold mines ever were to Spain, since without these the various metals could not be worked, and half our manufactories would be at a stand.”
But coal alone was not enough. There would be less output, of course, but he did not say that progress would have been stifled altogether (which is also more or less my own position). Also important was that inventors could persuade the government of the benefits of innovation, which is something I mentioned in my last email. As Gregory put it, Britain had “a government of whom the arts and sciences never crave audience in vain.”
And most important of all was Britain’s community of inventors and scientists, from the Boultons and Watts and Smeatons and Arkwrights and Bramahs, to the Donkins, Hornblowers, Trevithicks, Maudslays and Stephensons (only a few of whom are at all heard of today) …
