Energy Timeline
Posted by Ida Kubiszewski on April 25th, 2007 5000 BC | 1000 BC | 20 AD | 1000 | 1200 | 1400 | 1600 | 1700 | 1750 | 1800 | 1825 | 1850 | 1875 | 1900 | 1910 | 1920 | 1930 | 1940 | 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2005
| Year | Entry |
| about 4.5 billion years ago | Suggested time at which the Sun’s fusion reactions begin, and solar energy reaches the Earth. |
| about 600 million years ago | Proposed time at which the Earth’s ozone layer forms; i.e., enough ozone is present in the stratosphere to sufficiently shield Earth from biologically lethal ultraviolet radiation. Prior to this period, life was restricted to the ocean; the presence of ozone is a fundamental prerequisite for organisms to develop and live on the land. |
| about 500 million years ago | The organic precursors to fossil fuels are created. Marine and terrestrial plants absorb solar energy and use it to produce carbohydrates; these and other organic materials eventually settle on the ground and in stream, lake, and sea beds. As they become buried, they are transformed by heat and pressure into solid, liquid, or gaseous hydrocarbons (coal, oil, or natural gas). |
| about 350 million years ago | Evidence for the first forest fires on Earth appear in the geological record. |
| 2.5 to 1.5 million years ago | Proposed time span for the Oldowan tradition of East Africa, the earliest known use of stone tools by the forerunners of modern humans. |
| 1 million to 500,000 BC | Proposed time span for the development of more sophisticated stone tool use at various sites. |
| 500,000 BC | Estimated time of the first controlled use of fire by humans. Various scholars have proposed dates ranging from 1.5 million to 150,000 years ago; the large range is due to debate over the archaeological and paleontological evidence, and in particular the problem of distinguishing natural fire events (as from lightning) from human-produced fire. |
| 40,000 BC | Estimated date for the first use of artificial light in lamps, which were probably in the form of a hollow rock, shell, or other such natural object, fueled with animal fats and using lichens, moss, or other plant fiber for a wick. |
| 24,000 BC | Pits dug at sites in the East European plain constitute the first evidence of storage of non-food items, such as fuel and other raw materials. |
| 10,000 BC | Estimated date for the earliest use of hot springs (e.g., North America, Anatolia, Japan) for cooking and bathing and as religious sites or sanctuaries. |
| 8000 BC | Estimate of the first use of various forms of human transportation, such as sledges, skis, and primitive boats or rafts. |
| 8000-7000 BC | Estimated time span for the beginnings of agriculture worldwide, based on evidence such as wheat being grown in Mesopotamia and corn in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. |
| 7000 BC | Improved versions of lamps are in use, with oils derived from a variety of plant and animal fats as fuel. Wicks are used to control the rate of burning, made from hemp, flax, wool, or cotton. |
| 6000 BC | Humans begin to utilize animal power as an energy source through the domestication of various animals such as the wild ox, the horse, the pack ass, and the camel. |
| 6000 BC | The Bible has numerous references to the use of pitch, which is asphalt or bitumen in its soft state. Noah follows God’s instructions to cover the Ark with pitch. The reed basket that carries the infant Moses into the Nile River is waterproofed with pitch. The Tower of Babel is built with “bricks for stone and slime they had for mortar.” (Slime is another word for pitch.) |
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| 5000 BC | Evidence of ocean-going reed boats being used in the Persian Gulf. Other indications of early use of reed boats exists in sites such as the Sudan, coastal Peru, Lake Titicaca, New Zealand, and the marshes of southern Iraq. |
| 4800 BC | Residents of the Nabta Basin in Egypt construct stone calendar circles that target due north and the summer solstice. |
| 4600 BC | Farmers begin to use the plow rather than the hoe as a farm implement, in Mesopotamia or possibly Egypt. |
| 4241 BC | The earliest known official recording of a date is registered in the calendar of ancient Egypt. |
| 4000 BC | Egyptians build boats made from planks joined together. Previously, boats were dug out from logs, or made of reeds bound together or skins stretched over a framework. |
| 4000 BC | The crafts of glassmaking, brickmaking, and copper smelting are in existence. |
| 4000 BC | The earliest proposed date for the use of the horse for riding, on the basis of excavations from Dereivka in the Ukrainian steppes that show possible signs of bit wear on horse teeth. |
| 3800 BC | Based on boat fragments found in southeast Turkey, suggested date for the earliest transport of trade goods by riverboat, including petroleum products. |
| 3500 BC | Earliest evidence of sailing ships, on the Nile river and in the Mediterranean. |
| 3200 BC | Earliest specific evidence of the use of wheeled vehicles, at the Uruk site in what is now Syria. |
| 3100 BC | The earliest known use of candles, as indicated by candle holders found in Crete and Egypt. Early fuels are derived from local materials; e.g., wax from insects molded in paper tubes, various forms of tallow (rendered animal fat). |
| 3000 BC | Coal is in use as a fuel, based on evidence found in various ancient sites such as China and Wales. |
| 3000 BC | Mesopotamians use “rock oil” (an early term for petroleum) in architectural adhesives, ship waterproofing, medicines, and roads. |
| 3000 BC | The Sumerians divide the day into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, the minute into 60 seconds, and the circle into 360 degrees. |
| 3000 BC | The use of oars to power a boat is established in Egypt. |
| 3000 BC | Various Mideast peoples use deposits of bitumen (asphalt) in the form of natural seepage from sites such as the Dead Sea, for a number of purposes including road building, bonding and waterproofing, and the making of artifacts. |
| 2950-2900 BC | The earliest complex is constructed at the Stonehenge site in southern England. Subsequent periods of construction (2900-2400 BC and 2550-1600 BC) culminate in the complicated setting of large stones that still exists today. |
| 2900 BC | Specialized oil lamps are in regular use in the Middle East, probably employing olive oil as fuel or possibly beeswax. |
| 2800 BC | Solar orientation is the basic principle of design for Egyptian temple construction, with pyramids positioned to show the change in the Earth’s location relative to the Sun over the course of a year. A temple in Kamak, honoring the sun god Ra, is oriented so that sunlight penetrates the building in a precise beam. |
| 2560 BC | Construction begins for the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), one of the Seven Wonders of the World in ancient times and the only one still in existence. |
| 2200 BC | Crude oil is refined in China for use in lamps and in heating homes. |
| 2000 BC | Horse-drawn vehicles are in use in Egypt; also contemporaneously or subsequently in China. |
| 2000 BC | The Greeks use water power to turn waterwheels for grinding wheat into flour. |
| 2000 BC | Various peoples construct baths using geothermal hot springs. |
| 1900 BC | Spoked wheels have appeared in Egypt and Palestine. These wheels are significantly lighter than solid wheels, allowing a wheeled cart to carry a heavier load. |
| 1900 BC | The Greeks employ an early form of passive solar heating. |
| ca. 1810 BC | King Amenemhet III of Egypt completes a system to regulate the inflow of water into the large Lake of Fayoum (Lake Moeris) depression, southwest of Cairo. This includes one of the world’s earliest dams and provides both a flood control for the seasonal overflow of the Nile and a reservoir for irrigation. |
| 1600 BC | The shadouf (or shaduf) is used to raise water from a river or well. This is a form of lever consisting of a pole balanced on a pivot, with a weight at one end and a bucket at the other. This first appears in Egypt or possibly India; it is still in use today. |
| 1500 BC | Smelted iron tools come into in use. Armenia is traditionally thought of as the first site for this. |
| ca. 1380 BC | A canal diverging from the Nile extends along the Wadi Tumilat to Heropolis, a port at the head of the Bitter Lakes, providing a shipping passage between the Nile and the Red Sea. The path of this canal was frequently followed by the builders of the modern Suez Canal. |
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| 1000 BC | Phoenician warships and merchant ships travel over the Mediterranean Sea, employing a large square sail and banks of oarsmen. |
| 900 BC | Hand-dug oil wells near the Gulf of Suez are used as a source to extract bitumen for use as a preservative in Egyptian mummies. |
| 900 BC | The first practical use of natural gas takes place when the Chinese use it for brine evaporation. |
| 800 BC | The Scythians, a unified group of nomadic tribes from the southern Russian steppes, display great skill and mobility as mounted archers. |
| ca. 692 BC | Sennacherib, king of Assyria, constructs a highly advanced aqueduct at Jerwan, a portion of which still exists today. |
| 600s BC | The Greeks begin making terra cotta lamps to replace hand-held torches. The word “lamp” is derived from the Greek term lampas, meaning “torch.” |
| ca. 600 BC | Ancient Assyrian writings tell of the “Eternal Fire,” a continuously burning flame from a natural oil spring. In the modern era the Iraqi oil industry will come into being at this same site. |
| ca. 585 BC | The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus notes that an amber rod attracts to itself light materials, such as straw, when it is rubbed. Though not understood at the time, this is the first known observation of the phenomenon of static electricity. |
| 500s BC | One of the first industrial uses of pitch is in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon of King Nebuchadnezzar II, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The gardens are built of brick and asphalt protected by lead. |
| 500s BC | Ancient Chinese proverbs describe what will become known in the modern era as an ecological pyramid based on energy relations among trophic (feeding) levels: (1) “The large fish eat the small fish, the small fish eat the water insects, the water insects eat plants and mud;” (2) “Large fowl cannot eat small grain;” (3) “One hill cannot shelter two tigers.” |
| 500 BC | Construction begins on China’s Grand Canal; it is extended over the centuries by dredging new sections and by connecting existing canals and natural rivers until it eventually becomes the longest canal in the world. |
| 480 BC | The Persians use flaming arrows wrapped in oil-soaked fibers at the siege of Athens. |
| ca. 450 BC | The Greek philosopher Empedocles refines the existing belief that the universe consists of four basic properties—earth, air, water and fire—by stating that all types of matter are composed of varying proportions of these. This idea holds sway in the West for roughly the next 2,000 years. |
| ca. 420 BC | The Greek philosopher Democritus postulates that all matter consists of tiny particles called atoms that cannot be divided, and that their constant motion explains the physical nature of the universe. |
| 400s BC | Spurred in part by wood fuel scarcity, classical Greek architecture develops widespread use of passive solar energy. Socrates states the basic principles of this practice: homes are oriented toward the south, and eaves are added to shade for south windows in summer; entire cities are designed to allow equitable access to the winter sun. |
| 400-200 BC | Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, and Pythagoras lay the foundations for modern science through their inquiries that emphasize evidence, logic, and deduction. |
| ca. 380 BC | Many parts of Greece are completely bare of trees due to their harvest for fuel, smelting operations, and shipbuilding. The philosopher Plato laments, “The mere skeleton of the land remains.” A tax is then placed on wood for home heating and cooking, and the supply of wood is regulated by public authorities in some localities. |
| ca. 350 BC | Aristotle proposes the use of distillation as a means of desalinating sea water. |
| ca. 340 BC | Aristotle describes how heat from the sun’s rays sets in motion the circulation of huge masses of air and moisture in the atmosphere. This concept remains unchallenged for nearly 2000 years. |
| ca. 340 BC | Aristotle provides the first technical definition of energeia, a word formed by combining two root forms meaning “at” and “work.” He uses this to describe the operation or activity of anything; the modern term “energy” ultimately will be derived from this concept of energeia. |
| 325 BC | The Greeks develop an accurate form of the clepsydra (water clock), improving on a technology that is thought to have originated in Egypt. |
| ca. 315 BC | The Greek philosopher Theophrastus publishes De Lapidus, which uses the term anthrax to refer to a black stone that would burn (coal). |
| 312 BC | Rome’s Via Appia (the Queen of Roads) is completed, as well as the Aqua Appia, the first aqueduct to serve the city; both are named for Roman censor Appius Claudius Cieco. |
| ca. 300 BC | Syrian glassmakers invent the blowpipe to enable the production of glass in hollow shapes, followed by the invention of the two-part mold that enables multiple production of glass products. |
| ca. 270 BC | Aristarchus of Samos, an early Greek astronomer, estimates the distance and size of the Sun, and proposes that the Earth goes around it. |
| ca. 270 BC | The Great Lighthouse at Alexandria (Egypt) is constructed on the island of Pharos, using fire at night and reflecting the Sun’s rays from a giant mirror during the day. It stands for some fifteen centuries until being destroyed by earthquakes in 1326. |
| ca. 250 BC | Greek mathematician Archimedes states that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid, which explains the buoyancy of ships. He is also credited with having discovered the principle of the lever and with providing a foundation for modern calculus. |
| 240 BC | The lift-and-force piston pump is used to raise water, an invention attributed to the Greek engineer Ctesibius of Alexandria. He is also said to have invented a pneumatic catapult that hurled stones by combining a spring device with a compressed air system. |
| 212 BC | Solar energy is reportedly employed to defend the harbor of Syracuse against a Roman siege. Archimedes uses a “burning glass” to set fire to the ships of the Roman fleet from shore. Possibly this was a parabolic mirror of polished metal combined with a large series of smaller mirrors; later experts disagree as to whether such a technique is possible. |
| ca. 211 BC | The first known well is drilled for natural gas in China to a reported depth of 500 feet. The Chinese are said to drill their wells with primitive percussion and bamboo poles as pipelines. The gas is burned to dry rock salt. |
| ca. 210 BC | The Archimedes screw (a helix-shaped screw in a tube) is employed to lift water from rivers for irrigation. |
| ca. 191 BC | A temple in Rome contains an “eternal fire” that burns continuously in homage to Vesta, the goddess of the hearth; this is probably a natural gas flame. |
| 150 BC | The quern, a rotary hand mill used to grind grain, is developed, likely by the Romans. Over the next several centuries this comes into widespread use in Europe through Roman influence there. |
| mid 100s BC | A decline in forest cover occurs in the environs of Rome because of demand for wood for industrial fuel, home and ship construction, central heating, and lavish baths. |
| ca. 130 BC | Hipparchus of Rhodes, a Greek astronomer, applies mathematical principles to the determination of locations on the Earth’s surface, expressed in terms of their specific longitude and latitude. |
| ca. 122 BC | The Chinese writer Liu An refers to “ice-charcoal;” this is assumed to be the first written reference to the mineral coal, which is used in China by this time for home heating. |
| 100s BC | Chinese farmers use an iron plow with a moldboard (a curved plate above the plowshare that lifts and turns over the soil, creating a true furrow). Iron plows are also in use in Britain at this time, but moldboard technology is not reported in Europe until centuries later. |
| 100s BC | Waterwheels are in operation in Greece and Rome and probably elsewhere in southern Europe. |
| ca. 85 BC | The earliest known mention of the specific use of water power to replace human labor is made by the poet Antipater of Thessalonica, who refers to maids having their hard work of hand milling relieved by the power of a water mill. |
| ca. 80 BC | The Romans employ the technique of hypocaust heating in baths and other buildings, the first known system of central heating. |
| ca. 63 BC | King Mithradates the Great of Pontus (Asia Minor) reportedly uses a hydraulic machine, presumably a water mill. |
| ca. 25 BC | Glass melting, working, and forming technology flourishes in the Mediterranean region of the Roman Empire. |
| ca. 10 BC | Vitruvius, a Roman engineer, publishes the earliest known description of a vertical water mill. |
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| ca. 20 AD | Imperial orders in China reportedly set down the first environmental protection laws, including energy-related issues such as restrictions on wood burning and mining. |
| ca. 37 AD | The first greenhouse is reportedly used to grow cucumbers for Tiberius Caesar, emperor of Rome. |
| 47 AD | Roman historian Tacitus reports on the digging of a 23-mile canal by Roman soldiers in Germany, linking the Rhine and Meuse rivers. |
| ca. 60 AD | Hero (Heron) of Alexandria publishes Pneumatica, which describes over 100 different machines, including gears, a lever, and the aeolipile, the first working steam engine. The aeolipile is similar in operation to the modern jet engine. |
| 77 AD | Roman author Pliny the Elder describes people living near the Rhine River delta (now the Netherlands) who dig lumps of earth which they then dry and burn for cooking and heating. This is the first known mention of the use of peat as fuel. |
| 100 AD | The Romans construct a huge bridge near the city of Nesausas (modern-day Nimes, France), still standing and now known as Pont Du Gard. It features an aqueduct that is part of a system bringing water to the city from springs 50 km distant. |
| ca. 105 AD | Paper manufacture is reported in China, with a man named Ts’ai Lun credited as the inventor. Over the next several centuries papermaking spreads to other parts of Asia. |
| ca. 110 AD | The Roman occupiers of Britain use coal for heating and metalworking, obtained from surface mines. The early peoples of Britain apparently mined coal long before this date; large quantities of burned coal fragments have been discovered at an Iron Age settlement near Edinburgh and, as even earlier evidence, flint axes have been found embedded in coal in Derbyshire. |
| 150 AD | An efficient reservoir and dam for irrigation is built at Saurashtra, India. |
| 150 AD | The Romans advance Greek solar technology by employing clear window coverings such as glass to enhance the capture of solar energy and using dark colors and pottery to store thermal energy. “Sun rights” guarantees are codified in Roman law. |
| 300 AD | A Roman flour mill at Barbegal, near Arles, in southern France, operates a large series of water wheels, each turning a pair of millstones; this complex is said to have a total capacity of 3 tons of grain per hour. |
| 300s AD | The Roman Cursus Publicus (imperial postal system) extends over more than 80,000 km. |
| 300s AD | Water mills appear in the Roman Empire. |
| ca. 320 AD | Pappus of Alexandria identifies five elementary machines in use: the cogwheel, lever, pulley, screw, and wedge. This follows on a similar description by his predecessor Hero (ca. 60 AD). |
| 500 AD | The modern horse collar is in use in China, thus allowing a single draft animal to pull a much heavier load. This follows the earlier development of the stirrup (ca. 300 AD), also reportedly in China. |
| 500s AD | The heavy plow is in use in Slavic Europe. The earlier Roman light plow was suited to Mediterranean soil but not to the rich, heavy, often wet soils of Northern Europe. Over the next two centuries the heavy plow is introduced elsewhere in Europe; e.g., Northern Italy’s Po Valley and the Rhineland. |
| 600 AD | Japanese excavators hand dig wells to depths of 600 to 900 feet. |
| 600s AD | Arab and Persian chemists discover that petroleum’s lighter elements can be mixed with quicklime to make Greek fire, which was in effect the napalm of its day as an incendiary weapon in warfare. |
| 600s AD | Windmills are used in Persia to grind grain; also possibly in the same period or earlier in China. At this time rude vertical axis panemones (wind turbines) are used to grind grain in the Afghan highlands. |
| ca. 700 AD | Scholars in the Arab world adopt the Indian system of numbering, which is more useful and sophisticated than the extant method of Roman numerals. Though some argue this system should be called Hindu numerals because of its likely origin, it becomes known in the West as Arabic numerals because Europe learns of it from the Arab world. |
| 700s AD | The Catalan forge comes into use in Andorra. This produces significantly higher temperatures than existing furnaces and allows larger amounts of ore to be smelted at one time. |
| ca. 750 AD | Papermaking reaches the Islamic world from contact with China. The Arab world then improves this technology over the next two centuries by the use of linen fibers. |
| ca. 776 AD | Works written by Geber (Jabir Ibn Haiyan), and by later Arab writers but attributed to him, introduce experimental investigation into alchemy and establish many of the principles of modern chemistry. In 1144 the Englishman Robert of Chester translated Geber’s major works into Latin. |
| late 700s AD | The earliest known tidal-powered mills of Europe are in operation on the northeast coast of Ireland. |
| 800s AD | The horse collar, stirrup, and moldboard plow appear in Europe. |
| ca. 830 AD | The Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi describes various important concepts of modern mathematics; the current term algorithm derives from his name and algebra comes from the title of a book he wrote. He is considered the main source of European knowledge of the Arabic numeral system. |
| 900 AD | Sailing vessels have appeared in various waters with multiple masts and lateen (triangular) sails that make directional sailing possible, whereas earlier square-sail vessels were limited to sailing with the wind. The probable origin of this technology is Arab merchant ships on the Red Sea. |
| ca. 950 AD | Gunpowder is developed, most likely in China though claims have been made for several other cultures. Its use spreads to Europe at some point during the next two centuries, probably as a result of the Mongol invasion. |
| ca. 980 AD | The pound lock for canals comes into use in China, thus allowing boats to move from a lower to significantly higher stretch of water. |
| late 900s AD | Muslim chemists in Moorish Spain practice the technique of distillation to produce alcohol for use as a solvent and antiseptic (though not for alcoholic beverages, in accordance with Islamic law). The word alcohol comes from “Al-Kohl,” an Arabic term for a cosmetic powder that was a product of the distillation process. |
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| 1000-1400 | The age of feudalism in Europe: castles, knights, religious fervor, only very rudimentary science and technology. The Vikings sail as far as Greenland and America. Mongol warriors overrun and subjugate southern Russia. |
| ca. 1000 | The magnetic compass is discovered in China. |
| early 1000s | The waterwheel is widely used in Western Europe; it remains the main source of large-scale power there until well into the 18th century. |
| 1031 | Waste paper is reportedly re-pulped into new paper in Japan; this is considered the earliest known example of recycling. |
| ca. 1050 | The Anasazi peoples of southwestern North America build distinctive multistoried cliff dwellings with southern exposure, providing passive solar heating. |
| 1066 | The Norman Conquest alters the profile of energy use in England, as the subsequent growth of towns and trade leads to greater use of water power and water transportation. |
| 1086 | A total of 5,624 water-driven mills are in use by the manors of England south of the Trent River, or about one mill for each 400 people. This is according to the Domesday Book, a statistical survey that survives as a portrait of medieval life. |
| 1100s | Arabs in Spain introduce to Western Europe the practice of distilling petroleum products for illumination. |
| 1100s | The Chinese drill wells with primitive boring equipment to depths as great as 3,500 feet. |
| ca. 1130 | Gunpowder is employed for weaponry in China, as primitive rockets, mortars, and cannons are in use. Similar weapons are reportedly in use by Moorish armies at around the same time. |
| ca. 1150 | The first known paper mill in Europe is built by the Moors in Xativa, Spain. Papermaking then becomes established in Italy and gradually spreads across Christian Europe, though it does not become truly important until the invention of the printing press. |
| mid 1100s | Monks and lay brothers of the Cistercian order display special talents in the use of water resources and water power; e.g., irrigation channels, dams, mills, and canals. In their agricultural practices they also exhibit an early awareness of modern ecological concepts such as reclamation, sustainable development, and food webs. |
| 1180 | Windmills are widely in use in France, England, and elsewhere in Europe. The first documented appearance of the familiar European or “Dutch” style of windmill is recorded in Normandy at around this time. A written record of a windmill in Yorkshire, England dates from 1185. |
| ca. 1187 | Working in Toledo, Spain, Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona provides Latin translations of many important thinkers from the Greek and Arab world, such as Ptolemy, Euclid, Geber, and al-Khwarizmi, thus providing Europe with scientific knowledge that had become lost or obscured during the early Middle Ages. |
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| ca. 1200 | A treadmill hoisting machine powered by donkeys is installed at the Abbey of Mont St. Michel on the French seacoast. |
| ca. 1200 | Reinier, a monk of the Priory of St. Jacques, Liège, Belgium, describes the use of coal for metalworking. At this time coal is being exported from northeastern England to other parts of Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe. |
| 1202 | Italian mathematician Fibonacci (Leonardo Pisano) of Pisa publishes Liber abaci, a book that introduces the Arabic numeral system into Europe. |
| 1230 | The first importing of Scandinavian timber is recorded in England, indicating that wood as a domestic fuel supply was already experiencing shortages. |
| ca. 1230 | Robert Grosseteste, chancellor of Oxford University, breaks with medieval thought to stipulate that science should be based on observation and experimentation. He also theorizes on the nature of light in a way that anticipates the work of Newton. |
| 1232 | The Chinese use rockets to defend the city of Kaifeng against Mongol invaders. |
| ca. 1264 | The young Marco Polo visits Baku, a Persian city on the shores of the Caspian Sea in modern Azerbaijan. There he observes people collecting oil from seeps, a practice that is said to date back to the time of Alexander the Great. |
| 1267-1268 | English philosopher Roger Bacon prepares three large works for Pope Clement I, in which he lays a foundation for the development of modern science with his emphasis on the experimental method, rather than established tradition, as the proper means for acquiring knowledge about the world. |
| 1269 | The first experiments in magnetism are carried out by Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt, a French engineer, who observes and describes some of the fundamental properties of magnets. |
| 1270 | An illustration of an English windmill appears in the Windmill Psalter, which has its origin in Canterbury. |
| 1273 | Pollution from coal smoke offends the citizens of London. An ordinance is then enacted prohibiting the use of coal because it is “prejudicial to health.” This is the first recorded example in Britain of an explicit air-pollution control. |
| 1291 | A royal charter granted to the Abbot of Dunfermline gives him and his monks the rights to dig for coal. At this time in Britain coal is obtained from shallow underground mines known as bell pits or stair pits. Another form of soft coal called “sea coal” is gathered on beaches as it washes up on the shore. |
| 1298 | Marco Polo’s "Description of the World" comments on many novel customs and practices of China, including the use of “stones that burn like logs” (coal). Some scholars now question whether Marco Polo actually observed China at first hand or simply reported on what others told him, but in either case his writings made the West aware of Chinese culture. |
| 1300s | The first geothermal district heating system is set up at the town of Chaudes-Aigues in France; it employs as the heat source a natural flow of hot water from springs at 82°C (it is still in use today). |
| early 1300s | Serious wood shortages begin to be reported in England and elsewhere in Western Europe; these will become gradually more acute over the next 300 years. |
| 1306 | King Edward II of England prohibits artificers from burning sea coal while Parliament is in session, because of its offensive smoke. |
| 1326 | The first known drawing of a cannon in Europe appears in a Florentine manuscript. In the following year King Edward III of England is reported to have used cannon in battles with the Scots. Cannon were definitely used by the English in the Battle of Crecy in 1345. |
| 1327 | The Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal (1800 km long) is completed, the longest man-made canal in the world. It was begun in about 600 AD (though supposedly parts of it existed at least 1,000 years earlier) and it still exists today. |
| 1340 | A flüssofen (flow oven) is in operation at Marche-les-Dames, Belgium. This is the earliest form of a true blast furnace, which was developed in the Rhineland as an improvement on the earlier stückofen, in which malleable iron was produced directly from the ore. |
| 1347 | The Black Death (Plague) reaches Italy via merchant ships after having inexorably moved westward from Asia along the trade routes over the past two decades. Over the course of the next five years the Plague devastates Europe, killing about one-third of the entire population. |
| ca. 1350 | Franciscan alchemist Joannes de Rupescissa characterizes ethanol as “aqua vitae rectificata,” and identifies it as the fifth essential form of matter, in addition to earth, air, fire, and water. |
| 1379 | The first tax on coal is enacted in England; in 1421 “a duty of two pence per chaldron (an old unit of measure) was to be paid to the Crown by all persons, not franchised in the port of Newcastle, who bought coals.” |
| late 1300s | Portable firearms are in use, including the first weapon referred to as a handgun; i.e., a weapon that can be held and fired by one person. |
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| ca. 1400 | The Hopi people of southwestern North America burn coal for cooking and heating, and to bake the pottery they make from clay. |
| 1400s | Huge draft horses, originally bred to carry heavily armored knights in battle, are now in use as work animals. |
| 1400s | Major advances are made in the use of candles, including the first use of candle molds and the use of beeswax instead of tallow (producing less smoke and odor). |
| 1408 | The drainage windmill is used in Holland, employing a large scoop wheel to carry inland waters out to sea, thus permitting the use of lowland areas for agriculture. |
| 1427 | Portuguese caravels in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator discover the Azores archipelago roughly 1500 km west of the European mainland. Over the next two decades Portuguese sailors also explore the west coast of Africa, a region previously little known to Europeans. |
| 1450 | The Dutch invent the wipmolen, a form of windmill in which the top portion, bearing the sails, can be turned to face the wind. |
| 1454 | After more than 20 years of experimentation, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg prints 300 copies of a 42-line, 1282-page Latin Bible, known today as the Gutenberg Bible, and inaugurates the era of movable type. At the time, all of Europe had a total of only about 30,000 books. By the year 1500, there were an estimated 9 million. |
| 1457 | A new type of carriage is introduced into France from Hungary; it features light spoked wheels and a springed undercarriage. It becomes known in Europe as the “cart of Kocs,” from the town where it was built, and this leads to the modern English word coach. |
| 1474 | William Caxton prints the first book in English, a translation of a popular French romance. |
| 1482 | King Edward IV of England establishes 42 gallons as the standard size for a barrel of herring, in order to end cheating in the packing of fish. This becomes a standard unit of measure for various goods and eventually (mid 19th century) barrels of oil will use this same standard. |
| 1488 | Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias sails to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. |
| 1492 | Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus sails across the Atlantic in the service of Spain, making Europeans aware of “new” lands lying to the west of Europe. Evidence exists of earlier European presence in North America; e.g., Vikings in Newfoundland ca. 1000 AD, but it is the voyage of Columbus that establishes a permanent link between Europe and the Americas. |
| ca. 1493 | Leonardo da Vinci sketches an experimental flying machine. It is also reported that he created a design for a bicycle at around the same time; during his lifetime he designs or describes hundreds of other innovative machines and devices, such as a windmill, a parabolic mirror, and a parachute. |
| 1497-1498 | Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama follows the route recently established by Bartolomeu Dias to sail around the southern coast of Africa, then proceeds across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, a port city on the Malabar Coast of India. |
| ca. 1498 | The Inca Empire of western South America establishes the Andes highway, a vast system of roads built of stone bricks, reportedly extending over more than 15,000 miles in total. |
| ca. 1500 | By this date, direct use of geothermal water for medical purposes is common practice at Xiaotangshan Sanitarium, northwest of Beijing. The 50°C water is still used today for the treatment of high blood pressure, rheumatism, skin diseases, and for recuperation after surgery. |
| 1502 | Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci asserts that the land discovered by Columbus is a “new world,” completely separate from Asia. In 1507 German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller publishes a map of the new continent discovered by Columbus and calls it “America” after Amerigo Vespucci. |
| 1519 | Ferdinand Magellan of Portugal sets sail from Spain on the first voyage around the world. Although he is killed in the Philippines midway through the journey, Magellan’s voyage provides information on the size of the earth and the independent structure of continents. |
| ca. 1520 | The Saxon spinning wheel is introduced (named for its supposed origin in Saxony). This improves on the existing European spinning wheel by featuring a foot pedal, leaving both hands free to manipulate the fibers. |
| 1536-1539 | King Henry VIII rejects the authority of the Pope and dissolves the monasteries of England. Church lands thus pass into public hands, most significantly the coal mines of Newcastle and other areas, which can now be exploited by local merchants. |
| 1543 | Shortly before his death, Polish astronomer Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of celestial bodies). He presents a heliocentric model of the solar system; i.e., the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun. This contradicts the prevailing geocentric (Earth-centered) system developed earlier by Ptolemy. |
| ca. 1550 | King Gustaf I Vasa of Sweden (ruled 1523-1560) is one of the earliest ruler to recognize the importance of energy supply to national security (forests in this case). |
| ca. 1550 | Miners in Germany use wooden rails and pushcarts with flanged wheels to move ore along a track from the mines. A simpler rail system was in use in Slovakia as early as 1513. |
| mid 1500s | The first known production of hydrogen is made by the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus, probably through the combination of sulfuric acid and iron. Paracelsus notes that this reaction produces a gas or “air,” and that the air is released with great pressure. |
| 1551 | Jerome Cardan (Girolamo Cardano), an Italian mathematician, distinguishes electricity from magnetism by observing that while amber will attract various light objects, a lodestone (magnetic stone) will attract only metals. |
| 1560 | The Swedish Baltic Empire dominates Northern Europe from this time until 1721, based in part on its rise as a producer and exporter of metals, while England’s and mid-Europe’s metal production declines due to a drop in charcoal production caused by deforestation and wood scarcity. |
| 1561 | Adam Lonicier of Germany writes of a solar heating technique used by alchemists to make perfume, in which flowers are heated by light reflected from a mirror to cause their essence to diffuse into water. |
| 1568 | Gerardus Mercator introduces cylindrical projection in maps, now known as Mercator projection. The cover of his book of maps shows the Greek Titan Atlas balancing the world on his shoulders, a picture which gave atlases their name. |
| 1570-1630 | England experiences a widespread shortage of firewood, especially in areas with ironworks since large amounts of fuel are required for smelting iron. This depletion of the wood supply leads to a shift to coal as the chief energy source for smelting and other industrial purposes. As a result England becomes the first country to develop a full-scale coal industry. |
| late 1500s | Oil from seeps in the Carpathian Mountains is burned in street lamps to provide light for the Polish town of Krosno. |
| 1583 | Mathematician Simon Stevin demonstrates the laws of hydrostatics, showing that the surface pressure of a liquid is related to the height of the liquid above the surface and the area of the surface, but not to the shape of the container holding the liquid. |
| 1586 | Mathematician Simon Stevin is said to have performed a key gravitational experiment, noting that weight does not affect the pull of gravity. (It is also said that Galileo reached this same conclusion after dropping two different weights from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.) |
| 1589 | The Reverend William Lee of England invents the first knitting machine, which can knit faster than human hands, using a stocking frame. |
| 1590 | Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen constructs the first microscope, using two convex lenses and a tube. |
| 1592 | Galileo develops the first primitive thermometer, known as a thermoscope, using air in a tube instead of liquid. |
| 1592 | The first wind-driven sawmill is built in the Netherlands by Cornelis Cornelisz. It is mounted on a raft to permit easy turning into the wind. |
| 1594 | An oil well 35 meters deep is reportedly dug in Azerbaijan. |
| 1597 | Andreas Libavius publishes Alchemia, the first European chemical textbook, in which he describes the preparation of hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and tin tetrachloride. |
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| 1600 | William Gilbert presents a model of the solar system based on magnetism, explaining gravity through electromagnetic terms and noting magnetic dip in a compass. |
| early 1600s | Giovanfrancesco Sagredo, a disciple of Galileo, divides his thermometer into 360 divisions like a circle, after which the divisions on a thermometer are called “degrees.” |
| 1603 | Hugh Platt describes coke, a charcoal-like residue left after the volatile components of coal have been driven off. This later becomes an important fuel. Ironically Platt at the same time complains about the damage being caused to London’s buildings and vegetation by the burning of coal, the process that produces coke. |
| 1603 | Italian alchemist Vincenzo Cascariolo makes the first scientific investigation into the property of luminescence when he finds that a heated mixture of barium sulfate and coal glows in the dark, and can be “recharged” through exposure to sunlight. |
| 1603-1604 | Huntingdon Beaumont of England constructs a wooden wagon way from the bell pits at Strelley down to Wollaton Lane, to carry coal (horse-drawn) to the Nottingham market. |
| 1604 | Robert Cawdrey publishes a dictionary of hard words; this is the first alphabetical reference work in English. |
| 1606 | Italian Giambattista della Porta designs a device capable of raising water, an improved version of “Hero’s Fountain,” with steam instead of air as the displacing fluid. He also describes the formation of a vacuum by condensation of steam. |
| 1608 | Hans Lippershey of the Netherlands builds the first practical telescope. |
| 1609 | German astronomer Johannes Kepler formulates his first two laws of planetary motion: the elliptical orbits of the planets and the alteration of planetary speed according to distance from the Sun. |
| 1609-1611 | Galileo improves the telescope and pioneers its use for astronomical observation, discovering mountains on the moon, many new stars, the four satellites of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the composition of the Milky Way. |
| 1610 | The English coal industry has grown to the point that nearly half of all the country’s maritime trade consists of coal exports. The city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast part of the country is the hub of this industry (giving rise to the expression “carrying coals to Newcastle” for an activity that is a waste of time because it supplies something which is already present in abundance). |
| 1612 | Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater (literally, “empty water”) directs the drainage of Beemster and other polders, beginning a long period of wind-driven polder drainage in the Netherlands. |
| 1615 | A royal proclamation in Britain prohibits the use of wood for glassmaking. Wood is in high demand for the crucial shipbuilding industry, so glass-making furnaces are changed to burn coal instead. |
| 1615 | French engineer Salomon de Caux (Caus) builds a solar-powered water pump, using glass lenses to heat a sealed vessel containing water and air. This is regarded as the first use of solar energy since classical times. He also describes the principles of a steam engine and advocates its use. |
| 1619 | German astronomer Johannes Kepler formulates his third law of planetary motion, involving a calculation to determine the distance of a planet from the sun. He also publishes a defense of the Copernican system. |
| 1620 | In his influential Novum organum scientiarum, Francis Bacon advocates observation and the inductive method over postulation and a priori reasoning, describing what is known today as the scientific method. |
| ca. 1620 | Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel creates a thermostat which he uses to regulate the temperature of an oven by controlling the flow of air. |
| 1621 | The first ironworks in colonial North America is set up at Jamestown, Virginia. |
| 1628 | British physician William Harvey publishes On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals, in which he describes the circulation of the blood and the pumping of the heart; this is often described as the foundation of modern medicine. |
| 1629 | Italian engineer Giovanni Branca invents a stamping mill whose power is generated by a steam-powered turbine. |
| ca. 1630 | Jan Baptista van Helmont of Brussels coins the word gas, from the Flemish word for chaos, to describe what he calls the “wild spirit” component of oaken coal that has been burned; i.e., that does not remain as ashes. This is the first known description of an air-like substance, without fixed volume or shape, other than air itself. |
| 1635 | John Winthrop opens America’s first chemical plant in Boston, producing saltpeter (potassium nitrate) for use in the manufacture of gunpowder. |
| 1637 | In Discours de la methode, Rene Descartes champions deductive reasoning on the basis of mathematical laws; famous appendices to this influential work present important advances in physics, optics, meteorology, and mathematics. |
| 1638 | Galileo publishes his major work on mechanics, including experiments on acceleration, friction, inertia, and falling bodies that correct many of Aristotle’s errors. |
| 1640 | Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli applies Galileo’s laws of motion of fluids, establishing the science of hydrodynamics. In 1643 he invents the mercury barometer and in the process makes an artificially created vacuum, the first known instance of this. |
| 1641 | Rene Descartes argues in his Principles of Philosophy that the Universe is governed by simple laws and that natural processes might have shaped the Earth. |
| 1645 | German engineer Otto von Guericke (Gericke) demonstrates the effect of atmospheric pressure on evacuated bodies when he builds the first vacuum pump and takes the first measurement of the density of air. |
| 1646 | English physician Sir Thomas Browne publishes Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in which he discusses his experiments with static electricity and magnetism and introduces the words electric and electricity into the English language. |
| 1648 | From an experiment using barometers at different levels on a mountain, French mathematician Blaise Pascal establishes that air pressure decreases with altitude, leading him to conclude that the atmosphere has only a finite height. He also formulates the principle that pressure is uniform throughout a static fluid. |
| ca. 1650 | The longwall coal mining technique is introduced in Shropshire, England. This becomes the most widely used method of coal extraction. |
| 1652 | The government of New Amsterdam (New York City) establishes the first traffic laws in the Americas, ruling that horse-drawn wagons, carts, and sleighs are not to be driven at a gallop in the city. |
| 1654 | Ferdinand II of Italy develops the first sealed liquid thermometer. |
| 1654 | Otto von Guericke begins a series of public demonstrations of the power of air pressure in a vacuum, including experiments in which teams of horses are unable to separate a sphere held together by a vacuum. |
| 1656 | Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens builds the first pendulum clock based on the cycloid, much like a modern grandfather clock. It is the first clock to keep highly accurate time. |
| 1659 | Thomas Shirley describes an inflammable gas seeping from coal deposits near Wigan, England. This is the first known discovery of natural gas in Europe. |
| 1661 | John Evelyn publishes “Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated,” one of the earliest tracts on air pollution. He describes the poor air quality of London and suggests remedies to deal with this, such as relocating certain industries (e.g., iron making, brewing) outside the city, and then planting gardens and orchards in their place. |
| 1662 | Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle discovers that air can be compressed and formulates Boyle’s law, which states that in an ideal gas of constant temperature, pressure and volume vary inversely. |
| 1662 | John Graunt compiles a study of London death records, in what is considered the first statistically based public health study. He notes that roughly one out of every four deaths results from lung-related diseases. This contrasts with lower death rates in rural areas, away from London’s smoke-filled air. |
| 1662 | King Charles II of England grants a charter to the Royal Society of London, an organization formed to encourage scientific research and communication. |
| 1663 | Otto von Guericke develops the first electric generator, which consists of a revolving ball of sulfur inside a glass globe, mounted on a wooden frame. This produces a static electric spark when a pad is held against the ball as it rotates. |
| 1665 | Denis de Sallo of Paris publishes the initial volume of the Journal des scavans, the first Western scholarly journal. |
| 1665-1666 | Isaac Newton conducts a series of experiments, discovering that white light is composed of different colors that can be separated by a prism, formulating his first law of universal gravitation, and inventing the first form of calculus. |
| 1666 | The Great Fire of London sweeps through this metropolis of wooden buildings, destroying virtually the entire city north of the Thames River. The fire does have one positive effect in that it “sanitizes” areas that had just been devastated by an outbreak of plague, and England never again has a major epidemic of the disease. |
| 1668 | John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum, according to which the total momentum of a closed system does not change. |
| 1669 | In his quest to create gold from another material, German chemist Hennig Brand identifies a faintly glowing element that he names “phosphorus.” The discovery of this element is the first attributable to a specific person and time. |
| 1669 | Nicolaus Steno of Denmark lays the foundation for the science of crystallography with his statement that the angles are constant between equivalent faces of crystals of the same substance, when measured at the same temperature. |
| 1671 | Hydrogen is isolated by Robert Boyle. Earlier in the century, hydrogen was discovered to be flammable by Turquet de Mayerne. |
| 1671 | Wagon ways from Ravensworth Colliery deliver coal to the Team-staith at Dunston, England. |
| 1672 | Giovanni Cassini calculates the distance from the Earth to the Sun to be 87 million miles, within 6 million miles of modern estimates. Scientists begin to realize just how large the solar system must be. |
| 1672 | Otto von Guericke recognizes that the static electricity produced by his sulfur ball device (see 1663) will cause the surface of the sulfur to glow, thus identifying the phenomenon of electroluminescence. Guericke also notes that like charges repel each other. |
| 1673 | Christiaan Huygens produces what is regarded as the first heat engine, although the lack of a reliable fuel hampers its development. |
| 1673 | The first record of coal in the United States is shown in a map prepared by the French explorer Louis Joliet. The map shows “charbon de terra” seen by Joliet and Jacques Marquette along the Illinois River, near present-day Utica, Illinois. |
| 1675 | Gottfried Leibniz of Saxony (now Germany), working independently of Newton, develops differential and integral calculus. His notations, including the integral sign and derivative notation, are still in use today. |
| 1675 | In the course of his study of Jupiter’s moons, the Danish mathematician Olaus Roemer estimates the speed of light to be about 141,000 miles per second. Before Roemer, many scientists believed that light had infinite speed. |
| 1676-1677 | Looking at pond water through a microscope of his own construction, Anton van Leeuwenhoek is the first to view what he called “animalcules,” known today as microorganisms. |
| 1678 | A patent application is made by Clement Clerke of Bristol, England for a lead smelting reverberatory furnace using pit coal. | 1678 | Abbé Hautefeuille of Orleans, France is one of the first to propose the use of explosive powder for motive energy when he suggests the construction of a powder motor to raise water. |
| 1679 | French engineer Denis Papin builds the first atmospheric engine called the “Digester” (pressure cooker). |
| 1680 | Robert Boyle discovers the match by rubbing phosphorus and sulfur together. |
| 1680 | Newton proposes that a jet of steam can be used to power a carriage, an idea now considered to be a precursor to the development of the jet engine. |
| ca. 1684 | The experiments of English minister John Clayton of Yorkshire, an amateur chemist, reveal the presence of a clear, flammable “spirit of coal” as a byproduct of distillation, though he does not recognize a practical use for this coal gas. |
| 1686 | English astronomer Edmond Halley shows that low latitudes receive more solar radiation than higher ones and proposes that this gradient provides forcing for the atmosphere’s general circulation. For this, and his work on tides, Halley is considered a founder of geophysics (though he is better known for his study of what is now called Halley’s Comet). |
| 1686 | Gottfried Leibniz posits an early version of the law of conservation of energy. He argues that the true measure of the effect of force is vis viva or “living force” as exhibited in motion and not “dead force” as exhibited in statics. |
| 1687 | Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, often regarded as the most important book of science ever written. He establishes three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, and other fundamental principles. Newton thus provides the basic description of the natural laws governing the universe (later modified by the work of Einstein). |
| 1688 | The Royal Society of London officially notes that gas can be extracted from coal and oil, and then burned as a source of heat and light. |
| 1690 | Denis Papin develops the idea of using steam to pump water out of mines. He also describes an atmospheric steam engine operating with piston and cylinder. |
| 1690 | William Rittenhouse establishes the first paper mill in the American colonies, on a creek near Philadelphia. This has been described as America’s first example of recycling, since the mill’s fiber for papermaking was obtained from discarded rags and cotton. |
| 1695 | Italian academicians Averoni and Targioni conduct experiments on the combustibility of diamonds, including the use of solar heat by means of a large burning-glass. |
| 1698 | Captain Thomas Savery, an English military engineer and inventor, receives the first patent for a crude steam engine, based on Papin’s Digester of 1679. Savery is motivated by the challenge of pumping water out of coal mines. He names his engine “The Miner’s Friend.” |
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| early 1700s | Settlers in New England utilize solar energy by “saltbox” houses that face toward the winter sun. Many feature a lattice overhang on the south facade, supporting deciduous vines that afford shade in summer but drop their leaves in winter, allowing sunlight through. |
| 1701 | Coal deposits are found by Huguenot settlers in Manakin on the James River, near present-day Richmond. |
| 1701 | English agriculturist Jethro Tull invents an efficient mechanical seed drill, which allows seed to be sown in evenly in neatly spaced rows. |
| 1702 | Czar Peter the First establishes Russia’s first regular newspaper, Vedomosti. The paper’s first issue carries a story about the discovery of oil on the surface of the river Sok in central Russia. |
| 1705 | Neon light is born when Francis Hauksbee of England creates electrical effects by putting mercury into a glass globe, pumping out the air, and then turning it with a crank. When he does this in the dark, and then rubs the globe with his bare hand, it glows. |
| 1709 | Abraham Darby, iron-maker at Coalbrookedale in the West Midlands of England, develops the use of coke in iron smelting, enabling factories to produce iron at a much faster rate. Before that, iron furnaces could only be located at a site with both sufficient water power and an extensive wood supply, to provide the fuel source for charcoal. |
| 1709 | Sir Isaac Newton builds an electric generator consisting of a rotating glass sphere. |
| 1711-1712 | English engineer Thomas Newcomen devises a new kind of steam engine with a piston and cylinder construction that utilizes ordinary low-pressure steam to pump water out of coal mines. This is the culmination of efforts he began in 1705 and it becomes the first successful atmospheric steam engine. |
| 1714 | Gabriel Fahrenheit develops a mercury thermometer and the Fahrenheit scale of measurement based on the temperature of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (0 degrees), ice and water (32 degrees), and boiling water (212 degrees). |
| 1716 | Swedish engineer Martin Triewald uses a hot water system to heat a greenhouse in Newcastle upon Tyne, in northern England. This is considered the first modern instance of central heating. |
| 1723 | Jacob Leupold of Germany publishes a nine-volume work that is the first detailed and systematic exposition of mechanical engineering, including a design for a noncondensing, high-pressure steam engine similar to the ones that would be built much later. |
| 1728 | James Bradley notes the periodic shift of the stars’ positions during a year and explains it by the aberration of light caused by the Earth’s orbit. He uses his findings to recalculate the speed of light, which he places within 5% of what it is now stated to be. |
| 1729 | Through a series of experiments, Stephen Gray establishes that some materials conduct electricity better than others and that static electricity travels on the surface of objects rather than through the interior. This is considered the first discovery of the principle that electricity can flow. |
| 1733 | Charles-Francois de Cisternay du Fay states a “two-fluid” theory of electricity, dividing electrical charges into vitreous (positive) fluid and resinous (negative) fluid, and noting that like charges attract and differing charges repel. Benjamin Franklin also distinguishes between positive and negative charges, though he favors a one-fluid theory. |
| 1733 | Englishman John Kay patents the flying shuttle loom, enabling one person to do much more work with relatively less effort. |
| 1735 | George Hadley, an English meteorologist, introduces the importance of Earth’s rotation in the features of major winds, including the easterly trades and the mid-latitude westerlies. |
| 1735 | Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus publishes Systema naturae (Systems of nature), introducing a method of classification for plants still in use today, which he later extends to include animals. |
| 1736 | Swiss scientist Leonhard Euler writes the first book of mechanics based on differential equations. |
| 1738 | Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli develops his kinetic theory of gases, according to which pressure within a closed container of gas increases as temperature rises and decreases as temperature goes down. |
| 1742 | Anders Celsius suggests replacing the Fahrenheit scale with the Centigrade scale, which places the freezing point of water at 0 degrees and the boiling point at 100 degrees. In 1948 the name of this scale is changed to Celsius scale by international agreement. |
| 1743 | Jean le Rond d’Alembert expands on Newton’s laws of motion, proposing that actions and reactions in a closed system of moving bodies are balanced. He applies this principle to several mechanical problems. |
| 1743 | King Louis XV of France has a “flying chair” installed in his palace to allow him to ride from the first to the second floor; this is considered the earliest form of passenger elevator. |
| 1745 | Edmund Lee introduces the fantail mechanism for windmills; it automatically rotates the blades of the windmill into the wind, as opposed to having a person manually do this. |
| 1745 | Shafts are dug into the hillsides of Pechelbronn, France to extract petroleum; these are the first known wells specifically sunk to search for oil. |
| 1745-1746 | Pieter van Musschenbroek and Ewald Georg von Kleist independently invent the capacitor, an electricity-storage device that is the first practical way to store static electricity. It comes to be called the Leiden (Leyden) jar after Musschenbroek’s employer, the University of Leiden. |
| ca. 1746 | Leonhard Euler determines the mathematics of light refraction, based on Huygens’ theory of 1690 that light is composed of different colors of varying wavelengths. |
| 1747 | Benjamin Franklin describes his discovery that a pointed conductor can draw off electric charge from a charge body. This is the basis for his lightning rod, even before he proves the connection between electricity and lightning. |
| 1748 | The first commercial coal production in colonial America is recorded near Richmond, Virginia. By the end of the 1750s other coal deposits are reported in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. |
| 1749 | Benjamin Franklin installs a lightning rod on his home. |
| 1749 | George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon publishes the first of his 44 volumes of Historie Naturelle (Natural History), in which he anticipates Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by presenting arguments for descent with modification and species extinctions. He also suggests that existing estimates of the age of the Earth are much too low. |
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| 1750 | A French military officer notes that Indians living near Fort Duquesne (now the site of the city of Pittsburgh) set fire to an oil-slicked creek as part of a religious ceremony. |
| mid 1700s | An extensive system of canals is established in various countries of Western Europe. At the same time the quality of surface roads in these countries is generally poor. |
| mid 1700s | England and Holland make advances in greenhouse technology. |
| 1752 | Benjamin Franklin conducts his famous experiment with a kite in a lightning storm, showing that lightning is a form of electricity. |
| 1754 | Joseph Black discovers “fixed air,” or carbon dioxide, when he heats limestone. He determines that carbonates are compounds of a gas and a base. |
| 1755 | The first known instance of artificial refrigeration is demonstrated by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow. |
| 1757 | Captain John Campbell of the Royal Navy develops a nautical sextant for precise measurements of longitude and latitude. |
| 1758 | Coal is “exported” from the James River district of the colony of Virginia to New York. |
| 1758 | Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt divides minerals into four classes: earths, bitumens, salts, and metals. This establishes the classification of minerals by chemical structure. |
| 1759 | English civil engineer John Smeaton determines that the overshot waterwheel is much more efficient than the traditional undershot wheel. He also makes advances in the design of many other devices and structures; e.g., an improvement on the Newcomen steam engine. |
| 1759 | Franz Aepinus rejects mechanical theories of electricity and suggests that ordinary matter repels itself in the absence of electricity, a theory of electrostatics similar to Newton’s law of gravity and supporting Benjamin Franklin’s one-fluid theory of electricity. |
| 1760 | John Mitchell proposes that earthquakes are caused by the build-up of pressure within the earth and that they produce waves which travel at measurable speeds. |
| 1761 | Joseph Black discovers that ice absorbs heat without changing temperature when melting. He calls this property “latent heat,” a quality later important in the improvement of the steam engine. |
| 1762 | An act of the New York City assembly gives the authority to provide funds for lighting the city, and in that year the first street lamps and posts are purchased. |
| 1762 | Deposits of anthracite coal are discovered in Pennsylvania. |
| 1764 | James Hargreaves introduces a new device, called a “spinning Jenny,” which can spin eight threads at once and thus provide much greater efficiency than the traditional spinning wheel. |
| ca. 1765 | Burmese excavators hand dig hundreds of oil wells. |
| 1766 | Henry Cavendish identifies and outlines the properties of a highly flammable substance which he calls “fire air,” now known as hydrogen. |
| 1766 | Swiss physicist Horace-Benedict de Saussure develops an electrometer, a device for measuring electric potential by means of the attraction or repulsion of charged bodies. He also constructs the first known solar flat plate collector. |
| 1766 | The brothers Thomas and George Cranege receive a patent for a reverberatory or air furnace, for use in iron-making. This is later improved upon by Peter Onions (1783) and Henry Cort (1784). |
| ca. 1766 | The opulent Paris townhouse of François de Monville features a central heating system; this is the first time that buildings in France have had central heat since the era of the ancient Romans. |
| 1767 | Joseph Priestley offers an explanation for rings formed by an electrical charge on metal (now known as Priestley’s rings) and proposes that electrical forces follow the same inverse square law that gravity does. |
| 1769 | French army engineer Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot builds a three-wheeled wagon powered by a steam engine, the first example of a “horseless carriage.” However, it can only operate for a few minutes without stopping to get up steam, and it is soon retired after overturning in what is described as the world’s first motor vehicle accident. |
| 1769 | Richard Arkwright invents a spinning frame that produces cotton threads for textile manufacture, one of the key developments leading to Britain’s Industrial Revolution. |
| 1769 | Scottish inventor James Watt receives the patent for an improved version of the Newcomen steam engine. It uses a condenser, separate from the cylinder, to improve efficiency. A unit of power called the watt is eventually named after him. |
| ca. 1769 | Spanish missionary Juan Crespi writes of “extensive swamps of bitumen” that he has seen while traveling on an expedition to the region that is now the city of Los Angeles, California. These swamps are the La Brea Tar Pits, and more than 200 years later the oil industry of Southern California will begin in this same area. |
| 1770 | George Washington observes a “burning spring” on the Kanawha River in West Virginia. |
| 1771 | In experiments with plants in carbon dioxide-filled chambers, Joseph Priestley discovers that plants somehow convert the gas breathed out by animals and created by fire back into oxygen; this lays the foundation for an understanding of photosynthesis. |
| 1772 | Daniel Rutherford, Joseph Priestley, Carl Scheele, and Henry Cavendish independently discover nitrogen, although Rutherford is usually given credit for being the first. |
| 1774 | Priestley publishes his discovery of oxygen. Scheele had previously discovered it in 1772 but did not publish his findings until 1777, and Antoine Lavoisier actually named the element. The identification of oxygen overturns an idea that had dominated science for more than 2,000 years, namely that air is a singular, elementary substance. |
| ca. 1775 | Antoine Lavoisier builds a solar furnace that can generate enough heat to melt platinum. |
| 1775 | James Watt patents a new steam engine that he had developed in 1765, which is six times as efficient as the old Newcomen engine. Its condenser is separated from the cylinder, allowing the steam to act directly on the piston. |
| 1775 | Pierre-Simon Girard invents a water turbine. |
| 1775 | The first chemical extraction from geothermal waters (mainly borate products) is undertaken in Lardarello, Italy. |
| 1776 | An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is published by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith. It establishes economics as a distinct field of study and provides the basis for laissez-faire economics, in particular the idea that “the invisible hand” of the free market, and not government, is the proper controlling force for a nation’s use of resources. |
| 1776 | The American colonies declare independence from Britain. From this time the industrialization of the United States will proceed separately from that of Britain; prior to this one-third of all British ships were being built in America and the colonies were also a center for British iron manufacturing. |
| 1776 | The Watt steam engine is put into practical use, to drain water from coal mines. |
| 1778 | Scheele and Lavoisier independently conclude that air is composed mainly of oxygen and nitrogen. |
| ca. 1778 | The first industrial blast furnace is created by ironmaster John Wilkinson, using a steam engine rather than water power. |
| late 1770s | Factories are sited along rivers to utilize the power of waterwheels. |
| 1779 | Dutch scientist Jan Ingen-Housz identifies principles of photosynthesis when he notes that plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, which animals convert back into carbon dioxide. He also discovers that only the green parts of plants release oxygen, and that oxygen is only given off when plants are in the presence of light. |
| 1779 | The earliest versions of the modern bicycle appear on the streets of Paris. |
| 1780 | During experiments with oxidation of organic gases, Johann Wolfgang Döberreiner discovers that there are certain similarities of reaction among elements. This forms the basis of the periodic table. |
| ca. 1780 | Luigi Galvani of Italy discovers that when he touches a dead frog’s leg with a knife, it twitches violently. Alessandro Volta will later show this is because electricity is created when moisture (from the frog) comes between two different types of metal (the steel knife and a tin plate); this phenomenon will become known as galvanism. |
| ca. 1780 | M. Bonnemain of France creates a hot water boiler that uses a gravity system to circulate the heated water. |
| 1780s | Watt continues to adapt his steam engine invention. He creates a mechanical attachment with a rotary movement, enabling the engine to power a wider variety of machines, and he develops the first governor and flywheel. Flywheels will later be the focus of extensive research as power storage devices. |
| 1781 | Priestley “creates” water by igniting hydrogen in oxygen. |
| 1781 | Richard Arkwright builds the first modern factory to house his water frame for spinning. |
| 1783 | Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier launch the first hot air balloon, the earliest successful air flight in history. It is made by filling paper bags and then silk bags with hot air over fires. It floats in the air for 10 minutes, coming down 2.4 km from the launch site at Annonay, France. The second flight carries a cargo of animals, and the third flight carries two men. |
| 1783 | Jacques-Alexandre Charles creates and flies in the first hydrogen balloon. Later in the year he begins a series of balloon ascents. |
| 1783 | Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent marquis d’Arlandes make a 25-minute flight in a hot air balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers. They are the first humans to fly. |
| 1783 | Lavoisier, with Pierre Laplace, uses a calorimeter to estimate the amount of heat evolved per unit of carbon dioxide produced. The ratio is the same for a flame and an animal, indicating that animals produce energy by a type of combustion, and also demonstrating the role of oxygen in the respiration of animals and plants. |
| 1783 | William Herschel explains the apparent movement of stars together and apart from each other by arguing that the Sun itself is moving toward some stars and away from others, changing their relative positions. |
| 1784 | Benjamin Franklin notes that the substitution of coal for wood as a fuel has helped to preserve England’s remaining forests, and he urges France and Germany to do the same. |
| 1784 | Benjamin Franklin suggests that a great eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland is responsible for the unusually severe winter that follows, thus showing an awareness of the effect of volcanism on global climate. |
| 1784 | For the first time a flour mill in England successfully substitutes a steam engine for wind power. |
| 1784 | Ironmaster Henry Cort develops both the puddling method of manufacturing wrought iron from coke-smelted iron and the rolling mill with grooved rollers. |
| 1784 | Jean Pierre Minkelers describes the production of gas from coal, and uses such gas to illuminate his classroom at Leuven, Belgium. This is sometimes considered the origin of gas lighting. |
| 1784 | Swiss scientist Aimé Argand patents a new type of lamp that burns much brighter than candles, produces less smoke, and reduces the danger of fire. It features an oil receptacle, a round wick lamp with a chimney, and a glass cylinder in which the flame burns. This becomes the prototype for many subsequent oil lamps. |
| 1785 | French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb is the first to measure accurately the forces exerted between electric charges. |
| 1785 | Henry Cavendish establishes that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. |
| 1785 | The theory of uniformitarianism, or the very gradual and regular evolution of the earth’s structure, is introduced by James Hutton. According to his ideas, the earth is so old that it is almost impossible to determine when it began. |
| 1785 | Jean-Pierra Blanchard and Dr. J. Jeffries make the first balloon crossing of the English Channel. |
| 1787 | Jacques Charles demonstrates that different gases expand at the same rate for a given temperature. This principle, known as Charles’s Law, had actually been discovered by Guillaume Amontons as early as 1699. |
| 1787 | John Fitch builds and launches the first steamboat on the Delaware River. Although a technological success, it is a commercial failure. |
| 1787 | John Wilkinson launches an iron boat, believed to be the world’s first such vessel for commercial use. Reportedly it is intended as a canal barge for freight. |
| 1788 | The fur trader Peter Pond is the first European to describe the vast oil sands (tar sands) of Atahabasca, Canada. He writes of “bituminous fountains” and describes how the local Indians mix this fluid with gum from fir trees to waterproof their canoes. |
| 1789 | French engineer Philippe Lebon distills gas from heated wood and suggests that it can heat and illuminate interiors and inflate balloons. This is an important contribution to the subsequent development of the manufactured gas industry. |
| 1789 | German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovers uranium in the mineral pitchblende. It is not until 1841, however, that this element is isolated by Eugene Péligot. |
| 1789 | In Traite elementaire de chimie (Elementary treatise on chemistry), Lavoisier introduces the law of conservation of mass that he had developed some years before, and establishes a new system of chemical nomenclature. |
| late 1700s | Spermaceti, an oil found in the head of sperm whales, is highly sought after for various industrial uses. It is especially prized for candle making; the term candlepower is based on a measurement of the light produced by a spermaceti candle. |
| 1790 | England builds its first steam-driven rolling mill. |
| 1790 | Samuel Slater builds the first American factory, constructed entirely from his memory of blueprints he had seen earlier in England, and ushers in the Industrial Revolution in the United States. |
| ca. 1790 | Claude Berthollet and Joseph Priestley determine the molecular formula for ammonia. |
| ca. 1790 | Friendly Societies, forerunners of modern trade unions, are organized in Britain. |
| 1791 | John Barber receives the first patent for a basic turbine engine, which he intends to use to power a “horseless carriage.” Though he does not achieve practical success, this is the first engine to use the thermodynamic cycle of a modern gas turbine. |
| 1792 | William Murdock discovers that by heating coal in a closed container, the gas given off will yield a steady flame. Murdock produces “coal gas,” or “manufactured gas” and conveys it through metal pipes, lighting his Redruth, Cornwall cottage and offices. |
| 1793 | Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) challenges the prevailing caloric theory that heat is an elastic fluid. From his work boring cannon barrels, he notes that the cannon stay hot as long as the friction of boring continues, and he associates heat with mechanical energy. By defining heat as a form of motion rather than matter, he anticipates the kinetic theory of heat. |
| 1793 | Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin to pull the cotton threads off the seeds in cotton bolls. The machine is so successful that it completely changes the economy of the southern U.S., where cotton becomes the main crop. |
| 1794 | Inventor Philip Vaughn obtains the first patent for a modern type of ball bearing while working on carriage axles. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have developed a model for ball bearings some 300 years earlier but none were actually produced from this. |
| 1795 | Count Rumford invents the Rumford stove, an innovative version that provides greater heat with less smoke. |
| 1795 | Joseph Bramah patents a hydrostatic machine (hydraulic press), one of many inventions with which he is credited. |
| 1796 | M. Ambroise & Company, Italian fireworks manufacturers, reportedly exhibit a form of gas lighting in Philadelphia. |
| 1796 | Pierre-Simon Laplace advances his “nebular hypothesis” of the origin of the world, which states that our solar system was formed by the condensation of a nebula of dust and gas, a theory still widely accepted today. |
| 1797 | Edmund Cartwright invents an engine that runs on alcohol. He also makes significant contributions to weaving loom technology. |
| 1798 | Eli Whitney is awarded a government contract for 10,000 muskets. In manufacturing these weapons, he develops methods to produce standardized interchangeable parts, a procedure important to the Industrial Revolution. |
| 1798 | Henry Cavendish accurately determines the mass of the earth by determining the gravitational constant, the unknown G in Newton’s equations. |
| 1798 | Thomas Robert Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that poverty and famine are inevitable because the world’s population is bound to grow at a faster rate than the food supply. This leads to many subsequent analyses of the relationship between population and available resources, in particular Darwin’s ideas about natural selection. |
| 1799 | Alessandro Volta creates the first electric battery (known as Volta’s pile). It consists of alternating zinc and silver disks separated by felt soaked in brine. It is the first source of a steady electric current. Volta announces this invention in 1800. |
| 1799 | Philippe Lebon receives a patent for his Thermolamp, which is illuminated by coal gas. By 1801 he lights his own home in this manner and he also conducts a light demonstration at the Hotel Seignelay in Paris. Lebon also conceives of a gas-powered engine. |
| 1799 | The first patent for a wave energy system is granted in Paris to a father and son named Girard; they envision a system that would harness the power of heavy ships rocking back and forth on the waves in a harbor. |
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| 1800 | Less than two months after Alessandro Volta’s battery was publicized, English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle build a battery and use it to perform electrolysis on water, separating it for the first time into hydrogen and oxygen. |
| 1800 | While investigating the heat of different colors in a spectrum, William Herschel discovers that there is an invisible light beyond the red that produces the most heat, now known as infrared radiation. |
| 1800-1870 | The level of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) in the atmosphere, as later measured in ancient ice, is about 290 parts per million. Fossil fuel use and land clearing associated with the Industrial Revolution, population growth, and rising affluence will produce a steady rise in CO2 concentrations over the next two centuries. |
| 1801 | Building on Herschel’s discovery of radiation beyond the red end of a spectrum, Johann Ritter experiments with silver chloride and detects radiation beyond the violet end as well, now known as ultraviolet radiation. |
| 1801 | Thomas Young discovers that light passing through two narrow slits produces an interference pattern, providing further support for the wave theory of light. |
| 1801 | William Symington launches the Charlotte Dundas on the Forth and Clyde canal in Scotland. This is the first vessel built for the specific purpose of being propelled by a steam engine. Symington builds more than 30 different steam engines in the period 1790-1808. |
| 1801-1802 | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck provides the first classification scheme for invertebrates, and also presents ideas about a relationship between physical energy and morphological changes in organisms over generations. |
| 1802 | Applications of manufactured gas lighting take place in Britain and the U.S.; e.g., William Murdock installs gas lighting at the Watt and Boulton Birmingham works; a gas lighting system is patented in London by Frederick Winsor; Benjamin Henfrey demonstrates his “thermo-lamp” coal gas lighting method in Pennsylvania. |
| 1803, | Claude Berthollet applies physics to chemistry to show that reaction rates depend on the amounts of reacting substances as well as on affinities. |
| 1803 | John Buddle develops an air pump to provide ventilation for coal mines in Britain. |
| 1803 | John Dalton is the first to formally propose the atomic theory of matter, claiming that atoms (a word he took from Democritus’s writings of ca. 440 BC) explain why chemicals combine only in specific proportions. |
| 1803 | William Henry proposes the law named after him, which states that the mass of a gas dissolved in a liquid is proportional to the pressure. |
| 1804 | Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick develops the Penydarren, the world’s first steam locomotive to run on iron rails. However, the weight of the engine proves too heavy for the rails. Shortly before this Trevithick also developed a steam-powered road carriage to carry passengers. |
| 1804 | Sir George Cayley designs a glider that is regarded as the first successful heavier-than-air vehicle, one of several such vehicles he develops. In a long career (1799-1850s) studying the principles of aviation, Cayley describes many of the concepts and elements of the modern airplane. |
| 1805 | British manufacturer George Medhurst receives a patent to use compressed air to drive a motor. |
| 1805 | Commander William Beaufort develops a wind force scale consisting of 13 degrees of wind strength, from calm to hurricane. He bases this on the observed effect of various wind strengths on the sails of a British frigate. |
| 1805 | Frederick Tudor and Nathaniel Wyeth of Cambridge, Massachusetts devise new methods to cut, store, and transport ice blocks from nearby Fresh Pond. They ship the ice as far as India and Cuba, with production reaching 65,000 tons by 1846. |
| 1806 | David and Joseph Ruffner drill a well on the banks of the Great Kanawha River within the present city of Charleston, West Virginia. The well is drilled in search of brine, which can be evaporated to make salt. This is the first well known to have been drilled, rather than dug, in the Western Hemisphere. |
| 1807 | Great Britain, the principal slave-trading nation of the time, abolishes the Atlantic slave trade. The United States enacts similar legislation in the same year and other nations follow suit. (Denmark had already done so, in 1803.) |
| 1807 | Isaac de Rivaz of Switzerland designs an internal combustion engine, believed to be the first of its kind. He subsequently uses this to build a gas-powered car, using a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. |
| 1807 | Sir Humphrey Davy of Britain isolates a new metal, sodium, using electrolysis. |
| 1807 | The Clermont, a 133-foot-long steam-powered paddleboat built by Robert Fulton, makes its maiden voyage up the Hudson River in New York. It proves to be a great commercial success. |
| 1807 | The resort city of Hot Springs, Arkansas is founded, and shortly thereafter visitors begin arriving to enjoy the heated waters. The area is made a national park in 1921. |
| 1807 | Thomas Young begins to use the term energy in the modern sense. He states, “The term energy may be applied, with great propriety, to the product of the mass or weight of a body, into the square of the number expressing its velocity.” This refers to what is now known as kinetic energy. |
| 1808 | French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac publishes his discovery that gases combine in definite proportions, just as elements do, when forming compounds. |
| 1808 | Judge Jesse Fell burns anthracite coal on an open grate in his Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania home. At the time most people thought that this type of coal was of little value. |
| 1809 | Chilean nitrates are discovered. These will serve as the chief source of nitrogen for explosives and for the chemical industry over the next 100 years. |
| 1809 | Humphrey Davy uses a high-powered battery to induce a bright light between two strips of charcoal 10 cm. (4 in.) apart, creating the first arc light. |
| 1809 | Lamarck states that animals evolved from simpler forms and that unused body parts will degenerate or new parts develop as needed for survival. Though scientists now reject Lamarck’s idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited, he was credited by Darwin as a major influence on his own theory of evolution. |
| early 1800s | A new era in illumination has begun, with gas producing a much higher quality flame than the oil lamp, the dominant lighting technology for many previous centuries. However, the new technology leaves vast pools of toxic coal tar as a byproduct in many European and American towns, a serious public health legacy. |
| 1810 | The first reported U.S. coal mine explosion occurs in Virginia. |
| 1811 | Amedeo Avogadro suggests that at a given temperature and pressure, equal volumes of any gas will always contain equal numbers of molecules. This comes to be known as Avogadro’s Hypothesis. |
| 1812 | German promoter Frederick Albert Winsor receives a charter from Parliament to establish the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company. This is the origin of public gas lighting in Britain. The following year, Winsor lights Westminster (London) Bridge. |
| 1813-1816 | The first miner’s safety lamps are developed independently by Sir Humphrey Davy, William Clanny, and George Stephenson. They reduce the risk of igniting the gas mixtures that are common in mines. Davy’s design is particularly effective in that it prevents the lamp temperature from rising above the ignition point of mine gases such as methane. |
| 1813 | David Melville receives a patent for his apparatus for making coal gas. Coal gas is used for street lighting. |
| 1814 | The first American steam-powered warship, "Demologos," is launched in New York Harbor. Designed and built by Robert Fulton, the ship is officially christened "Fulton the First." |
| 1814 | George Stephenson builds the Blucher (or Blutcher), the first practical steam locomotive in England. It is capable of pulling 30 tons up a grade at 4 miles per hour, a vast improvement over horse-drawn wagons. |
| 1815 | Samuel Clegg, chief engineer for Frederick Winsor’s gas company, develops an efficient gas meter and also installs a gas works at the Royal Mint. |
| 1815 | From his work digging canals, William Smith discovers that each layer (stratum) of earth contains a unique assemblage of fossils, and that he can distinguish one formation from another by the characteristic fossils in each. He then publishes what his biographer Simon Winchester called “the map that changed the world,” a geological survey of England and Wales. |
| 1816 | Karl von Drais of Germany builds a steerable two-wheeled vehicle that is propelled by pushing with the feet against the ground. In the same year his countryman Karl D. Sauerbronn develops the first prototype for the modern bicycle. |
| 1816 | Scottish minister Robert Stirling receives a patent for a new type of engine, the forerunner to the modern Stirling engine. This features the “Heat Economiser” (a refrigerator) and represents an advance in safety. Unlike existing steam engines, Stirling’s engine would not explode because it operated at lower pressures. |
| 1817 | The artist Rembrandt Peale receives permission from the city of Baltimore, Maryland to supply the city with coal gas for street lights. Peale and his associates then charter the Gas Light Company of Baltimore, the first energy utility in the U.S. |
| 1818 | The first commercial oil well in North America is drilled by Marcus Huling on land leased from Martin Beatty in McCreary County, Kentucky. The well is drilled in search of brine, but when drilled to about 200 feet, it produces large quantities of oil. |
| 1819 | English chemist John Kidd demonstrates that distilled coal tar can be used to produce naphthalene, an industrial chemical with a variety of uses, thus beginning the use of coal as a source of chemicals. |
| 1819 | Frederick Christian Accum publishes A Description of the Process of Manufacture of Coal Gas, which serves to bring greater recognition to the technique of gas lighting. He also publishes the first systematic study of food technology (1820). |
| 1819 | The American coastal packet Savannah sails across the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the first vessel to make an ocean crossing with steam-assisted power. |
| 1819 | Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted is the first to note the magnetic effect of electric currents when, by accident, he observes that an electric current in a wire can deflect a nearby compass needle. |
| 1819 | The US vessel Savannah arrives at Liverpool. She is the first steam-propelled vessel to cross the Atlantic, most of the journey was made under sail. The steamboat made the crossing in 25 days, running all but 7 days on steam. |
| 1820 | Expanding on the work of Oersted, Andre Marie Ampere finds that two wires carrying current in the same direction attract each other, while wires carrying current in opposite directions repel. |
| 1820 | Johann Schweigger also expands on Oersted’s experiments and invents the galvanometer to measure the strength of a current. |
| 1820 | The Rev. W. Cecil of Magadelen College, Cambridge writes a paper on how to use the energy of hydrogen to power an engine, and provides a description of how such a hydrogen engine could be built. |
| 1820 | Warren De la Rue of Guernsey encloses a platinum coil in an evacuated glass tube and passes electricity through it, in the first recorded attempt to produce an incandescent lamp. |
| early 1820s | Gas companies in Baltimore, Boston, and New York City provide commercial gas service to light streets and buildings. |
| 1821 | French engineer Gaspard de Prony invents the Pony brake to measure the power of engines. |
| 1821 | Michael Faraday publishes the results of his research into electromagnetic rotation, providing the basis for his efforts to create an electricity-powered motor. |
| 1821 | The first natural gas well in the U.S. is drilled in the village of Fredonia, New York by William Hart. By 1825, the gas is being used to light buildings in Fredonia and also reportedly for cooking in the local hotel. |
| 1821 | The Lehigh Navigation Company and the Lehigh Coal Company merge, forming a single company for the purpose of transporting coal on the canals of eastern Pennsylvania. By 1825 this new company is shipping over 30,000 tons of anthracite coal to Philadelphia. |
| 1821 | Thomas Johann Seebeck observes that if two dissimilar metals are joined with a heat difference between the juncture points, this will produce an electric current. This phenomenon is called thermoelectricity or the Seebeck effect; it will later be used in the development of the semiconductor. |
| 1822 | Friedrich Mohs sets up a scale of mineral hardness, now known as the Mohs scale, and presents a mineral classification system. |
| 1823 | French engineer Benoit Fourneyron invents the first practical water turbine. He goes on to produce various improved versions of this (1832-55). |
| 1823 | Michael Faraday is able to liquefy chlorine by a systematic use of cold and pressure. Later he uses the same technique to liquefy other gases. |
| 1823 | Samuel Brown constructs a gas engine that runs a road carriage successfully on the streets of London and a boat on the Thames River. |
| 1823 | William Sturgeon invents the electromagnet, which is improved by Joseph Henry eight years later to the point where it can hold suspended a ton of iron. |
| 1824 | Hans Christian Oersted discovers aluminum. German chemist Friedrich Wohler then devises a method for isolating the pure form of this element (1827). |
| 1824 | Joseph Aspin, an English bricklayer, receives the first patent for Portland cement, which will become a fundamental material of industrial society as a basic ingredient in concrete and mortar. Cement production is among the most energy-intensive of material processes. |
| 1824 | Nicolas Léonard (Sadi) Carnot of France publishes a seminal analysis of the steam engine, showing that work is done as heat passes from a reservoir of higher temperature to a lower one. He defines work and provides the basis for the second law of thermodynamics. |
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| 1825 | Employing a locomotive developed by George Stephenson, the Stockton and Darlington Railway opens in northern England, operating the first public passenger train. Its original purpose is to carry coal from the collieries of West Durham to the port of Stockton. |
| 1825 | The Chatham Garden and Theatre in New York City is illuminated by gas lighting. |
| 1825 | The Cheshunt Railway is in operation in Hertfordshire, England, the first known monorail (horse-drawn). It is based on a patent obtained in 1821 by Henry Robinson Palmer. |
| 1826 | Samuel Morey of New Hampshire receives a U.S. patent for his “vapor engine,” which is regarded as the first successfully designed forerunner to the modern internal combustion engine. |
| 1826 | Swedish-born inventor John Ericsson constructs a heat engine that runs on hot air rather than steam. |
| 1827 | German physicist George Simon Ohm states that an electrical current is equal to the ratio of the voltage to the resistance (Ohm’s law). |
| 1827 | Robert Brown discovers the constant motion of microscopic particles (Brownian motion). This will provide a foundation for proof of the existence of atoms. |
| 1828 | James Beaumont Neilson of Glasgow introduces the “hot blast” oven, an advance in ironmaking. This involves a stream of heated air rather than the previous technique of cold air, thus requiring a smaller amount of coal and allowing the use of lesser grades of coal. |
| 1829 | The Rocket locomotive of Robert Stephenson and Company wins a competition held by the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway to choose between competing engines. The basic design principles of the Rocket are utilized until the end of British steam locomotive building in the mid 20th century. This is considered the start of the railroad boom in the U.S. |
| 1830 | A railroad boom begins in Europe. The first locomotive in the U.S. to power a passenger train, the "Tom Thumb," carries 26 people 13 miles over the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Liverpool to Manchester railway opens in England. |
| 1830 | Andrew Ure patents a thermostat based on the principle of differential expansion of two different metals. He also publishes a widely read dictionary in which he introduces the word thermostat to describe devices for controlling temperature automatically. |
| 1830 | Charles Lyell publishes the first volume of his landmark Principles of Geology, advancing the uniformitarian theory that becomes generally accepted; i.e., the principle that the same physical processes which can be observed today were responsible for the geological changes of the past. |
| early 1830s | English mathematician Charles Babbage designs a mechanical calculating device he calls an “analytical engine;” this is regarded as the earliest prototype for the modern electronic computer. |
| 1831 | Charles Sauria develops the first practical friction match, using phosphorus on the tip. This improves on earlier versions of the late 1820s from John Walker and Samuel Jones. |
| 1831 | Cyrus Hall McCormick carries out the first successful demonstration of his mechanical reaper during the harvest of 1831. He further refines it and takes out a patent in 1834. (Obed Hussey had announced the construction of a mechanical reaper of his own in 1833.) |
| 1831 | The first American locomotive to burn coal, the York, is tested in York, Pennsylvania. |
| 1831-1833 | Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry independently discover the principle of electromagnetic induction, which becomes the basis for the development of the electric generator and electric motor. |
| 1832 | Antoine-Hippolyte Pixii of France builds the first practical mechanical generator of electrical current, using concepts demonstrated by Faraday. |
| 1832 | Joseph Henry is the first to produce high-frequency electrical oscillations for communication purposes, and the first to detect them at a distance, using what becomes known as a magnetic detector. This is a key precursor to the development of radio technology. |
| 1833 | Faraday derives the laws of electrical separation of compounds (electrolysis), and suggests that atoms contain electrical charges. |
| 1833 | John Lane uses a saw blade to produce the first steel-bladed plow in the U.S. This becomes known as the “prairie plow” because it is much more efficient in plowing the thick prairie sod of the American Midwest than existing wooden plows. |
| 1833 | Karl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber collaborate to produce an electromagnetic telegraph, the signals being given by the deflection of a galvanometer needle. |
| 1834 | American inventor Jacob Perkins receives the first U.S. patent for a practical refrigerating machine; it uses ether in a vapor compression cycle. In his long career as an inventor Perkins also makes improvements to the steam engine and hot air furnace. |
| 1834 | Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron provides a graphical representation of Sadi Carnot’s ideas on heat, which were largely unknown before Clapeyron’s analysis. Clapeyron thus provides the link between Carnot’s study of heat engines and Clausius’s expression of the second law of thermodynamics (1850). |
| 1834 | James Bogardus of the U.S. patents the “gasometer,” which is regarded as the first gas meter; it operates on the principle of a bellows, alternately being filled and emptied of gas, the pulsations being counted on a register. |
| 1834 | London officials bring nuisance charges against a coal gas manufacturing firm for polluting the Thames River with coal tar. |
| 1834 | Vermont blacksmith and inventor Thomas Davenport establishes the first commercially successful electric streetcar (horse-drawn streetcars are the dominant type in this era). |
| 1834 | Walter Hancock operates a regular service for the London and Paddington Steam Carriage Company, using a “steam bus” called the Enterprise to carry passengers between London Wall and Paddington via Islington. |
| mid 1830s | The island city of Nantucket, Massachusetts reigns as the “Whaling Capital of the World.” Whale oil is in great demand as a lighting fuel, and about 100 whaling ships from the port of Nantucket search the oceans in quest of whales, especially the sperm whale (the prototype for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in the novel of the same name). |
| 1835 | Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis of France publishes the laws of mechanics in a rotating frame, including an apparent force (Coriolis force) exerted on moving objects by the rotation of the Earth. |
| ca. 1835 | Robert Anderson of Scotland invents a form of electric-powered carriage. |
| 1836 | John Frederic Daniell invents the Daniell cell, the first reliable source of electric current; it represents a great improvement over the voltaic cell. |
| 1837 | Scottish inventor Robert Davidson constructs a prototype for an electric car. |
| ca. 1837 | Astronomer Sir John Herschel (son of William Herschel) uses a solar collector box to cook food while exploring in Africa. |
| 1838 | A commercial shale oil industry is established in Autun, in central France, to produce lamp fuel. |
| 1838 | William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone put the first electric telegraph into commercial service. It uses visual signaling in which two needles at a time, out of a total of five, rotate on the receiving device to point to letters on a display. |
| late 1830s | Steamships begin to replace sailing ships as the preferred vessel for Atlantic Ocean crossings. I. K. Brunel’s steamship Great Western (1837) is launched at Bristol, England, the largest such ship in the world at the time and the first steamship in regular transatlantic service. This is followed by Brunel’s Great Britain (1843), an iron-hulled vessel with a screw propeller, and Great Eastern (1858), the largest of all and not equaled in size for another 50 years. |
| 1839 | Charles Goodyear develops vulcanized rubber, a more stable and much more useful substance than plain rubber. He supposedly invents this after he accidentally drops rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and notices that this strengthens the mixture. |
| 1839 | Kirkpatrick MacMillan of Scotland develops a new form of bicycle, identified as the first version of the two-wheeled pedal-driven bicycle that is the standard form today. |
| 1839 | Nineteen-year-old Edmund Becquerel, a French experimental physicist, discovers the photovoltaic effect while experimenting with an electrolytic cell made up of two metal electrodes. |
| 1839 | Sir William Robert Grove builds a device that will combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity; this is the world’s first gas battery, later renamed the fuel cell. |
| 1840 | G. H. Hess observes that the sum of the enthalpies of the steps of a reaction will equal the enthalpy of the overall reaction. “Hess’s Law” allows the enthalpy change for an entire chemical reaction to be calculated without any direct measurements through calorimetry. |
| 1840 | German botanist Justus von Leibig formulates his Law of the Minimum, which states that if any one essential material is absent or only minimally available, then the growth and functioning of an organism is adversely affected. Later scholars will apply this concept of the limiting factor to larger contexts; e.g., ecosystems. |
| 1840 | James Prescott Joule states that heat is produced in an electrical conductor; this becomes known as “Joule’s Law.” |
| 1841 | The first incandescent lamp is patented in England by Frederick de Moleyns. It has a design using powdered charcoal heated between two platinum wires. |
| 1842 | In England, the Royal Commission on Employment of Children in the Mines reports “cruel slaving revolting to humanity,” such as women and children chained to carts and working 15-hour days in the nation’s coal mines. The subsequent Mines Act prohibits women and boys under age ten from working in the mines. |
| 1842 | Julius Robert von Mayer of Germany presents a numerical value for the mechanical equivalent of heat, based on a horse stirring paper pulp in a cauldron. This is the original statement of the first law of thermodynamics (law of the conservation of energy), a fundamental principle of modern physics. |
| 1842 | Sir John Bennet Lawes patents the first artificial fertilizer, “superphosphate,” a combination of rock phosphate with sulfuric acid. This frees farmers from dependence on animals to produce manure to nourish crops and proves that agriculture can be a technical process, rather than an entirely natural one. |
| 1842 | Justus von Liebig is among the first to argue that body heat and muscular action are derived from the oxidation of foodstuffs. He proposes that the energy source for muscular exertion in animals and humans comes principally from protein, and not carbohydrates and fats. |
| 1843 | James Joule determines the mechanical equivalent of heat by measuring the change in temperature produced by the friction of a paddlewheel attached to a falling weight. The joule becomes a common unit of heat measurement. He also shows that heat is a form of energy. |
| 1844 | Englishman Robert Beart is issued the first patent for rotary well drilling, so named for the rotary table through which a drill pipe with a bit at the end is inserted and rotated. Rotary drilling rigs can drill faster, deeper, and more effectively than cable tool rigs that rely on pulverizing rock formations. |
| 1844 | Jean Foucault brings electric light to Paris, the City of Light, when he illuminates the Place de la Concorde, the largest public square in the city. |
| 1844 | Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrates his telegraph by sending the message, “What hath God wrought?” from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., using a system that imprints dots and dashes on paper. Operators soon learn to read the dots and dashes directly, by listening to the click of the receiver. |
| 1844 | Stuart Perry of New York City patents a gas engine. It is a non-compression cylinder engine using turpentine vapors as fuel. |
| 1845 | Scottish inventor Robert William Thomson patents the first pneumatic (air-filled) tire of vulcanized rubber. However this is not economically practical and it will be more than 40 years before pneumatic tires come into use through the efforts of fellow Scot John Boyd Dunlop. |
| 1845 | William Robert Grove publishes an article describing and illustrating the principles of the modern gas-filled incandescent lamp. His actual work on this may have been done as early as 1840, thus predating the 1841 patent of Frederick de Moleyns. |
| 1846 | Wilhelm Eduard Weber develops a force law that is dependent on velocity and acceleration, which will be crucial to James Clerk Maxwell in his electromagnetic theory of light. He also invents the electrodynamometer, an instrument for measuring small currents. |
| ca. 1846 | Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero is the first to prepare the highly explosive compound nitroglycerine. |
| 1847 | Hermann Helmholtz of Germany publishes On the Conservation of Force, in which he is the first to extend James Joule’s work to a general principle. He expresses the relationship among mechanics, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism by treating them all as forms of a single force, i.e. energy. |
| 1847 | The Siemens and Halske Telegraph Company is founded in Berlin with Werner von Siemens as principal. His younger brother William (Wilhelm) will establish a London branch in 1850. The company becomes a leader in telegraphy, telephony, and electrical engineering. |
| 1847 | William Bell Elliot discovers a geothermal steam field north of San Francisco which he names “The Geysers.” In the 1850s the area becomes a tourist attraction for its steam baths, and in the 20th century it will become an important source of geothermal energy. |
| 1848 | Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) proposes a temperature of -273°C as the “absolute zero” point, or least possible temperature, since at that point the energy of molecules in a gas would be at a theoretical minimum. He proposes a new temperature scale (now known as the Kelvin scale) based on this principle of absolute zero. |
| 1848 | President James K. Polk turns on the first gas light at the White House, one year after James Crutchett had lit the U.S. Capitol building with gas. |
| 1848 | William Staite uses his arc lamp technology to light the portico of the National Gallery museum in London. Staite makes various improvements in arc lamp technology during the 1830s and 40s, though the original patent is awarded to Thomas Wright (1845). |
| ca. 1848 | A commercial oil well is drilled in Baku, Azerbaijan under the direction of a Russian engineer, F. N. Semenov. This is described as the world’s first modern oil well. |
| ca. 1848 | James B. Francis develops an improved inward-flow water turbine in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of several important steps made by Francis in the use of water power. Uriah Boyden of Lowell also improves on the existing Fourneyron turbine at around the same time. |
| 1849 | Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, devises a method to distill kerosene from petroleum. Kerosene (also known as “coal oil” or “paraffin oil”) is cheap, easy to produce, relatively odorless, and can be stored indefinitely, and it rapidly replaces whale oil and other oils in illumination applications. |
| 1849 | Joseph J. Couch of Massachusetts receives the first U.S. patent for a steam-powered percussion rock drill. Later versions of the drill, along with dynamite, will make it possible to excavate large amounts of earth and rock in tunneling, mining, and quarrying. |
| 1849 | The California Gold Rush begins, setting off a process that will eventually make California the most populous U.S. state, with huge requirements for energy and water. |
| 1849 | The speed of light is accurately calculated by Armand Fizeau, using a turning disk and a mirror placed five miles away. His assistant, Jean Foucault, improves the technique in 1850 and determines the speed of light to be 185,000 miles per second, within 1% of the true figure. |
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| 1850 | Rudolf Clausius, a German mathematical physicist, makes the first formal expression of the second law of thermodynamics, which becomes a cornerstone of modern science. This states that heat cannot of its own accord pass from a colder body to a hotter one. |
| 1850 | Scottish chemist James “Paraffin” Young patents a process of extracting oil from cannel coal. |
| 1850 | The first absorption refrigeration machine is developed by Edmond Carré, using water and sulfuric acid. His brother Ferdinand demonstrates an ammonia/water refrigeration machine in 1859. Most early refrigerants are flammable and/or toxic, and some are also highly reactive. These disadvantages are not overcome until fluorocarbon refrigerants appear in the 1930s. |
| 1850s | Swift-sailing, graceful clipper ships carry passengers and freight on long ocean voyages, especially trips to California and China. |
| 1850s | The New England whaling industry is in steep decline because of massive depletion of whale stocks and the rise of petroleum and other fuels that are used in place of whale oil. |
| ca. 1850 | Simple distillation of seep and salt well oil is carried out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Samuel Kier. He builds a one-barrel still to treat crude oil, which he buys by the gallon. This is regarded as the first commercial refinery in North America. |
| 1851 | In his work treating tropical diseases, Florida physician John Gorrie becomes convinced that cooler sickrooms will reduce fever and make patients more comfortable. He goes on to patent a cooling machine that produces artificial ice, thus laying the groundwork for modern refrigeration and air-conditioning. |
| 1851 | William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) is the first to describe a heat pump, a device in which heat is absorbed by the expansion of a working gas and given off at a higher temperature in a condenser. |
| 1852 | Henri Giffard, a French engineer, builds and flies the first full-sized airship, a hot air balloon powered by steam and steered by a rudder. This can be considered the first powered and controlled aircraft flight. |
| 1852 | Irish scientist George Gabriel Stokes names and explains the phenomenon of fluorescence based on the absorption of ultraviolet light and then emission of blue light. |
| 1852 | James Prescott Joule and Lord Kelvin demonstrate that an expanding gas with no outside energy source will become cooler; this is now known as the Joule-Thomson effect. |
| 1853 | Employees of the Russian-American Company document oil seeps in Alaska, on the western shore of Cook Inlet. The native peoples of Alaska had traditionally used oil-soaked tundra as heating fuel. |
| 1853 | Ignacy Lukasiewicz, a Polish druggist in the city of Lvov (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine), invents an improved kerosene lamp, using the distillation techniques recently developed by Abraham Gesner in Canada. |
| 1853 | Alexander Bonner Latta invented the first practical fire engine, a "steam" engine, on this date. Built and tested in Cincinnati, Ohio, its chief feature was a boiler made of two square chambers: the inner one, a fire-box; and the outer one, a space for water and steam. |
| 1854 | Abraham Gesner opens a plant in New York to convert coal into kerosene, using his patented process of fractional distillation. |
| 1854 | Daniel Halladay invents the first commercially successful self-governing windmill in Connecticut. Halladay’s machine has four wooden blades; it automatically turns to face changing wind directions and controls its own speed of operation. |
| 1854 | German-American watchmaker Heinrich Gobel of New York develops an incandescent electric lamp in which a carbonized bamboo filament is secured in a glass vessel. This predates the work of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan by two decades. |
| 1854 | Hermann von Helmholtz proposes that the Sun derives its energy from gravitational shrinkage. |
| 1854 | In order to provide oil for his kerosene lamp business, Ignacy Lukasiewicz establishes an “oil mine” near Bobrka, a town in the Gorlice region of Poland. High-quality crude oil is pumped from wells as deep as 150 meters. This is often described as the beginning of the modern oil industry, though various competing claims have been made. |
| 1854 | New York lawyer George H. Bissell and others, most notably financier James Townsend, form the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to search for oil in western Pennsylvania. This is the first U.S. company created explicitly as an oil business. |
| 1855 | Abraham Gesner receives a patent for his process of extracting kerosene from bituminous shale and coal. |
| 1855 | An 800-horsepower water turbine is installed at the Pont Neuf waterworks in Paris. |
| 1855 | At the request of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, chemist Benjamin Silliman of Yale University applies fractional distillation to Pennsylvania rock oil and discovers that it produces high-quality lamp oil. |
| 1855 | Heinrich Geissler designs a mercury-powered air pump which he uses to create the most effective vacuum tubes to date. The Geissler tube will eventually lead to the discovery of electrons. |
| 1856 | Following a series of cholera outbreaks in London in the late 1840s, the Metropolitan Board of Works is created and charged with providing a cleaner water supply for the city, with particular attention to the condition of the Thames River. Measures to control air pollution are also taken at this same time. |
| 1856 | Henry Bessemer develops a new way to remove carbon from cast iron in steel-making by sending a blast of air through molten iron in special furnaces. This is now known as the Bessemer process. |
| 1856 | The Siemens brothers, William and Friedrich, introduce a regenerative gas furnace. This is an improvement on existing furnaces in which much of the heat of combustion is lost by being carried off in the hot gases that pass up the chimney. |
| 1856 | Workers near the Neander River in Germany discover the first known skeleton of a Neanderthal (Neandertal) man in a limestone cave. This becomes an important step in studying human evolution. |
| 1857 | A system of oil wells in Romania begins to produce a sizeable output. Some authorities describe this operation as the origin of the oil industry, rather than the efforts of Ignacy Lukasiewicz (see 1854). |
| 1857 | George Pullman develops the first successful railroad sleeping car, making longer trips more comfortable. The “Pullman Car” becomes widely known in 1865 when one is used to carry the body of President Abraham Lincoln from Washington for burial in Illinois. |
| 1857 | Oil is found at a site in Canada near Lake Erie; this is considered to be North America’s earliest commercial petroleum discovery, predating the better-known Drake field in Pennsylvania by two years. |
| 1857 | The first elevator for public use is installed in New York City by Otis Brothers, a steam-driven type installed in a five-story department store on Broadway. |
| 1858 | A telegraph cable is completed, stretching the Atlantic Ocean between Newfoundland, Canada and Ireland, the first such connection between the United States and Europe. This cable line fails after three months but a successful one is eventually established in 1866. |
| 1858 | Brothers C. W. and W. W. Marsh of De Kalb, Illinois develop a harvesting machine that improves on the McCormick reaper by reducing the amount of labor needed to bind the grain. |
| 1858 | James Miller Williams of Hamilton, Ontario mines “gum beds,” (surface oil seeps that have congealed), planning to sell the material for caulking in ships. He soon sees the greater potential for oil as an illuminating fuel and builds a small refinery. |
| 1858 | William Hart, originator of natural gas drilling in the U.S. in 1821, forms the Fredonia Gas Light and Water Works Company; this is described as the first incorporated natural gas company in the U.S. |
| 1859 | Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, a book outlining his theory of evolution by natural selection. It becomes the foundation of a completely new approach to biology. |
| 1859 | Edwin Drake drills an oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, with a depth of about 70 feet. This is considered to be the first commercially successful U.S. oil well and is regarded as the origin of the U.S. petroleum industry. |
| 1859 | Gaston Plante of France invents the first rechargeable lead-acid storage battery (alkaline battery). |
| 1859 | George B. Simpson of Washington, D.C., patents an electric cooking device using the same principle as modern electric ranges. |
| 1859 | Jean Lenoir of France builds the first practical and operative internal combustion engine, fueled by coal gas. The following year he incorporates it in a “horseless carriage.” |
| 1859 | John Tyndall, a self-taught Irish scientist, suggests that water vapor, carbon dioxide, and any other radioactive ingredient of the atmosphere could produce “all of the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.” This will become a basic component of climate science. |
| 1859 | Scottish physicist William John Rankine proposes a temperature scale having an absolute zero value, below which temperatures do not exist, and using a degree of the same size as the Fahrenheit scale. Absolute zero, or 0°R, is the temperature at which molecular energy is at a minimum. |
| 1859 | The first volume of the American Gas-Light Journal is published. |
| 1860 | A proposal to transport oil by pipeline is made by 17-year-old Samuel Duncan Karns of Parkersburg, West Virginia. A salt well in the region is beset by an influx of oil; Karns suggests that the oil be shipped to a refinery on the Ohio River, via a wooden pipeline along a route that would allow the oil to flow by gravity. |
| 1860 | Concerned about France’s dependence on coal, Auguste Mouchout begins the first research on the direct conversion of solar radiation into mechanical power. He goes on to develop a solar-powered steam engine, the first successful example of a motor running on solar energy. |
| 1860s | American railroads provide the best means of transporting oil to coastal cities, where it is used in refineries or shipped overseas. The first method involves transporting the oil in wooden barrels stacked on flat cars or in layers on specially built racks. |
| 1860s | The clipper ship era ends as these classic vessels are supplanted by the steamship, which has proven to be a much more profitable method for carrying large freight cargoes. |
| 1861 | The first bulk transportation of oil in America is accomplished by wooden barges known as “bulk boats” on Oil Creek and the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania. These boats carry 400-barrel loads down river to refineries at Pittsburgh. |
| 1861 | The first shipment of oil to be exported departed from the U.S. (Philadelphia) and arrived in Europe (London) on January 9, 1862. It is carried aboard the sailing ship Elizabeth Watts, a 224-ton ship carrying 1,329 barrels of oil. |
| 1861 | The U.S. Civil War begins. Steam-powered railroads will play a key role in the war for the transportation of troops and supplies, especially through the U.S. Military Railroads system organized by the Union government. |
| 1862 | Louis Pasteur’s experiments with bacteria conclusively disprove the theory of spontaneous generation and advance the germ theory of disease, revolutionizing medical research and treatment. |
| ca. 1862 | Werner von Siemens proposes the measurement of electrical conductance; later the name siemens will be used for a basic unit of conductance. |
| 1863 | Because of the damage caused by harmful emissions from alkali works, Great Britain enacts its first environmental protection law, the Alkali Act. This requires a reduction by 95% in the discharge of all noxious and offensive gases by alkali manufacturers. It also establishes an official regulator, the Alkali Inspectorate, to enforce the legislation. |
| 1863 | French engineer Rodolphe Leschot invents the diamond core drill and uses it to drill blast holes for tunneling Mount Cenis on the France-Italy border. Eventually, diamond drill bits will produce a major advance in oil and gas exploration because their extreme hardness improves drilling efficiency. |
| 1863 | London opens the first route of its subway (underground) system, linking Paddington railway station to Farringdon Street, near the King’s Cross rail station. The line is built on the “cut and cover” method in which a large trench is dug under a street and then roofed over so that surface traffic can use the street. |
| 1863 | Pierre and Ernst Michaux of Paris produce the Michaux Velocipede, a new form of bicycle in which the pedals are directly connected, via crankshafts, to the front wheel. |
| 1864 | George Perkins Marsh of Vermont publishes Man and Nature: The Earth as Modified by Human Action, often considered one of the first modern treatments of environmental problems, and in particular the role of humans as agents of environmental change. |
| 1864 | Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposes his equations of electromagnetism and is the first to suggest that light is an electromagnetic wave. |
| 1864 | Siegfried Marcus of Vienna, Austria builds a one-cylinder engine with a crude carburetor, and attaches it to a cart for a 500-foot drive. This is described as the world’s first successful gasoline-powered vehicle. |
| 1864 | The construction of the Hot Lake Hotel near La Grande, Oregon marks the first time that geothermal energy from hot springs is used for the direct heating of a large building. |
| ca. 1864 | Natural gas deposits are found near Stockton, California, the first such discovery in the western U.S. |
| 1865 | After years of research with pea plants, Gregor Mendel publishes his theories of heredity in an obscure publication. These ideas establish the science of genetics but are generally unknown for over thirty years. |
| 1865 | America’s Civil War ends, and with it the use of human slave power as an energy source in the United States. |
| 1865 | Amos Densmore, an oil buyer and shipper at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, invents the first railroad oil tank car. The Densmore tank car is a major breakthrough in bulk transportation compared to the earlier method of stacking barrels on a flat car. |
| 1865 | British inventor George Law devises a rock drill in which an air-driven piston operates a hammer tool. This is considered to be the first practical application of compressed air to drive a motor. |
| 1865 | Colonel E. A. L. Roberts uses 8 pounds of black powder to make the first successful oil well “shot” on the Ladies Well along Oil Creek, Pennsylvania. “Shooting” a well refers to the detonation of an explosive device in the well bore so as to allow oil to flow to the surface. |
| 1865 | Friedrich August Kekule recognizes that benzene is made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms in a stable hexagonal ring, not a chain. This discovery changes the way chemists view molecular structure. |
| 1865 | Rudolf Clausius introduces the concept of entropy (disorder) to explain the directionality of physical processes. He establishes that entropy can never decrease in a physical process and can only remain constant in a reversible process. This becomes formalized as the second law of thermodynamics, which Clausius had first proposed in 1850. |
| 1865 | Samuel Calthrop of the U.S. develops a streamlined railroad train. |
| 1865 | Samuel Van Syckel completes the first major oil pipeline in the Oil Creek area of Pennsylvania. The pipeline was about five miles long, 2-inches in diameter, and made of iron pipes. At the time teamsters charged extremely high prices to haul barrels of oil by wagon, and Van Syckel under-prices them with his line of wrought iron pipes, laid partly underground and partly on the surface. |
| 1865 | The British economist W. Stanley Jevons publishes The Coal Question, in which he argues that coal is essential for the industry of Britain and that this resource will one day be exhausted, causing the collapse of British society. The prediction proves wrong because Jevons did not foresee improvements in mining technology and the use of oil as a substitute for coal. |
| 1865 | W. Stanley Jevons formulates Jevons’ paradox, a concept now employed by modern scholars. It states that increased efficiency in the use of a natural resource, such as coal, will actually result in greater consumption, not less. This is because improvement in efficiency will lead to higher demand; e.g., U.S. gas consumption increased after fuel-efficient cars were introduced in the 1970s. |
| 1866 | Alfred Nobel tames the volatility of nitroglycerin by enclosing it in kieselguhr, a packing material, making a much safer explosive that he names dynamite. He goes on to produce other new explosive substances in the 1870s. |
| 1866 | Early Pennsylvania oil producers adopt the 42-gallon barrel as their standard. It is still the standard unit of measurement today. |
| 1866 | German scientists Adolph Fick and Johannes Wislicenus test von Liebig’s theory that protein alone powers muscle activity. They eliminate protein from their diet, climb Mt. Faulhorn in the Swiss Alps, and calculate their energy expenditure. Urine analysis indicates that protein catabolism could not have supplied the requisite energy. |
| 1866 | Lyne Taliaferro Barret and his partners in the Melrose Petroleum Oil Company drill the first oil well in Texas, in Nacogdoches County. Though this well produces only a modest flow of oil, other efforts at the same site in 1887 have much greater success and set off the state’s first oil boom. |
| 1866 | Strip mining begins near Danville, Illinois, when horse-drawn plows and scrapers are used to remove overburden so that the coal can be dug and hauled away in wheelbarrows and carts. |
| 1866 | Werner von Siemens discovers the dynamo-electric principle. This solves the problem of needing direct current batteries to generate continuous current and high voltage, and provides the crucial advance needed to supply electric power at commercially reasonable prices. |
| 1867 | German engineer Nikolaus August Otto and his partner Eugen Langen demonstrate an improved version of Jean Lenoir’s engine, theirs operating on liquid fuel instead of coal gas. This engine is the forerunner of Otto’s major breakthrough in 1876. |
| 1867 | The Reverend Leonard Wheeler, a missionary to the Ojibwa Indians of Wisconsin, invents a classic American farm windmill that is a departure from the earlier Dutch style. |
| 1868 | A refrigerated railroad car is patented by J. B. Sutherland of Detroit, Michigan, for use in transporting perishable foods such as meats and dairy products. In the 1870s and 80s Gustavus Franklin Swift will build a huge meat-packing firm using refrigerated cars to ship meat from Chicago to markets in the East. |
| 1868 | American engineer George Westinghouse patents the air brake, which benefits the railroad industry by making braking a safer venture and thus permitting trains to travel at higher speeds. To manufacture his invention he establishes the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, a predecessor to the huge Westinghouse Electric Company. |
| ca. 1868 | Georges Leclanche of France invents a precursor to the modern dry cell battery, now widely used in consumer products such as flashlights, toys, and other electronic devices. |
| late 1860s | Enclosed cast iron stoves are in common in America. Stoves had been resisted at first on the grounds that they hid the fire, but gradually they replace the open fireplace because of their greater efficiency. |
| 1869 | Belgian Zenobe-Theophile Gramme builds the first efficient direct-current dynamo, two years after building an efficient alternating-current dynamo. In 1873 it is demonstrated that the Gramme type dynamo can function as an electric motor, a major step in the development of electric power. |
| 1869 | Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev is the first of several scientists to publish a periodic table of the elements, with elements arranged in order of increasing atomic weight. |
| 1869 | German biologist Ernst Haeckel introduces the term ecology in his work Generelle Morphologie Der Organismen. |
| 1869 | In the French Alps, Aristide Berges sets up a pipeline to transport a pressurized stream of water to his wood pulp factory. He then uses a dynamo to transform the water power into electricity. This is regarded as the first systematic use of hydroelectric power. |
| 1869 | Joseph Norman Lockyer suggests that a yellow spectral line observed in the Sun’s spectrum during an 1868 eclipse must belong to a new element. Lockyer has discovered helium (from the Greek helios, or Sun) which is identified in terrestrial material by William Ramsay in 1895 and later isolated by him. |
| 1869 | The first transcontinental railroad line in the United States is completed when a symbolic golden spike is driven into the ground at Promontory Point, Utah. The Union Pacific line from the East meets the Central Pacific line from the West at this spot. |
| 1869 | The Pennsylvania Railroad introduces the horizontal boiler-type metal tank car for oil shipments, which is still the basic design in use today. The metal tanks are safer and more reliable than the earlier wooden Densmore tank car. |
| 1869 | The Red Sea is joined to the Mediterranean as the Suez Canal opens, construction having begun ten years earlier under the direction of the French promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps. The canal will come under the control of Great Britain in 1875 and will serve as the crucial link to India and other British interests in the Far East. |
| 1869 | The first "oil tanker," Charles of Antwerp, Belgium ships off, becoming the forerunner of the modern oil tanker. It had a bulk capacity of 7,000 barrels of oil which it carried from the U.S. to Europe in 59 iron tanks. |
| 1869 | Thomas Andrews of Belfast, Ireland suggests that there is a “critical temperature” for every gas at which it can no longer be liquefied by pressure alone. |
| 1869 | Passenger traffic begins on New York City’s first subway, pneumatically powered system invented by Alfred Ely Beach, drawing upon the earlier work of George Medhurst. It operates along a line one block long in lower Manhattan, consisting of a 312-foot long circular tub, 9 feet in diameter. Though the route closes three years later for lack of riders, it represents the beginning of underground transport in the U.S. |
| 1870 | Briquetting of coal is introduced in the United States. This provides greater thermal stability and cleaner combustion. |
| 1870 | John D. Rockefeller and his associates form the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland had become the leading site for the U.S. oil refining industry in the 1860s. |
| ca. 1870 | Julius Hock of Vienna develops the first internal combustion engine operating on modern principles. |
| 1870s | Edward Frankland, a British chemist, is among the first to apply the conservation of energy principle to human energetics. Building on the work of Fick and Wislicenus, Frankland shows that the energy intake of the body equals the heat expelled. He also is among the first to measure the caloric value of food. |
| 1871 | Andrew Smith Hallidie in San Francisco, California patents the first cable (street) car. In 1873 the first passengers travel along 2800 feet of track to the crest of a hill 300 feet above the starting point. This is the first successful attempt to replace horses with a machine in the U.S. streetcar system. |
| 1871 | Charles Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, in which he specifically applies his principles of evolution in the animal kingdom to the human race. |
| 1871 | Italian-American Antonio Meucci declares the intent to patent his “Talking Telegraph,” a predecessor to the comparable device patented five years later by Alexander Graham Bell. Meucci is forced to let his application lapse because of lack of funding and Bell becomes recognized as the inventor of the telephone. |
| 1872 | Abraham Brower opens the first mass transportation system in America along Broadway in New York City. The vehicle is an omnibus, which looks like a stagecoach and is pulled by horses. |
| 1872 | George B. Brayton, a British-trained engineer of Boston, Massachusetts, receives a patent for a gas-powered streetcar. This goes into operation the following year, though electric-powered streetcars will become the dominant form. |
| 1872 | L. C. Marcy of Philadelphia develops an improved oil lamp using two flat and parallel cotton wicks. |
| 1872 | The first long-distance pipeline for natural gas is completed in Pennsylvania, extending from the Newton gas well to the town of Titusville. |
| 1872 | The first wireless telegraphy patent in the U.S. is issued to Mahlon Loomis. In 1866, Loomis had set up a demonstration experiment on two mountain peaks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, 22 kilometers apart. |
| 1872 | Thomas Edison develops an automatic telegraph machine, one of many improvements in telegraphy for which he is responsible. |
| ca. 1872 | Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson develops an improved form of the Stirling engine; this is intended for use as means of pumping water to provide irrigation for arid lands of the American West. Ericsson is also noted as the designer of the Civil War ironclad battleship Monitor. |
| 1873 | Entrepreneurs Robert and Ludwig Nobel (brothers of the better-known Alfred) establish a company to exploit the oil riches of Baku, Azerbaijan. They become the most successful oil producers in the area and help to make Baku’s oil industry the largest in the world in the late 19th century. |
| 1873 | Johannes van der Waals refines Boyle’s and Charles’s laws of gases, introducing modified equations that allow for a wider range of molecular behavior. |
| 1873 | Joseph Henry proposes that the physical drudgery of human labor can be ameliorated only by more inanimate sources of energy and more powerful energy converters. This is an early application of the new science of thermodynamics to socioeconomic concerns. |
| 1873 | London experiences the first of a series of “killer fogs.” A thick winter fog settles over the city, darkening the sky to the point that visibility is nearly zero. An estimated 500 deaths occur both from respiratory illnesses and from accidents caused by the lack of visibility. Two similar events in 1880 and 1892 are each responsible for about 1,000 deaths. |
| 1873 | Thaddeus S. C. Lowe of the U.S. develops a new gas manufacturing process, carbureted water gas. This is cheaper and more efficient than the existing coal gas process and soon comes to dominate the manufactured gas industry. |
| 1873 | Willoughby Smith of England and his assistant Joseph May note that when selenium is exposed to light, its electrical resistance decreases. This discovery provides the means to transform images into electric signals, and leads to the manufacture of photoelectric cells and other light sensors. It also lays the foundation for the development of television. |
| 1874 | Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois develops a successful form of barbed wire, improving on the version patented in 1868 by Michael Kelly. Barbed wire will change the face of the American West as it provides a means of confining cattle and of separating them from crop fields. |
| 1874 | Jules Verne publishes The Mysterious Island, set during the U.S. Civil War. The book’s main characters speculate on how the depletion of coal will affect the future. Cyrus Harding, one of the characters, asserts “I believe that one day hydrogen and oxygen, which together form water, will be used either alone or together as an inexhaustible source of heat and light.” |
| 1874 | Siegfried Marcus produces a true four-cycle, four-wheeled vehicle with electrical ignition, jet carburetion, and a throttle. This is accepted by many historians as the true forerunner of the modern automobile, though many competing claims exist. |
| 1874 | The “Destructor” goes into operation in Nottingham, England. This is the first known example of a systematic incineration of urban solid wastes. The Destructor burns mixed waste and produces steam to generate electricity. Several hundred similar facilities are built in the coming decades. |
| ca. 1874 | Swedish engineer Charles Wilson builds the first solar distillation plant, in the mining area of Las Salinas in what is now northern Chile. This provides fresh water to the mining community; it remains in operation for about 40 years. |
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| 1876 | Alexander Graham Bell transforms the world of communication when he patents the first telephone. Bell’s patent precedes a similar application just two hours later on the same day by rival inventor Elisha Gray. Bell’s device is improved almost immediately by Thomas Edison, who adds carbon powder to the mouthpiece, allowing it to carry more current. |
| 1876 | German engineer Carl von Linden patents a process of liquefying gas (ammonia) that marks a major advance in basic refrigeration technology. |
| 1876 | Nikolaus August Otto of Germany invents a successful four-stroke internal combustion engine, known as the “Otto cycle.” This engine represents the first true advance over the steam engine and is almost universally adopted for all liquid-fueled automobiles from that point on. |
| 1876 | Thomas Edison establishes a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey that will become the site of many of his famous inventions and innovations. |
| 1876-1878 | After a wave of violence in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, a sensational murder trial results in the execution of 20 members of the Molly Maguires, a secret society of Irish-American miners. The historical record is unclear as to what extent the violence was incited, or even committed, by private detectives hired by mine owners to infiltrate the miners’ union. |
| 1877 | A steam-powered shovel excavates some 10 feet of overburden from a 3-foot-thick coal bed near Pittsburg, Kansas. |
| 1877 | Austrian physicist Ernst Mach publishes a paper that accurately describes the relationship between the speed of a fast-moving object and the local speed of sound (Mach number). |
| 1877 | Louis Paul Cailletet and Raoul-Pierre Pictet independently liquefy oxygen. |
| 1877 | Oakland Gas Light establishes what is said to be the first high-pressure gas transmission in the United States; two years later the company introduces gas cooking stoves into California. |
| 1878 | American inventor Charles F. Brush develops an efficient dynamo and goes on to produce a commercially viable arc light, which is used to illuminate a private home in Cincinnati and a public square in Cleveland. He then founds Brush Electric Company, which will eventually join Edison’s General Electric Company. |
| 1878 | Marie Alfred Cornu, a French physicist, measures the spectrum of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface and suggests that the absence of short-wave ultraviolet radiation is due to an atmospheric absorber. Two years later, Walter Hartley concludes that Cornu’s absorber is ozone in the upper atmosphere (the ozone layer). |
| 1878 | Samuel Pierpont Langley of the U.S. invents the bolometer, a radiant-heat detector that is sensitive to differences in temperature of one hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius (0.00001°C). The device is still used to provide accurate regional and global measurements of the components of the Earth’s radiation budget. |
| 1878 | Thomas Edison founds the Edison Electric Light Company to finance his efforts to invent a practical incandescent electric lamp. This and various other electric companies established by Edison will later be combined in what becomes the General Electric Company. |
| 1879 | Attorney George Selden of Rochester, New York applies for a patent for his “road engine,” a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion engine. This is the first automobile patent in the U.S., though it is not granted until 1895. Later Selden will sue Henry Ford for producing his own automobiles, and the courts then declare the Selden patent too vague to be enforced. |
| 1879 | English physicist William Crookes identifies a fourth state of matter in addition to solid, liquid, and gas, one in which a collection of electrons and ions move freely within a given space. Irving Langmuir later applies the name plasma to this state. Plasmas make up about 99% of the visible matter in the universe and offer the potential for a large-scale energy source. |
| 1879 | Thomas Edison in America invents carbon-thread electric lamps. Independently Joseph Swan in England produces a similar lamp. Edison’s first bulb burns for forty continuous hours, and only a year later he opens the first electric generation station in London used primarily for lighting. |
| 1879 | The Siemens Company builds the world’s first electric train in which power for the train is supplied through the tracks rather than from overhead wires. |
| 1879 | William Adams, a British colonial official in India, constructs a heating system with a series of large mirrors to concentrate the Sun’s radiation. He demonstrates it by placing a piece of wood in the focus of the mirrors where, he notes, “it ignited immediately.” This system is similar to the one reputedly used by Archimedes 2,000 years earlier. |
| 1880 | Charles Brush’s Electric Light and Power Company successfully demonstrates an arc lighting system by lighting up New York City’s famous avenue Broadway for the first time, and soon thereafter builds New York’s first central power station. Broadway will later become known as the “Great White Way” because of its dazzling array of electric lights. |
| 1880 | John Milne of England invents the first modern seismograph. |
| 1880 | Lester Allan Pelton of California obtains a patent for a new type of water turbine with a more effective jet of water. In 1883 the Pelton turbine wins a competition for the most efficient water wheel turbine, and it will serve as the standard design for the next 40 years. |
| 1880 | Michigan’s Grand Rapids Electric Light and Power Company is created. It begins generating electricity by means of Brush dynamo belted to a water turbine, lights up a set of Brush arc lamps to provide theater and storefront illumination. |
| 1880 | Pierre and Jacque Curie discover that some crystalline materials, when compressed, produce a voltage proportional to the applied pressure and that when an electric field is applied across the material, there is a corresponding change of shape. This is called piezoelectricity or pressure electricity. |
| 1880 | The Bradford Gas Company of Rixford, Pennsylvania begins using the first natural gas compressor. |
| 1880 | Wabash, Indiana becomes the first city to be lit entirely by electric light, using the Brush dynamo and arc light system. |
| early 1880s | A “current war” is underway over the choice between DC current, promoted by Thomas Edison, and AC current, promoted by George Westinghouse. An intense battle for public opinion and political support ensues. |
| 1880s | John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil base the first decades of their business producing kerosene and shipping it around the world on ships called “kerosene clippers.” Today kerosene is used primarily as a heating and aviation fuel, and as a solvent and thinner. |
| 1880s | Oil tanker barges are a major form of transportation for refined products in the Low Countries and Germany, which have extensive networks of rivers and canals. |
| 1881 | A hydroelectric generating station is operated on the Niagara River. An 85-foot cascade of water generates electricity to run the machinery of local mills and to light some of the village streets. |
| 1881 | German naturalist Karl Semper publishes the Natural Conditions of Existence as They Affect Animal Life. This is regarded as one of the earliest studies of energy flows in nature. |
| 1881 | Jacques D’Arsonval of France describes a method for using the temperature difference between the warm surface sea water and cold deep ocean water to generate electricity (later known as ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC). |
| 1881 | Scottish engineer Sir Dugald Clerk patents his two-stroke internal combustion engine (in contrast with the four-stroke engine developed at around the same time by Nikolaus Otto). It will become widely used for motorcycles and other light engines. |
| 1882 | Augustin Mouchout and his associate Abel Pifre demonstrate a solar power system in Paris in which solar energy is used to make steam to operate a printing press. |
| 1882 | The first commercial hydroelectric power plant goes into operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. It is used to power two paper mills and eventually the town’s streetcar system as well. |
| 1882 | The Standard Oil Trust is formed by John D. Rockefeller, largely to shield himself against legal challenges to his control of oil production and refining, and against public outcry over this perceived monopoly. |
| 1882 | The United States Electric Illuminating Company establishes an electric power station in Charleston, South Carolina. |
| 1882 | Thomas Edison’s power generating company in New York City began providing electricity for lighting. Three 125-horsepower “Jumbo” generators at the Pearl Street station and provide power to 5,000 lamps in 225 homes. |
| 1883 | Charles Fritts, an American inventor, describes the first solar cells made from selenium wafers. |
| 1883 | John Ericsson designs and demonstrates his “sun motor,” a working solar heat engine. |
| 1883 | S. Podolinsky, a Ukrainian socialist, is the first to explicitly describe the economic process from an energy perspective, and in particular agricultural energetics. His biophysical analysis leads him to conclude that limits to growth are imposed not by constraints on production, but by physical and ecological laws. |
| 1883 | Swedish engineer Carl Gustaf de Laval develops a high-speed steam turbine. His innovative use of special reduction gearing allows a turbine rotating at high speed to drive a propeller at comparatively slow speed, a principle having great value in marine engineering. |
| 1883 | The Chartiers Valley Gas Company is formed to produce, gather, and transport gas to Pittsburgh’s industrial plants. |
| 1884 | English engineer Charles Parsons invents the compound steam turbine, which converts the power of steam directly into electricity; it ultimately becomes the preferred power plant of electric power stations and ships. |
| 1884 | Paul Nipkow patents the world’s first electromechanical image scanning system, consisting of a rapidly rotating disc with a pattern of holes. This is an important early step in the development of television; in the 1920s John Logie Baird will use the Nipkow disc to transmit the first true television pictures. |
| 1884 | The French military officers Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs make a flight of 5 miles in their airship La France, in which they are able to guide the ship so that it lands at the point from which they begun the flight. |
| 1884 | The Serbian-American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla designs practical methods for generating alternating current, a prerequisite for long-distance transmission of electricity. Called the “Master of Lighting,” Tesla will receive more than 100 patents relating to electricity generation and transmission and radio communications. |
| mid 1880s | Steam-driven plows and threshing machines are in use on the prairies of North America, though oxen and horses will remain the principal source of power for some time to come. |
| 1885 | A high-pressure manufactured gas transmission line is installed between Oakland and Alameda under the San Francisco Bay. |
| 1885 | A Westinghouse Company employee, William Stanley, invents the transformer for shifting the voltage and amperage of alternating current, enabling electricity to be transported over long distances with relatively little loss. |
| 1885 | Carl Auer von Welsbach at the Bunsen laboratory in Germany develops the Welsbach mantle, which becomes a key technology for the utilization of manufactured gas. |
| 1885 | Gottlieb Daimler extends Otto’s work and invents what is recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine, with a vertical cylinder and with gasoline injected through a carburetor (patented 1887). Daimler uses the engine in a two-wheeled vehicle he calls the Reitwagen (Riding Carriage). One year later he builds the world’s first four-wheeled motor vehicle. |
| 1885 | John Kemp Starley of England introduces the Rover Safety Bicycle, a vehicle with essentially the same design as the modern bicycle. It is an immediate success and is marketed by Starley and fellow bicycle innovator William Sutton through their Rover Company. |
| 1885 | Sylvanus F. Bowser of Fort Wayne, Indiana develops the first workable gasoline pump. It has marble valves and wooden plungers with a capacity of one barrel. Bowser then founds a company to manufacture the device. |
| 1885 | The German mechanical engineer Karl Benz designs and builds the world’s first practical automobile to be powered by a gasoline-burning internal combustion, engine. The following year, Benz offers this vehicle for sale to the public. |
| 1885 | The Massachusetts Gas Commission becomes the first government agency to regulate the energy industry, including the setting of prices. |
| 1886 | Charles Hall of the U.S. and Paul Hêroult of France independently develop a molten electrolysis process for the production of aluminum. The Hall-Héroult process is still the basic method of aluminum production. |
| 1886 | The first alternating current power plant in the U.S. goes into operation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. |
| 1886 | The first oil tanker of modern design, Gluckauf, is built at Newcastle, England for a Bremen, Germany shipping company. The ship differs from previous versions in that the liquid cargo is contained directly in tankage integral with the hull, rather than in individual barrels. |
| 1886 | Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport, Connecticut, receives a patent for an electric light socket with a pull chain. |
| 1887 | Geographer and climatologist Eduard Bruckner makes pioneering studies of climate change and in particular of the effect of human activity on climate. |
| 1887 | German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz proves that energy is transmitted through a vacuum by electromagnetic waves. He detects and produces radio waves for the first time, with enormous implications for future technologies in radio, television, and radar. |
| 1887 | High Grove Station in San Bernardino, California becomes the first hydroelectric plant in the western U.S. |
| 1887 | In his studies of air and sound, Ernst Mach notes that air molecules behave irregularly when pushed faster than the speed of sound. |
| 1887 | Scottish veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop experiments with his son’s bicycle in an effort to improve upon the existing technology of solid rubber tires. He develops the first practical pneumatic tire, which becomes an essential component of the automobile industry. |
| 1887 | Solomon R. Dresser of Bradford, Pennsylvania, develops a new type of coupling for pipe joints that makes it possible to provide a leak-proof pipeline over extended distances. The company he founds becomes a leader in the oil and gas industry. |
| 1887 | The first patent for an "electrical motor" for a printing press is issued to Thomas Davenport of Brandon, Vermont. The engine weighs less than 100 pounds and operates a rotary printing press. |
| 1888 | Andrew Lawrence Riker founds the Riker Electric Vehicle Company in Elizabethport, New Jersey, which becomes one of the country’s largest manufacturers of electric cars and trucks. Riker produces his first electric car in 1894, using a pair of bicycles as a base. |
| 1888 | Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer observes that a substance called cholesteryl benzoate appears to have two different melting points, one in which the solid changes to a cloudy liquid and a higher one in which it becomes a clear liquid. German physicist Otto Lehmann confirms this and coins the term “liquid crystal” to describe this distinct phase of matter. |
| 1888 | Carl Gassner of Germany develops the first dry cell battery, using a carbon rod as the positive electrode and zinc as the outer container and negative electrode. This cell is easy to use and portable and it becomes the prototype for the dry battery industry. |
| 1888 | Charles F. Brush begins operation of an efficient wind dynamo in Cleveland, Ohio, modifying existing windmill technology to produce what is considered the world’s first wind power plant. |
| 1888 | Granville T. Woods develops and patents a system for overhead electrical conducting lines for railroads, which is adopted for the railway system of various large cities. Through this and other innovations in electricity and telegraphy, the African-American inventor Woods becomes known as “the Black Thomas Edison.” |
| 1888 | In Richmond, Virginia, Frank Julian Sprague establishes what is regarded as the first large-scale, successful streetcar system powered by electricity. Similar systems are soon established in many other American cities and the streetcar becomes the preferred mode of urban mass transit. |
| 1888 | Oliver B. Shallenberger, an electrician at the Westinghouse Electric Manufacturing Company, receives a U.S. patent for an ampere-hour meter, which accurately measures the amount of electricity used. |
| 1888 | Wilhelm Hallwachs extends Hertz’s work on the photoelectric effect, noting that when illuminated with ultraviolet light, a neutral or negatively charged body (a zinc plate) becomes slightly positively charged. |
| late 1880s | Electric vehicles begin to appear on the streets of the U.S. and Britain, including an electric bus company making regular trips in London. |
| 1889 | Norwegian-American engineer Edwin Ruud invents the first device to store and automatically heat water. Ruud founds a company (still in operation) to produce water heaters for commercial and residential use. |
| 1889 | Paris becomes known as “The City of Light” during the 1889 World’s Fair, since it is the first large city to switch to all electric lighting. |
| 1889 | Willamette Falls, Oregon provides the first commercial, long-distance transmission of electric power in the U.S. with a direct-current line to the city of Portland. |
| 1890 | French engineer Clement Ader reports that his Eole, a steam-powered, bat-winged flying machine, is the first full-sized aircraft to make a powered flight. Witnesses describe a liftoff covering 50 meters at a height of about 20 centimeters off the ground. Historians differ as to whether this was truly an airplane flight, or merely a “running hop.” |
| 1890 | The United Mine Workers of America is established in Columbus, Ohio through the merger of two earlier groups. |
| 1890s | Approximately 1,000 manufactured gas plants are in operation in the U.S. |
| 1890s | Ludwig Boltzman, an Austrian physicist, founds the field of statistical mechanics. His interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics introduces the theory of probability into a fundamental law of physics and thus breaks with the classical precept that fundamental laws have to be strictly deterministic. |
| 1890s | U.S. chemist W. O. Atwater constructs a calorimeter and uses it to identify the energy content of different foods, using subjects who eat either a high fat or high carbohydrate diet while riding a stationary bicycle many hours per day. His “Atwater general factors” provide a good estimate of the energy content of the daily diet. |
| ca. 1890 | Coal takes the place of wood as the dominant fuel in the U.S. economy, as industry has replaced human labor and draft animals with steam engines and other inanimate energy converters. |
| 1891 | Clarence Kemp of Baltimore, Maryland patents the first commercially successful solar water heater. His invention is later marketed in California and becomes popular enough to heat one-third of the homes in the city of Pasadena. |
| 1891 | German engineer Otto Lilienthal makes the first in a long series of successful glider flights. Lilienthal is a pioneer in aerodynamics, especially wing design, and his work will greatly influence the Wright Brothers. |
| 1891 | German-American chemical engineer Herman Frasch patents a process (Frasch process) to extract sulfur compounds from oil using copper oxide powder; until then, the foul smell of sulfur had prevented oil from being widely used as a fuel. |
| 1891 | Inventor Poul la Cour, the “Danish Edison,” begins a series of experiments with wind turbines. His work will establish a foundation for modern use of wind energy. |
| 1891 | Nikola Tesla invents the Tesla coil, an air-core resonant transformer that can generate extremely high voltages at high frequency. Tesla coils can produce spectacular lightning-like discharges and have often been used in the film industry for special effects. |
| 1891 | The first extended natural gas pipeline in the U.S. is built. It carries gas from wells in Indiana over a distance of 120 miles to Chicago. |
| 1891 | The first long-distance high-voltage electricity line is established between Lauffen and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, a distance of over 100 miles. |
| 1892 | Edward L. Doheny begins the oil industry in Los Angeles, California, supposedly after he notices oil sticking to the wheels of a wagon and asks the driver where it had come from. Doheny becomes one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. and a major figure in the creation of modern Los Angeles. Later he will be at the center of the Teapot Dome Scandal (see 1921). |
| 1892 | Electrical winders are in use in British coal mines. |
| 1892 | Inventor Aubrey Eneas founds the Solar Motor Company of Boston to build solar-powered motors as a replacement for steam engines powered by coal or wood. |
| 1892 | John Froelich manufactures the first gasoline-powered tractor and ships it to Langford, South Dakota. This will eventually supplant the steam-powered tractor, which is less practical because of its large size. |
| 1892 | R. E. Bell Crompton and H. J. Dowsing of England patent the first electric radiator. |
| 1892 | The first steel barges for oil transportation are put into use by Standard Oil of New York. Steel barges are larger, stronger and safer than their wood predecessors. |
| 1892 | The first U.S. geothermal district heating system is in operation in Boise, Idaho. |
| 1892 | The Murex is the first tanker to pass through the Suez Canal, with a load of kerosene to be delivered from Batum, a Russian port on the Mediterranean, to Singapore. Marcus Samuel, the owner of Murex, forms Shell Trading and Transport, which eventually merges with Royal Dutch to form one of the world’s largest oil companies. |
| 1892 | The Sierra Club is founded in San Francisco “to do something for the wilderness and make the mountains glad.” John Muir is the club’s first president. |
| 1893 | Julius Elster and Hans Geitel of Germany develop the first photoelectric cell. This is sensitive to both visible light and ultraviolet rays. |
| 1893 | Nikola Tesla begins a series of lectures and articles presenting his ideas for the fundamental methods of practical radio communication. Tesla thus precedes Guglielmo Marconi, popularly known as the “Father of Radio,” though Marconi will state that he carried out his own work without knowing of Tesla’s earlier efforts. |
| 1893 | Rudolf Diesel publishes a paper describing a new type of internal-combustion engine that will be named after him. Its distinctive feature is that it operates on the principle of self-combustion; i.e., rather than relying on a separate energy source such as a spark plug, it heats and compresses the fuel mixture to the point where it ignites itself. |
| 1893 | With the idea that his three-wheeled motor vehicle is unstable and uncomfortable, Karl Benz modifies the design to produce a four-wheeled vehicle. This is considered the world’s first inexpensive, mass-produced car. |
| 1894 | Drilling begins at Alberta’s Athabasca tar sand site, the world’s largest accumulation of tar sands. Crews strike a reservoir of natural gas that will blow wild for 21 years. |
| 1894 | The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad becomes the first U.S. railway line to make regular use of an electric locomotive. |
| 1895 | Conventional wisdom holds that the radio is born at this time, when Guglielmo Marconi of Italy demonstrates that it is possible to send signals by using electromagnetic waves to connect a transmitter and a receiving antenna. However, the U.S. courts will later conclude that Marconi relied upon the earlier work of Nikola Tesla (see 1893). |
| 1895 | Colonel George E. Waring is appointed as New York City’s commissioner of street cleaning. Waring is a noted expert on drainage, sanitation, and urban public health. Public sanitation becomes a major issue, and the first curbside pickups of garbage begin. |
| 1895 | The Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railway begins service in Chicago; it is described as the nation’s first electric elevated rail line. |
| 1895 | The first U.S. patent for a gasoline-powered automobile is issued to Charles E. Buryea of Springfield, Massachusetts. |
| mid 1890s | A period of great popularity begins for electric cars in the United States. Over the next 20 years about 35,000 electric vehicles will come into use. Popular makes include the Riker, the Columbia, and the Baker. |
| 1896 | Wilhelm Roentgen of Germany demonstrates the first X-rays, and their medical implications are immediately recognized. Roentgen’s discovery will lead to the year 1895 being referred to as the beginning of the Nuclear Age in human history. |
| 1896 | "Permitted” explosives are introduced to British coal mining. These are industrial explosives that are specially produced and tested for use in mines where firedamp and/or dangerous coal dust occur. |
| 1896 | A Santa Barbara, California group headed by Henry L. Williams drills wells from piers extending out into the sea. This leads to the 1898 discovery of the Summerland field, which is considered to be the first productive offshore oil facility in the world. (Similar offshore wells are reported in the Caspian Sea about five years later.) |
| 1896 | An electrical battery is developed by William W. Jacques that produces electricity directly from coal. |
| 1896 | Henri Becquerel of France discovers radioactivity when his experiments indicate that uranium emits radiation without an external source of energy such as the Sun, as observed when the invisible rays darken a photographic plate. |
| 1896 | Henry Ford’s automotive experiments culminate with the completion of his own self-propelled car, the Quadricycle (so named because it runs on four bicycle type wheels). It is a four-wheeled vehicle built on a steel frame with no body; it is steered by a tiller, like a boat. |
| 1896 | Svante August Arrhenius of Sweden presents a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society entitled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” This establishes the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. |
| 1896 | The first subway on the European continent is opened in Budapest. |
| 1896 | William Hadaway of the U.S. receives a patent for an electric stove. |
| 1896 | The first U.S. automobile accident occurred in New York City when Henry Wells of Springfield, Massachusetts, in a Duryea Motor Wagon collided with Ms. Evylyn Thomas, a bicycle rider, who was taken to Manhattan Hospital. Her leg was fractured, and Well Spend the night in jail awaiting a report as to the extent of the injuries. |
| ca. 1896 | A Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant is in operation, including a one-mile tunnel under the town of Niagara Falls and the use by George Westinghouse of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current for long-distance transmission of power to Buffalo, 26 miles away. |
| 1897 | Encouraged by reports of the successful 1892 flight of Clement Ader’s Eole flying machine, the French government provides funding for a new craft, named the Avion. Ader arranges a demonstration at a military base near Versailles, but Avion never succeeds in becoming airborne and the experiments are abandoned. |
| 1897 | Ferdinand Braun of Germany invents the cathode-ray oscilloscope, the precursor of the television picture tube. Braun does not patent this because he wishes it to be available to all scientists for research. Braun also makes important contributions to wireless telegraphy, for which he shares the Nobel Prize with Marconi. |
| 1897 | Henry Morris and Pedro Salom form the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company to operate electric cabs on the streets of New York City. This is described as the first motor vehicle service in the U.S. Prior to this Morris and Salom had developed an electric car known as the Electrobat. |
| 1897 | Joseph John Thomson shows that cathode rays are particles with a negative electric charge, thus identifying the electron, the first subatomic particle known. This leads to much greater understanding of electric and electronic processes. |
| 1897 | Justus B. Entz, chief engineer of the Electric Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia, develops what is considered to be the first hybrid-electric vehicle (actually called the petro-electric car). It uses a gasoline engine as the primary drive and an electric motor to assist when more power is required. |
| 1897 | New York and other large cities have established garbage “picking yards” to separate out materials that have value for reuse, such as paper, metal, rubber, and twine. |
| 1897 | Nikola Tesla files his first U.S. patent application for basic radio communication. The patent is granted in 1900, the same year that Guglielmo Marconi’s application is turned down. However, a 1904 ruling will overturn this and award the radio patent to Marconi. |
| 1897 | The German firm LURGI was founded on (LURGI wasthe cable address of Metallurgische Gesellschaf). It became a world leader in many energy conversion technologies. Most notable is the Lurgi process, coal gasification process that produces gas through the controlled reaction of coal and oxygen in the presence of excess steam in a reactor. |
| 1898 | Energy recovery from garbage incineration begins in New York City; this is the first known example of a waste-to-energy system. |
| 1898 | Pierre and Marie Curie of France isolate and analyze radium and polonium, the elements that constitute most of the radioactivity in uranium ore. |
| 1898 | The Sulzer Brothers firm of Switzerland builds its first diesel engine. (Years earlier Rudolph Diesel had begun his career as an apprentice in Sulzer’s engine works.) The company will become a world leader in the production of diesel engines. |
| 1898 | The Winton Motor Carriage Company of Cleveland, Ohio produces the first American truck, a gas-powered delivery wagon with a single-cylinder, six-horsepower engine. |
| 1898 | The first U.S. automobile insurance policy is issued by the Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut, to Dr. Truman J. Martin of Buffalo, New York. |
| 1898 -1900 | Phillip Lenard, a German physicist, is the first to cause cathode rays to pass from the interior of a vacuum tube through a thin metal window into the air, where they produce luminosity. |
| ca. 1898 | Albert Champion opens the Champion Ignition Company to manufacture spark plugs for the developing automobile industry. Champion later joins forces with General Motors and becomes the leader in the field. (Various others have been credited with inventing the spark plug, such as Edmond Burger, Oliver Lodge, and Robert Bosch.) |
| late 1890s | A vital solar hot water heater industry emerges in Southern California; it later collapses due to the availability of cheap fossil fuels. |
| late 1890s | The manufacture of automobiles is in full swing in western Europe and North America, led by industry pioneers such as Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor, Armand Peugot, Charles and Frank Duryea, and Ransome Eli Olds. This creates a great demand for gasoline. (Prior to this, kerosene for heating had been the main oil product.) |
| late 1890s | The U.S. takes over the lead in coal production. Britain now ranks second, after having been the world leader since the beginnings of the industry in the 1500s. Germany is third, an indication of her growing industrial power relative to continental rival France. |
| 1899 | A leading American magazine, the Literary Digest, analyzes the future of the automobile and declares that “the ordinary horseless carriage is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into (such) common use as a bicycle.” |
| 1899 | Waldmar Jungner of Sweden invents the nickel-cadmium battery, which uses nickel for the positive electrode and cadmium for the negative. Two years later, Edison produces an alternative design by replacing cadmium with iron. |
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| 1900 | Electric cars outsell gasoline and steam-powered cars in the U.S. Electric vehicles do not require a hand starter or gearshift, and they are quieter and operate with less vibration. Gas-powered cars take over in the 1920s due to cheap gasoline, the elimination of the hand crank, mass production, and the relatively limited range and speed of electric vehicles. |
| 1900 | German physicist Max Planck is the first to describe photons when he tries to explain the “black body” distribution of wavelengths in the light emitted by a solid hot object. “Planck’s constant” becomes a universal constant that is fundamental to all quantum theory. |
| 1900 | Gregor Mendel’s work on heredity is rediscovered by three different biologists working independently in separate countries. They finally give publicity and credence to Mendel’s theories, establishing the field of genetics. |
| 1900 | Paul Ulrich Villard observes gamma rays, proving them to be a form of radiation more powerful than X-rays. |
| 1900 | Standard Oil of New Jersey dominates in the U.S. with more than 80% of the market share in crude oil supplies, refining capacity, and kerosene and gasoline sold. In the following decade independent Texas oil companies will emerge to make inroads into this market share, and in 1911 Standard Oil is broken up by the government. |
| 1900 | The first dirigible to make a successful flight is built by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany. The name zeppelin will come to be a synonym for aircraft of this type. |
| 1900 | The first transmission of a human voice over radio is made by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, who transmits “words without wires” over a distance of 1600 meters between two aerial systems on an island in the Potomac River. Fessenden will make the world’s first radio broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906. |
| 1900 | The first "autostage," an electric bus, appeared on 5th Avenue in New York City. It seated 8 people inside and 4 outside. The fare was 5-cents |
| ca. 1900 | Charles Seeberger of the Otis Elevator Company develops a working escalator, improving upon an earlier design by Jesse Reno. |
| 1901 | At an oil field near Beaumont, Texas, a drilling crew supervised by Austrian engineer Anthony Lucas unexpectedly exposes a huge gusher of oil shooting 250 feet in the air. This becomes the site of the famous “Spindletop” well which will reportedly produce as much as 100,000 barrels of oil per day, a rate thousands of times greater than existing wells. |
| 1901 | Azerbaijan ranks as the world’s most productive oil region, thanks to an oil boom in the area around the city of Baku. A large refining industry also exists to turn crude oil into kerosene. |
| 1901 | The first Federal Water Power Act is enacted in the United States, beginning an era of large hydropower projects in the West. |
| 1901 | The King Edward, the first merchant vessel fitted with steam turbines, is launched in Scotland. |
| 1901 | Using an antenna he invented in 1895, Marconi broadcasts the first radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada, a distance of more than 2000 miles. |
| 1901 | What is now known as the Centennial Light Bulb is first lit at a firehouse in Livermore, California. It is a hand-blown bulb with a carbon filament, using approximately 4 watts of electricity. The bulb has now been burning continuously for over 100 years. |
| 1902 | A large gusher of oil spews forth in the Cotella (Katalla) region along the Gulf of Alaska. This is the first successful oil well in Alaska and provides evidence of the area’s potential as an energy source. |
| 1902 | An anthracite coal strike in the U.S. severely disrupts the national economy. The power of the United Mine Workers union grows as its membership goes from less than 10,000 members before the strike to over 100,000 members afterward. The UMW becomes the nation’s largest trade union. |
| 1902 | Arthur Korn of Germany develops a photoelectric scanning system for the transmission and reproduction of photographs. He goes on to establish a commercial picture transmission system linking Berlin, London and Paris; this is the world’s first fax (facsimile) network. |
| 1902 | Ernest Rutherford of New Zealand and Frederick Soddy of England publish their theory of radioactive decay, stating that atoms of a radioactive element emit charged particles (alpha or beta) and in doing so change into atoms of a different element. |
| 1902 | Marie and Pierre Curie measure the atomic weight of radium. |
| 1902 | Philipp Lenard studies the photoelectric effect, showing that electrons are emitted from certain metals when illuminated by ultraviolet light. He observes that the number of electrons released is proportional to the intensity of the light, while their speed is independent of this and is determined by the wavelength of the light. |
| 1902 | The first municipal oil-gas plant in the western United States is erected in Oakland, California for lighting purposes. |
| 1902 | The U.S. Congress establishes the Bureau of Reclamation to administer money from the sale of public lands to build dams and irrigation projects for western states. By 2000 the Bureau operates 60 dams with a total capacity of 14,757,668 kilowatts. |
| 1902 | Willis Haviland Carrier designs the first industrial air conditioning system; in the following decades he and the Carrier Air Conditioning Corporation carry out various other innovations, culminating with the first air-conditioned stores and theaters in 1924 and a practical home air conditioner in 1928. |
| ca. 1902 | French auto pioneer Louis Renault is credited with the invention of the internal expanding drum brake, a great improvement in stopping power for motor vehicles. |
| 1903 | Brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright make the first successful flight of a controlled, powered, heavier-than-air machine, for 59 seconds over a distance of 850 feet at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. |
| 1903 | Henry Ford and a group of financial backers found the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan. |
| 1903 | Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia publishes The Investigation of Outer Space by Means of Reactive Devices, which suggests the use of liquid propellants for rockets to achieve greater range. This is one of many writings by Tsiolkovsky on space flight, in which he puts forth ideas such as multistage rockets, artificial satellites, and manned space stations. |
| 1903 | The 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics is jointly awarded to Pierre and Marie Sklodowska Curie and Henri Becquerel for their pioneering work on radioactivity. Marie Curie is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. |
| 1904 | Beltram Borden Boldwood proves that uranium changes into radium through the process of radioactive decay. He later expands his theory, showing that radium decays into lead and that, in general, radioactive substances eventually decay into non-radioactive ones. |
| 1904 | English electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming patents the thermionic valve, which is the first electronic rectifier of radio waves. Along with the amplifier grid of Lee de Forest (see 1906), Fleming’s invention is the forerunner of the triode and other vacuum tubes and thus a foundation of the modern electronics industry. |
| 1904 | Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Italy successfully produces electricity from geothermal energy in an experimental “indirect cycle,” using pure steam produced from a heat exchanger. |
| 1904 | Swedish-American electrical engineer Ernst Alexanderson develops a high-frequency alternator that provides the means for effective long-distance radio communication. |
| 1904 | The earliest large-scale U.S. aluminum recycling operations begin in Chicago and Cleveland. |
| 1904 | The first official New York City subway system opens in Manhattan, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT). It consists of 28 stations from City Hall to 145th Street, along 9 miles of track. The IRT extends to the Bronx in 1905, Brooklyn in 1908, and Queens in 1915. |
| 1904 | The Kern River oil field in Bakersfield, California reaches a peak production level of 17.2 million barrels per year, roughly equivalent to the output of the entire state of Texas. |
| 1904 | The first arrest in U.S. for speeding in an automobile occurs by an unnamed man in Newport, Rhode Island. He runs his auto between 15 to 20 mph, and is fined. Seven days later, the same man is jailed for five days for his second speeding offense. |
| 1905 | Albert Einstein proposes that light can be described as a stream of separate particles of energy. This explains the photoelectric effect, which had been extensively studied by his predecessors such as Hertz, Hallwachs, and Lenard, but which could not be accounted for by Newtonian physics, with its assumption that light is a continuous wave. |
| 1905 | In a second major paper, Einstein presents his special theory of relativity. He proposes that the laws of nature have the same application in all frames of reference. This applies to the speed of light, which is said to be constant, independent of any relative motion between the light source and the observer. Einstein describes mass and energy as equivalent (E=mc2). |
| 1905 | In a third landmark paper of 1905, Einstein calculates how molecular movement causes Brownian motion (the irregular movement of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid). This confirms the validity of the atomic theory of matter. |
| 1905 | New York’s Long Island Railroad is the first major rail carrier to install extensive main line electrification. |
| 1905 | The concept of a limiting factor in photosynthesis is shown by Frederick Frost Blackman. Photosynthesis is limited by the supply of carbon dioxide, temperature, and light intensity. The rate of photosynthesis is controlled by the factor in the shortest supply. |
| 1905 | The gas pump innovator Sylvanus F. Bowser develops a self-measuring pump that dispenses precise amounts of fuel. |
| 1906 | In his statement of the third law of thermodynamics, Walther Nernst proposes that absolute zero is a point that can be closely approached, but never actually reached. |
| 1906 | Lee de Forest of the U.S. invents the triode, a vacuum-tube device that amplifies weak electric signals. It is first used as a detector of radio waves, then as an amplifier for long-distance telephone calls, and eventually as a major technology of the radio transmitter, sound films, loudspeakers, and many other electronic devices. |
| 1906 | The British battleship Dreadnought is launched, the best-armed and fastest battleship in the world. Its presence in the Royal Navy sets off a competition among rival nations to build other ships of this class in the years leading up to World War I. |
| 1907 | American chemist Bertram Borden Boltwood is the first to use radiometric dating to estimate the age of the Earth. Using the half-life of uranium as a standard, he estimates the Earth’s age at 2.2 billion years. This is a dramatic increase over previous estimates of Earth’s age. |
| 1907 | An explosion in a coal mine in Monongah, West Virginia results in the death of 362 miners, virtually the entire work force in the mine at that time. This is the worst coal mine disaster in American history and consequently Congress is impelled to create the Bureau of Mines to study mine safety and conduct inspections. |
| 1907 | Coal reaches the historic high point (78%) of its share of the U.S. energy supply. |
| ca. 1907 | Russian scientist Boris Rosing succeeds in transmitting and reproducing black-and-white silhouettes of simple shapes, using a mechanical mirror-drum apparatus as a camera and a cathode-ray tube as a receiver. In the 1920s, Rosing’s student Vladimir Zworykin will become a key figure in the development of television technology in the U.S. |
| 1908 | A. A. Campbell-Swinton proposes a television system in which images are stored in the form of electric charge in a camera tube and reproduced on a picture tube, in the manner now employed in modern television broadcasting. |
| 1908 | Ernest Rutherford and his assistant Hans Geiger develop the Geiger counter to detect radiation levels. |
| 1908 | With a commission from the Shah of Persia (Iran) to explore for oil in the region, Englishman William Knox D’Arcy and his team make the first major commercial oil discovery in the Middle East at Masjid-i-Suleiman. D’Arcy then forms the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) to exploit this discovery. |
| 1908 | Henry Ford revolutionizes the manufacturing process when he sets up the first assembly line in his Model T factory. The inexpensive Model T makes automobile ownership possible for the average American and it becomes the largest-selling car model of its era. |
| 1908 | Hermann Minkowski publishes Space and Time, proposing time as a fourth dimension for the study of the universe. |
| 1908 | The history of superconductors begins with the successful liquefication of helium by the Dutch scientist Keike Kamerlingh Onnes at a temperature of just 4° K. |
| 1908 | The Wisconsin Railroad Commission orders gas companies to use British Thermal Units (BTUs) as the new heating measurement standard. |
| 1909 | "England’s isolation has ended once and for all” is the judgment of one English newspaper after French aviator Louis Bleriot becomes the first to fly across the English Channel in an airplane. Bleriot will later found an aircraft company that produces thousands of the famous SPAD warplane for the Allies in World War I. |
| 1909 | Leo Hendrik Baekeland of Belgium invents bakelite, a dense synthetic polymer (a plastic) that is used to make jewelry, game pieces, engine parts, radio boxes, switches, and many other objects. Bakelite is the first industrial thermoset plastic; i.e., a material that does not change its shape after being mixed and heated. |
| 1909 | The Hughes Tool Company makes the first rotary rock bit, which makes it possible to drill through hard rock formations with a rotary rig. |
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| 1910 | A California gusher shoots forth a huge column of oil. The well, between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, will eventually reach an uncontrolled rate of 100,000 barrels and destroy its derrick. Its estimated output of 9 million barrels of oil is a record for the time, though reportedly less than half of this could be saved. |
| 1910 | American engineer Elmer A. Sperry establishes the Sperry Gyroscope Company (with himself as the lone employee) to market the innovative ballistic gyrocompass he had created two years earlier. |
| 1910 | Georges Claude displays the first neon lamp in Paris. |
| 1910 | The first electric-powered, self-contained washing machine is patented. |
| ca. 1910 | Farms in North America are home to about 25 million horses and mules. These animals supply the power for general transportation and for essential farm tasks such as plowing, seeding, cultivating, and harvesting. Following World War I, the mechanized tractor will take over this role, and on today’s farms animal power is a rarity. |
| 1911 | Austrian physicist Victor F. Hess discovers cosmic radiation. He is not certain what this phenomenon is, and it is poorly understood even today. |
| 1911 | Dissolution of the Standard Oil trust is ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. John D. Rockefeller’s empire is broken up into many smaller companies, including Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of Ohio (later part of BP), Standard of Indiana (later Amoco), Continental Oil (Conoco), and Atlantic Oil (Arco). |
| 1911 | Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity—the loss of electrical resistance in mercury near absolute zero temperatures. It is soon determined that other metals and alloys become superconductors at very low temperatures. |
| 1911 | Ernest Rutherford conducts experiments with the scattering of alpha particles off atoms, from which he concludes that the atom’s mass and positive charge are concentrated in a tiny nucleus. The nuclear model of the atom is born. |
| 1911 | Famed photojournalist Lewis W. Hine produces his classic “Breaker Boys” series of photos depicting harsh child labor conditions in the U.S. Breaker boys are employed in coal mines to separate coal from unwanted stone and slate, a grueling task that requires them to spend the day sitting suspended above a conveyer belt as the coal rushes by. |
| 1911 | George von Hevesy of Hungary conceives the idea of using radioactive tracers, which will have great applications in medical and ecological research. He first applies this method to a biological problem in 1923, when he traces lead absorbed by plants. |
| 1911 | The U.S. output of kerosene is eclipsed for the first time by a formerly discarded byproduct—gasoline. |
| 1912 | C. V. Boys and Frank Shuman’s solar-powered steam boiler begins pumping irrigation water from the Nile River. This is the world’s largest solar plant and Shuman envisions one even larger, a gigantic facility covering thousands of square miles in the Sahara Desert. World War I intervenes and Shuman’s dream is never realized. |
| 1912 | George Sarton, a Belgian-born professor at Harvard University, founds Isis, which will evolve into the premier international journal dedicated to the history of science. Sarton will edit Isis until 1952, and he is widely considered to be the father of the history of science. |
| 1912 | The General Motors Company approves the installation of Charles Kettering’s automatic self-starter in its Cadillac line of automobiles. This is one of many innovations in auto starting, ignition, and lighting accomplished by Kettering, first with his Delco company and then with General Motors after it acquires Delco. |
| 1912 | The world’s largest ocean liner, Titanic, sinks on her maiden voyage. |
| ca. 1912 | Robert Bosch of Germany develops what is considered to be the first successful fuel injection system. |
| 1912-1914 | First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, fearing conflict with Germany, hastens the conversion of British battleships from coal to oil. Oil-powered ships are faster, they can be refueled at sea, and they require less on-board labor. The Royal Navy eventually overcomes the largely coal-based German fleet in World War I. |
| 1913 | Austrian Victor Kaplan invents an improved turbine. The Kaplan turbine features movable blades that rotate, or “feather,” to handle different conditions; this allows hydroelectric power stations to operate with greater efficiency. |
| 1913 | Canadian engineer Sidney Ells advocates the hot water flotation method of separating bitumen from the tar sands of Athabasca. His is one of several unsuccessful attempts to develop the Athabasca sands. Decades later, oil sands will re-emerge as a viable energy source. |
| 1913 | Electric refrigerators for home use begin to appear on the market in the United States. |
| 1913 | Frederick Soddy formulates the concept of isotopes, stating that certain radioactive elements may exist in two or more forms which have different atomic weights but which are indistinguishable chemically |
| 1913 | French physicist Charles Fabry discovers the ozone layer, the thin shield in the upper atmosphere that acts as a screen to protect life on the surface of Earth from the ultraviolet rays of the Sun. |
| 1913 | Friedrich Bergius, a German chemist, invents a process he calls “destructive hydrogenation” of coal, which later comes to be known as direct liquefaction. Bergius liquefies coal by reacting it with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure. |
| 1913 | In the famous “oil drop experiment,” Robert Andrews Millikan measures the charge of a single electron to be sixteen-quintillionths of a coulomb. |
| 1913 | Irving Langmuir develops an improved incandescent lamp by filling the lamp with an inert gas so that the atoms of tungsten evaporate more slowly. This is the first major advance in the incandescent lamp since the days of Edison, and it remains a standard technology today. |
| 1913 | Niels Bohr applies the quantum theory to the atom and concludes that electrons have fixed orbits around the nucleus and that they emit or absorb specific amounts of energy, or quanta, when they jump into another orbit. |
| 1913 | The first geothermal power plant is built at Larderello in Tuscany, Italy, employing heat from a dry steam field to generate a constant flow of electricity. |
| 1913 | The percentage of the world’s energy consumption coming from coal peaks at 61%. |
| 1913 | U.S.S. Jupiter, a transport and coal carrying vessel, is commissioned in California. This is the first surface ship in the U.S. Navy to be propelled by electric motors. |
| 1913 | Using radiometric dating, the English geologist Arthur Holmes proposes the first geological time scale. He estimates the Earth’s age at 4 billion years, far older than prevailing wisdom. |
| 1913 | William Burton of the Standard Oil Company receives a patent for a thermal cracking process (the application of steady heat and pressure to crack, or break down, heavier hydrocarbons into lighter ones). This greatly increases the proportion of gasoline obtainable from crude petroleum. |
| ca. 1913 | Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch of Germany devise an industrial process in which nitrogen from the atmosphere and hydrogen under high temperature and pressure react to form ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process becomes an effective way to produce ammonia-based fertilizers. |
| 1913-1914 | Ford Motor Company installs the first moving assembly line for the manufacture of automobiles. Once the system is in full operation, Henry Ford announces that his workers will be paid $5 per day, more than double the usual wage at the time, while also having their work day reduced. This makes Ford a hero to the American work force. |
| 1914-1918 | World War I engulfs Europe. Newer forms of warfare are employed, such as tanks, airplanes, submarines, machine guns, and poison gas. Railroads and motor vehicles transport troops and war matériel. However, military tactics lag behind technology, and in the slaughterhouse of trench warfare millions of lives are lost in fruitless assaults on heavily defended positions. |
| 1914 | A version of the modern traffic light is put into operation in Cleveland, Ohio, with red and green lights and a warning sound to indicate when the light is changing. Three-color lights with yellow as the warning will be introduced in 1920. |
| 1914 | Acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines in the U.S. receives considerable attention when the Army Corps of Engineers begins an extensive investigation of the problem in the Ohio River basin. Municipalities are concerned about the increased costs of water filtration and pipe corrosion. |
| 1914 | Data compiled from annual mine inspector reports leads to the conclusion that about 90,000 people have died or suffered injury in the mines of Great Britain in the period from 1850 to 1914. Most of the deaths are in coal mines. |
| 1914 | Ernest Rutherford suggests that the positive nucleus of atoms contains protons that balance the charge of electrons but have a much greater mass. |
| 1914 | Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard of Worcester, Massachusetts receives two U.S. patents, one for a rocket that uses liquid fuel, the other for a two- or three-stage rocket using solid fuel. This is considered the first step in the era of rocket propulsion. |
| 1914 | The first regularly scheduled airline in the U.S. begins operation. The Benoist Company, using a flying boat, carries passengers across Florida’s Tampa Bay, between St. Petersburg and Tampa. The flights will last for only about six months. |
| 1914 | The Panama Canal opens, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and drastically reducing the sailing time from Europe or eastern North America to the West Coast. |
| 1914 | Through studies of earthquake waves, Beno Gutenberg determines that there is an inner and outer core at the center of the earth measuring about 4200 miles in diameter, with a sharp dividing line between the mantle and the outer core (now known as the Gutenberg discontinuity). |
| 1915 | German-American blacksmith August Fruehauf builds the first semi-trailer type of truck, in which the load-carrying vehicle has wheels only at the rear and is towed and supported by a powered vehicle in front. |
| 1916 | Edward Ardern and William Lockett, workers at a wastewater treatment plant in Manchester, England, demonstrate the activated sludge process, which will become the most widespread technology for wastewater purification. |
| 1916 | Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity, or Theory of Gravitation, equating gravitational and inertial mass and showing space to be curved. |
| 1916 | Gilbert Newton Lewis and Irving Langmuir independently formulate a system of chemical bonding based on the number of electrons in each shell of an atom. |
| 1916 | First drilling takes place at Goose Creek oil field on Galveston Bay, making it the first offshore drilling operation in Texas and the second in the U.S. The Goose Creek area will soon become the site of one of the largest oil refineries in the U.S. |
| 1916 | Using Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild postulates on the existence of what are later named black holes. |
| 1917-1921 | Russian oil production and exports drop sharply as a result of the Russian revolution in 1917, and the nationalization of the oil fields by the Communists in 1920. Production strengthens by the mid-1920s due to an infusion of foreign investment from the West. |
| 1918 | A U.S. Revenue Act restores the depletion allowance for minerals and fossil fuels, reducing taxes for owners of such resources to compensate for the exhaustion of an irreplaceable capital asset. Critics argue that the allowance is a huge subsidy because these resources are valuable enough to justify high levels of investment without tax incentives. |
| 1918 | The American Gas Association is formed through the consolidation of smaller gas organizations. It represents companies involved in all areas of the transmission and distribution of natural gas in the U.S. |
| 1918 | The first major U.S. gasoline pipeline begins operations transporting gasoline over a 40-mile distance in Wyoming. |
| 1918 | The first well of the Panhandle field north of Amarillo, Texas goes into operation. This will become one of the most productive oil and gas fields in the world, and within a few years Amarillo and other nearby towns of the Panhandle region will double and even triple in size. |
| 1918 | U.S. production of anthracite coal peaks at 100 million tons per year. Located primarily in the state of Pennsylvania, anthracite is a relatively clean burning form of coal that enjoys extensive use in home heating. By 2000 production drops to about 4 million tons, due largely to the depletion of the resource base. |
| ca. 1918 | Summing up the role of energy supply in World War I, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon is said to remark that “The Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.” (Other versions of this comment are reported, and it has also been attributed to Winston Churchill.) |
| 1918-1920 | The air-cooled radial engine comes into widespread use in military aircraft, with cylinders arranged to extend radially outward from its hub, like spokes of a wheel. |
| 1919 | Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown of Great Britain make the first aircraft flight across the Atlantic, flying from Newfoundland, Canada to Ireland in about sixteen and a half hours. Their plane is a Vickers Vimy, a two-engine biplane. |
| 1919 | Less than one month after the transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, the British airship R-34 makes the first two-way trip across the Atlantic, going from Scotland to New York and then back to England. |
| 1919 | Observations of a total eclipse of the sun show a gravitational deflection of light that supports Einstein’s general theory of relativity. |
| 1919 | The American Petroleum Institute (API) is organized in Chicago, Illinois, for the purpose of standardizing engineering specifications for drilling and production equipment. |
| 1919 | The first U.S. tax on gasoline is adopted by the Oregon state legislature to raise money for the maintenance of state highways. By 1929, all states impose a tax on gasoline, and three years later a Federal tax of one cent per gallon is enacted. |
| 1919 | The German scientist W. Schroeder makes the first estimate of global net primary production of carbon: 36.2 gigatons (1015). Subsequent estimates are in the range of 100 gigatons. |
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| 1920 | Isopropyl alcohol becomes the first commercial petrochemical, initially produced at Standard Oil’s Bayway, New Jersey, plant. |
| 1920 | Radio station KDKA of Pittsburgh receives a broadcasting license and goes on the air with news reports on the U.S. Presidential election. This is the nation’s first commercial radio broadcast; by 1925 there are more than 600 commercial stations in the U.S. and Canada. |
| 1920 | The Federal Power Act is enacted in the U.S. It creates the Federal Power Commission (FPC) and empowers it to regulate the electric power and natural gas industries, including the licensing of non-Federal hydroelectric projects, the regulation of interstate transmission of electrical energy, and the rates for that electricity’s sale. |
| 1920 | The number of automobiles in the United States exceeds nine million as gas stations open everywhere. Because of this increased use of gasoline, oil now provides almost one-fourth of the total U.S. energy consumption. |
| 1920s | Henry Ford and others promote the use of ethanol-blended gasoline, which they call gasohol. A fermentation plant to manufacture ethanol specifically for motor fuels is built in Atchison, Kansas, and in the 1930s, more than 2,000 service stations in the Midwest sell gasohol. Low oil prices in the 1940s end gasohol use until the 1970s. |
| 1920s | The technique of pulverizing coal into a fine powder for burning comes into use. This process brings advantages such as a higher combustion temperature, improved thermal efficiency, and a lower air requirement for combustion. |
| ca. 1920 | From his studies of the chemical composition of gasoline, British engineer Harry Ricardo establishes a measurement system that is the basis of today’s standard classification of fuels according to octane rating. Ricardo also makes important improvements to diesel and airplane engines. |
| early 1920s | French engineer Eugene Jules Houdry discovers a revolutionary method for cracking low-grade crude oil into high-test gasoline. In the 1930s he moves to the U.S. and works with American oil companies to develop the Houdry process as a large-scale commercial enterprise. Later he will also be credited with the invention of the catalytic converter. |
| 1921 | A 4,500 metric ton stockpile of ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate explodes at a chemical plant in Oppau, Germany. The blast and subsequent fire kill 600 people, injure 1500, and leave 7000 homeless. |
| 1921 | Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” (The citation does not specifically mention Einstein’s theory of relativity, though today this is often described as the most important advance in physics since Newton.) |
| 1921 | Charles F. Kettering and his assistant Thomas A. Midgley, General Motors researchers, discover that the addition of a slight quantity of tetraethyl lead will reduce “knock” (imperfect burning), which is a common drawback of the gasoline engines of this era. |
| 1921 | John D. Grant begins drilling in Geyser Canyon north of San Francisco with the dream of harnessing the steam power there. Grant builds a power plant that is one of the first U.S. facilities to generate electricity from geothermal power. |
| 1921 | Regularly scheduled passenger airline service is underway on various routes, such as Paris to London (by several French and British companies), Amsterdam to London (by KLM), Berlin to Weimar, Germany (by a forerunner of Lufthansa) and Los Angeles to San Diego, California (by a company owned by famous film director Cecil B. DeMille). |
| 1921 | Without competitive bidding, oil barons Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair receive exclusive rights to valuable Federal oil reserves at Elk Hills, California and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The Teapot Dome Scandal ensues, and U.S. Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall is convicted of bribery for getting “loans” from Doheny and Sinclair prior to granting them the rights. |
| 1921 | A German scientist, Friedrich Bergius succeeds in liquefying coal into oil in Stuttgart. |
| 1922 | Frederick Soddy, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, publishes a critique of standard economic thought for its lack of consideration of how thermodynamics and other biophysical laws constrain human economic aspirations. |
| 1922 | The aircraft carrier Hosho enters service in Japan. This is the first ship to be launched specifically as an aircraft carrier (as opposed to a flight deck being grafted on another type of vessel). |
| 1922 | The first peer-reviewed, continuously running journal pertaining exclusively to energy is published: Fuel, The Science and Technology of Fuel and Energy. |
| 1922 | The first well of the Hugoton gas field is discovered in southwestern Kansas. This massive field now includes acreage in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma and is defined as the largest natural gas field in North America and the second largest in the world. |
| 1922 | U.S. Geological Survey predicts that the United States only has energy oil supply to last 20 years. |
| 1923 | Arthur Holly Compton illustrates the dual wave and particle nature of X rays and gamma rays by showing how their wavelengths increase when they collide with electrons. |
| 1923 | California ranks as the leading oil-producing state in the U.S. The foremost site is Signal Hill (Long Beach), which is the richest field in the world based on output per area. Signal Hill will eventually produce over 1 billion barrels of oil and continues pumping at a rate of 1 million barrels per year into the 1990s. |
| 1923 | German chemist Matthias Pier of the BASF corporation develops a process to produce synthetic methanol. By 1926 U.S. companies such as DuPont will also begin synthetic methanol production. |
| 1923 | German coal researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch discover a method of producing synthetic liquid fuel from coal gas. The Fisher-Tropsch process has significant contemporary applications, such as to convert biomass into fuel or to utilize associated gas at oil fields. |
| 1923 | Hermann Oberth writes The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, a book that has been described as the first accurate prediction of the events that would unfold in the Space Age. Later Oberth’s pupil Wernher Von Braun will lead the rocket program of Germany, and that of the U.S. as well. |
| 1923 | Russian-American engineer Vladimir Zworykin applies for a patent for his iconoscope, a camera tube for television broadcasting. Based on this and his subsequent kinescope, Zworykin is often described as the originator of U.S. television, but it is not definitely established that he constructed a working system prior to his viewing the work of Philo T. Farnsworth (see 1927). |
| 1923 | The first ethyl gasoline in the U.S. goes on sale at a gas station in Dayton, Ohio. Leaded gasoline becomes the dominant fuel for cars, although it is eventually shown to be a major health hazard, leading to laws that prohibit its manufacture. |
| 1923 | The first oil field in Iraq is discovered in the Naft Khana area. |
| 1923 | The number of coal miners in the United States reaches a historic high of 705,000. U.S. coal production will reach higher levels in the future but with a reduced labor force, due to mechanization. |
| 1923 | Forty-two airplane landing fields on the Chicago-Iowa City-Omaha-North Platte-Cheyenne route are first lit by electricity. Thirty 6-inch electric arc signals are employed. The light is visible for 50 miles. |
| 1924 | A conveyor belt is successfully installed in a Pennsylvania anthracite mine to carry coal to a string of cars at the mine entry. |
| 1924 | Dr. H. S. Hele-Shaw and T. E. Beacham of Great Britain develop a variable-pitch propeller; this allows the angle of the propeller blades to be adjusted to suit different flight conditions while the engine speed remains the same. |
| 1924 | Scotsman Daniel Dunlop leads the organization of the First World Power Conference in London, among the first international meetings on energy. The name is changed to the World Energy Council (WEC) in 1968. The WEC remains an important global energy organization, with member committees in over 90 countries. |
| 1924 | The first seismic discovery of an oil-producing salt dome is made at the Orchard field in Fort Bend County, Texas, using the refraction method. |
| 1924 | The first successful oil drilling platform over water is erected by the Lago Petroleum Company in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. |
| 1924 | U.S. biologist Alfred Lotka describes evolution in energy terms, stating that the advantage goes to organisms whose energy-capturing devices are more efficient in directing available energies into favorable conditions for the preservation of the species. |
| 1924 | Five refinery workers die "violently insane" at Standard Oil (Exxon) refinery making tetraethyl lead gasoline additive in grossly unsafe conditions. |
| 1925 | Robert Millikan coins the term “cosmic rays” to describe the phenomenon discovered in 1913 by Victor Hess. Millikan, Hess, and others will confirm the extraterrestrial origins of this radiation. |
| 1925 | Scottish inventor John Logie Baird provides the first true television picture when he transmits live images to a screen in an adjoining room. He uses a mechanical scanning system based on Nipkow’s disc of 1884. Baird’s first image is the head of a dummy; he then televises the face of his young office assistant. |
| 1925 | The Magnolia Gas Company builds the first all-welded pipeline, over 200 miles in length, from northern Louisiana to Beaumont, Texas. |
| 1925 | Wolfgang Pauli proposes a fourth quantum number for energy levels of atomic electrons and theorizes that no two electrons with the same quantum number can occupy the same atom. This theory accounts for the chemical properties of elements. |
| 1925 | U.S. Surgeon General holds a conference on leaded gasoline. Ethyl officials claim it is a "Gift of God" and no alternatives are possible. |
| 1925-1927 | Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and later Erwin Schrödinger formulate quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that deals with matter at the atomic level. In 1927 Heisenberg states his famous uncertainty principle; i.e., that it is impossible to measure both energy and time (or position and momentum) with completely accuracy at the same time. |
| mid 1920s | The practice of filling in wetland areas near cities with garbage, ash, and dirt becomes a popular disposal method in Europe and North America. |
| 1926 | Arthur Wood and David Gray of the Corning, New York Glass Works develop the “Ribbon” machine to make light bulbs. Bulbs can be made at speeds of one thousand per minute. |
| 1926 | Britain is paralyzed when, in support of a strike by coal miners over threatened wage cuts, the Trades Union Congress begins a general strike. The strike ends after nine days due to government emergency measures and lack of public support. The miners eventually return to work, accepting lower wages and longer hours. |
| 1926 | Fritz Winkler introduces a process for commercial fluidized-bed coal gasification at a BASF plant in Leuna, Germany. |
| 1926 | Robert Goddard launches the first rocket propelled by liquid fuel. |
| 1926 | The Federal Oil Conservation Board of the United States estimates that the nation has only enough oil to last for another six years. |
| 1926 | George Ebert of Germany produces a synthetic rubber from butadiene. During the following decade this evolves into various types of “buna” rubber, so named from the two materials used to make them, butadiene and natrium (sodium). |
| 1927 | A huge flow of oil begins at the Baba Gurgur oil fields near Kirkuk, about 140 miles north of Baghdad, marking the beginning of the oil industry in Iraq. Peak flow rates are estimated at 95,000 barrels per day. This is at the ancient site where a natural oil spring known as the Eternal Fire burned for centuries. |
| 1927 | British ecologist Charles Elton publishes Animal Ecology, in which he outlines the importance of feeding (energy) relationships among organisms as the basis for understanding nature. Elton’s perspective is a precursor to modern ecological theory. |
| 1927 | Brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger of France develop the technique of wire line logging as a method of obtaining downhole data in oil and gas wells. They commercialize this process and the Schlumberger company becomes a leading provider of petroleum technology services. |
| 1927 | Charles A. Lindbergh flies from New York, USA to Paris, France to complete the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. |
| 1927 | George Lemaitre proposes the earliest version of what is now known (and generally accepted) as the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the Universe. |
| 1927 | U.S. inventor Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates the first successful transmission of a television image by wholly electronic means at his San Francisco laboratory. His “Image Dissector” system differs from John Logie Baird’s earlier mechanical transmission system, which by the early 1930s will be supplanted by electronic transmission. |
| 1927 | "Talking" films debut in America with the premier showing of "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson. |
| late 1920s | The U.S. natural gas industry expands greatly as large new fields are developed in the Southwest and California. Eventually natural gas will completely replace the older technology of manufactured gas in the U.S. |
| 1928 | A patent is assigned to Marvin Pipkin for an electric light bulb coated on the inside, which is stronger and has less glare than existing outside-coated bulbs. He goes on to develop an improved version of this in 1947. |
| 1928 | Station WGY of Schenectady, New York begins the first regularly scheduled television broadcasting. A half hour program is broadcast three days a week. |
| 1928 | The first diesel-electric passenger locomotive in the U.S. is built by the American Locomotive Co. for use on the New York Central Railroad. |
| 1928 | The U.S. Federal Trade Commission commences a massive four-year investigation of the nation’s private electric companies. The FTC’s report runs to 84 volumes and documents a vast number of financial abuses. Utility ownership becomes an issue in the 1932 Presidential election, with Franklin D. Roosevelt arguing for consumer-controlled systems. |
| 1928 | The New York Times mounts the first moving electric sign in the United States around the top of the Times Building in Times Square, New York City. It was used to report the election returns and was called "The Zipper" from the way it encircled the building. |
| 1928 | The first airplane flight using a diesel engine is made. The engine, manufactured by the Packard Motor Car Company is used in a Stinson Detroiter Airplane. |
| 1928 | St. Franics Dam gives way in Los Angeles, killing over 500. Improved safety measures were required in the aftermath of the disaster, including federal safety review based on uniform geological surveys. |
| 1929 | Manufactured gas suppliers in the U.S. annually distribute about 450 billion cubic feet of gas, more than twice the amount delivered per year prior to World War I. Over 50% of this is water gas, about 40% coal gas, and about 6% oil gas. |
| 1929 | The first ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) facility is built by Georges Claude of France in Mantanzas Bay, Cuba. The plant produces 22 kilowatts of electricity but requires about 80 kilowatts to run its equipment. |
| 1929 | The first particle accelerator, originally known as an “atom-smasher,” is devised by John Douglas Cockcroft and Thomas Sinton Walton. The following year Ernest Lawrence expands on their idea to create the cyclotron. This leads to studies of the atomic nucleus and the forces holding it together. |
| 1929 | U.S. physicist Robert Jemison Van de Graaff introduces his electrostatic generator, which is capable of producing extremely high voltages. It is a more efficient particle accelerator than the earlier Cockroft-Walton machine. Van de Graaff’s “atom smasher” will play an important role in the early years of nuclear and particle physics. |
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| 1929-1931 | The Panhandle Eastern, Northern Natural, and Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America are organized to deliver Southwestern gas to Midwestern markets. |
| ca. 1930 | The human population reaches 2 billion. |
| 1930 | British engineer Frank Whittle registers the first patent for a jet propulsion engine. In 1934 Hans von Ohain of Germany, working independently of Whittle, patents a jet engine design similar in concept but different in internal arrangement. Both inventors go on to test their engines successfully in 1937. |
| 1930 | German engineer Rudolf Erren presents data on a hydrogen engine at the World Power Conference in Berlin. In the mid 1930s Erren will convert hundreds of gasoline vehicles to run on hydrogen or hydrogen/gasoline mixtures. Apparently none of these engines survived World War II. |
| 1930 | The first analog computer is invented by Vannevar Bush to solve differential equations. |
| 1930 | The giant East Texas oil field is discovered. It is larger than the next 20 fields in the U.S. combined and will become the largest oil-producing site in the contiguous United States. The first productive wells in the area are drilled by promoter Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner. |
| 1930 | The Royal Institute of British Architects develops the heliodon to help architects determine the potential effects of the Sun on new buildings. |
| 1930 | The first diesel automobile trip begins. The 3-day trip began in Indianapolis, Indiana, and ended in New York City, covering 792 miles at a total fuel cost of $1.38. |
| 1930s | Edward A. Birge and Chauncey Juday, American aquatic scientists, carry out studies to measure the energy budget of lakes. They develop the idea of primary production, i.e., the rate at which food energy is generated, or fixed, by photosynthesis. |
| 1930s | German architects lead a renaissance in solar building during the 1930s that spreads throughout Europe; many of these architects later flee to the U.S. when the Nazis condemn functional architecture as Jewish. |
| 1930s | The DuPont Company begins the manufacture of Freon (chlorofluorocarbon or CFC), a substance that does not carry the hazards of earlier refrigerants. Freon leads to much greater consumer use of refrigerators and air conditioners. In the 1990s Freon will be banned because of concerns over its role in the depletion of the ozone layer. |
| 1930s | The Texas Railroad Commission begins to regulate oil drilling, production, and prices in Texas, in an effort to damp the boom-and-bust nature of the industry. The TRC will restrain production and thus establish a price floor. Other states follow the TRC’s lead. The power of TRC wanes in the 1970s as production begins to decline. |
| 1931 | André Clavier demonstrates the potential value of microwaves when he uses them for a radio transmission across the English Channel. |
| 1931 | Auguste Piccard and his associate Paul Kipfer set an altitude record by ascending to almost 52,000 feet in a balloon. This can be considered the first successful flight into the stratosphere; it is one of several flights above 50,000 feet made in the 1930s by Auguste Piccard and his twin brother Jean. |
| 1931 | Ernst Ruska of Germany designs the first electron microscope; he then builds a working model of this in collaboration with his mentor Dr. Max Knoll. |
| 1931 | French engineer Georges J. M. Darrieus patents a new type of wind turbine with a distinctive “eggbeater” or “skipping rope” design. This becomes known as a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). |
| 1931 | Harold Hotelling of the U.S. publishes the economic theory of the optimal depletion of nonrenewable resources, which is still the dominant paradigm today in economics. |
| 1931 | U.S. chemist Harold Clayton Urey devises a method for the concentration of any possible heavy hydrogen isotopes by the fractional distillation of liquid hydrogen; this leads to the discovery of deuterium. |
| ca. 1931 | English geologist Arthur Holmes provides the energetic explanation of continental drift. Currents of heat and thermal expansion in the Earth’s mantle, he suggests, drive the continents toward or away from one another, creating new ocean floors and building mountain ranges. |
| ca. 1931 | The Lurgi process for coal gasification is developed in Germany. |
| 1932 | After years of speculation, the existence of the neutron in an atom is demonstrated by James Chadwick. Based on this discovery, Werner Heisenberg proposes that an atom nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons, explaining the existence of isotopes. |
| 1932 | British engineer Francis Thomas Bacon develops the first practical modern fuel cell. Bacon (a descendant of scientific pioneer Sir Francis Bacon) continues working on this device and eventually produces an effective working model in 1959. |
| 1932 | Hermann Honnef of Germany proposes a multi-turbine wind generator 160 meters wide that would be capable of 20MW output. He urges the Nazi regime to adopt it, but the device is never built. |
| 1932 | John Cockcroft and E. T. S. Walton of Great Britain split the atom on their linear accelerator in Ernest Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. Their experiment substantiates Einstein’s theory of relativity. |
| 1932 | The positron, a positively charged electron and the first form of antimatter to be discovered, is detected in cosmic-ray tracks by Carl David Anderson. |
| 1933 | A team led by Reginald Gibson and Eric William Fawcett discover polyethylene, one of the earliest plastics to come into common use. |
| 1933 | Edwin Armstrong demonstrates his frequency modulation (FM) system for the almost static-free transmission of radio waves; FM is one of many fundamental advances in radio broadcasting credited to Armstrong. |
| 1933 | King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia establishes an agreement with Standard Oil of California (Chevron) to develop the oil resources of the country’s Eastern Province. In 1936 Texas Oil (Texaco) joins the venture and it is named the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco. It grows to become the largest oil company in the world. |
| 1933 | The first submersible drilling barge for oil exploration, introduced by Texas Company, goes to work on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana; this allows drilling to be done on the bottom of coastal marshes without the need to sink pilings and build a platform. |
| 1933 | The U.S. Congress passes legislation to create the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), beginning a period of large hydropower projects in the eastern United States. Electricity provided by the TVA will be crucial to the U.S. industrial effort in World War II. |
| 1934 | Enrico Fermi of Italy irradiates uranium with neutrons and believes he has produced the first transuranic element. Later it will be recognized that the reaction produced by this neutron bombardment actually is atomic fission. |
| 1934 | Husband and wife team Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie develop the first artificially radioactive element, an isotope of phosphorus. |
| 1934 | The Technocracy Movement in the U.S. argues that the antidote to the Great Depression is to replace politicians with scientists and engineers who have the technical expertise to manage the nation’s economy and natural resources. Technocrats use growth and decline curves to predict a wide range of societal trends. |
| 1935 | British scientist A. G. Tansley proposes the word ecosystem as a descriptive term for the fundamental ecological unit. |
| 1935 | Charles Richter invents a scale to measure the strength of earthquakes. |
| 1935 | Scottish engineer Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (a descendant of James Watt) uses microwaves to devise a radio detection and ranging system, better known as radar. By the outbreak of World War II Britain has a chain of radar stations along the east and south coast of England. |
| 1935 | The first era of electric vehicles in the U.S. ends when Detroit Electric, the best known company in the field, stops production after 30 years in business (though orders will still be taken into the early 1940s). Reportedly Clara Ford, wife of Henry Ford, drove a Detroit Electric car rather than a Ford because she disliked gasoline-powered cars. |
| 1935 | The first isotope of uranium, U-235, is discovered by Arthur Jeffrey Dempster. |
| 1935 | The General Electric Company introduces the first fluorescent lamp. |
| 1935 | First funding is provided by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for California’s Central Valley Project, a long-term plan for use of the water of the Sacramento River basin. |
| 1935 | Wallace Carothers of DuPont discovers a strong polyamide fiber that resists both heat and solvents; this is named Nylon and it quickly comes into widespread use, most notably for women’s stockings and then later in many military applications. |
| 1936 | American astrophysicist Charles Greeley Abbott invents an efficient solar boiler. |
| 1936 | British mathematician Alan Turing publishes a paper describing an abstract device (Turing machine), which “can be made to do the work of any special-purpose machine, that is to say to carry out any piece of computing, if a tape bearing suitable ‘instructions’ is inserted into it.” This is often described as a prediction of the modern computer. |
| 1936 | First generator, N-2, goes into full operation at the Hoover Dam (Boulder Dam) at Black Canyon on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada, one of the major engineering feats of modern times and the source of much of the electric power consumed in the Southwest. |
| 1936 | Japanese television pioneer Kenjiro Takayanagi builds an all-electronic television set with 245 scanning lines. Earlier Takayanagi had transmitted an image on a Braun electric tube (1926) and had demonstrated a cathode ray tube system (1928). |
| 1936 | The airship Hindenburg becomes the largest aircraft ever to fly, at more than 800 feet long and 135 feet in diameter. After making several transatlantic trips, the Hindenburg catches fire on May 6, 1937 while making a landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-five people are killed and this tragedy effectively ends the use of airships for passenger transportation. |
| 1936 | The Rural Electrification Act is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the fact that rural America is still largely without electricity. Within two years cooperative projects financed by the REA will provide electricity to 1.5 million farms, and by the mid-1950s virtually all American farms will be electrified. |
| 1937 | Carl David Anderson discovers the muon, a subatomic particle larger than an electron but smaller than a proton. |
| 1937 | Lockheed Aircraft produces the first airplane with a fully pressurized cabin, a modified version of its Electra model. |
| 1937 | Theodor Dobzhansky publishes Genetics and the Origin of the Species, providing the link between Darwin’s evolutionism and Mendel’s theory of mutation in genetics. |
| 1938 | Aramco makes a major discovery at the Dammam field in Saudi Arabia. In the same year commercial quantities of oil are discovered at the Burqan field in southern Kuwait. |
| 1938 | Congress enacts the Natural Gas Act, giving the Federal Power Commission the authority to regulate commercial activity in the U.S. natural gas industry. |
| 1938 | G. S. Callendar publishes The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Climate, in which he directly implicates fossil fuel combustion as an agent of climate change. He is largely ignored or derided for this claim, but history proves him to be prophetic. |
| 1938 | Otto Hahn and his associates Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman of Germany are the first to split a uranium atom, although they hesitate to call their success nuclear fission. |
| 1938 | The Bonneville Dam is completed on the Columbia River about 40 miles of Portland, Oregon, and begins supplying power to the Pacific Northwest. |
| 1938 | The British steam locomotive Mallard reaches a speed of 126 miles per hour (201 kph) running on a downward grade in Lincolnshire, England. This still stands as the world speed record for a steam locomotive. |
| 1939 | Albert Einstein (written with Leo Szilard) writes a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt describing the possibility of an extremely powerful uranium bomb. Einstein calls for “watchfulness, and if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.” He urges FDR to provide government support for Fermi and colleagues in their work on chain reactions. |
| 1939 | Hans Bethe recognizes that the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to form deuterium releases energy. He suggests that much of the energy output of the Sun results from nuclear fusion reactions. |
| 1939 | John Randall and Henry Boot develop a resonant-cavity magnetron, providing a microwave transmission system for radar that is a significant advance on the existing meter-wave system. |
| 1939 | The first jet airplane takes flight with a turbojet engine developed by Hans von Ohain of Germany. This is followed by a 1941 flight by a British jet developed by Frank Whittle. |
| 1939 | The first practical gas turbine used to generate electricity operates at Neuchatel, Switzerland, developed by the Brown Boveri Company. |
| 1939 | The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit engineers the first air-conditioned automobile. |
| 1939 | The VS-300, the first workable single-rotor helicopter, makes its first vertical take-off with aeronautical engineer Igor Sikorsky. This followed other important advances made by French aviation pioneers Louis Breguet and Rene Dorand (1935) and by Germans Heinrich Focke and Gerd Achgelis (1936). Sikorsky’s craft makes its first free flight in 1940. |
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| 1939-1942 | John Vincent Atanasoff of Iowa State University (U.S.) collaborates with his graduate student Clifford E. Berry to develop the first digital electronic computer. Though the better-known ENIAC machine (see 1946) is often given this honor, a 1973 court decision found that the design of ENIAC was based on the earlier work of Atanasoff. |
| 1939-1942 | World War II rages around the globe. As in World War I, new forms of warfare come into use, such as large-scale bombing of cities, combined aerial and ground assaults (blitzkreig), aircraft carriers, rocket bombs, jet planes, and most notably, nuclear weapons. New technologies include radar, sonar, battlefield radios, and electronic coding/code breaking devices. |
| 1940 | Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben, chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, use a cyclotron to bombard a graphite target with a beam of deuterium nuclei. The result is carbon-14, which, with a half-life of 5,000 years, becomes a powerful tool to trace carbon’s movement through photosynthesis and many other biochemical processes. |
| 1940 | The American Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors is founded in Dallas, Texas; it is now known as the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC). |
| 1940 | The first residential use of geothermal energy for space heating begins in the Moana area of Reno, Nevada. |
| 1940 | W. G. Templeman observes the effects of naphthalacetic acid, a highly selective compound that is toxic to broad-leafed plants but less harmful to grasses. This leads to the development of the herbicide 2,4-D in 1944, which revolutionizes weed control in cereal plants. |
| 1940s | Important new industrial materials are developed, such as polyethylene (electrical insulation and food packaging), silicones (lubricants, protective coatings, and high-temperature electronic insulation), and epoxy (a very strong adhesive). |
| 1941 | After Japan seizes part of Indochina, the U.S. responds by freezing Japanese assets. This leads to sanctions against the sale of American oil to Japan (at the time about 75% of Japan’s oil supply came from the U.S.) Following this the Dutch government in exile in London bars the sale of oil to Japan from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). |
| 1941 | Having been denied access to oil supplies from the U.S. and the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese government concludes that if existing conditions continue they will run out of oil within a short time. This is cited by historians as probably the chief reason for Japan’s decision to launch a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7th). |
| 1941 | Nazi Germany surprisingly invades the Soviet Union, after having formed a nonaggression pact with the Soviets just two years earlier. The primary military objective of this operation is to capture the valuable Caucasus oil fields, since Germany’s own supply is relatively meager and dependent on synthetic oil. |
| 1941 | On a hilltop in Rutland, Vermont known as "Grandpa’s Knob," a 1.25 megawatt wind generator begins supplying power to the local grid during the World War II era. This is considered the first use of wind energy to supply public power on a large scale |
| 1941 | Plutonium, a new element, is identified by chemist Glenn Seaborg and his team at the University of California, Berkeley. Seaborg will discover 10 atomic elements in all, including one that now bears his name. Forms of plutonium become the main explosive ingredient of nuclear bombs and an important energy source for nuclear power reactors. |
| 1941 | Russell Ohl of the Bell Laboratories (U.S.) discovers that semiconductors can be “doped” with small amounts of foreign atoms to create interesting new properties. He develops the first silicon solar cell that converts available light into electrical energy. |
| 1941 | The first commercial plant for liquefied natural gas (LNG) is built in Cleveland, Ohio. |
| 1942 | A team of inventors at Exxon’s Research and Engineering Company develop the technique known as fluid catalytic cracking, a process that now produces over half of the world’s gasoline. |
| 1942 | Aquatic scientist Raymond Lindeman studies Cedar Creek Bog, a senescent lake in Minnesota, and describes the area in a classic paper titled “The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology” (published after his death at the age of 27). Lindeman’s analysis establishes trophic dynamics as the energetic basis of modern ecology. |
| 1942 | General Leslie R. Groves is appointed to head what becomes known as the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort by the United States to build an atomic bomb before the Germans can do so. |
| 1942 | On the Baltic coast of Germany at Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun launches the A-4 rocket. Breaking the sound barrier, it reaches an altitude of sixty miles. This is the world’s first launch of a ballistic missile and the first rocket to ascend to the fringes of space. |
| 1942 | Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven argues that an electromagnetic wave can propagate through a highly conducting medium. This discovery eventually forms the basis of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which studies the motions of electrically conducting fluids, such as plasmas and liquid metals, and their interactions with magnetic fields. |
| 1942 | The Grand Coulee Dam is completed in Washington State, U.S. to harness the power of the great Columbia River. It is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world at this time (in fact the largest concrete structure of any kind), and still remains the largest dam in North America, |
| 1942 | The Petroleum Administration for War (PAW) is established to assure “the most effective development and utilization of petroleum in the United States and its territories and possessions.” The PAW rations civilian petroleum use to insure adequate military supplies. The PAW is terminated in 1946. |
| 1942 | Ulrich Hütter of Germany writes a graduate thesis in which he provides the first statement of the theoretical basis for modern wind turbines. |
| 1942 | Under the football stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi leads a team of scientists in successfully creating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. This development will lead directly to the assembly and detonation of an atomic bomb. |
| 1942 | The U.S. Army Air Force begins a series of large-scale raids on Ploesti, Romania, a city that Sir Winston Churchill calls “the taproot of German might” because it is where the Nazi war machine obtains much of its oil. Damage turned out to be minimal on the first mission and was greatly overshadowed by Operation Tidal Wave (1943). When the Ploesti refineries are finally rendered inoperative in late 1944, there is virtually no fuel left for the German military. |
| 1942-1944 | Because transporting oil by sea is endangered by German submarines, the U.S. constructs the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines to carry oil from East Texas to the northeastern U.S., a distance of about 1,500 miles. |
| 1943 | A patent dispute stretching over a half century is finally resolved with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Guglielmo Marconi patent of 1904 for the invention of radio, in favor of Nikola Tesla’s 1897 patent. |
| 1943 | DDT, a powerful and effective pesticide, comes into widespread use. At first DDT is hailed as a miraculous advance and its developer, Paul Müller of Switzerland, wins the Nobel Prize in 1948. However, DDT later is targeted as harmful to wildlife (see 1962) and eventually its use will be widely banned. |
| 1943 | Los Angeles, California experiences its first recognized episode of smog as visibility is reduced to three blocks and people suffer from eye irritation, breathing difficulty, and nausea. Fearful citizens at first believe the city is undergoing a gas attack, but eventually a wartime synthetic rubber plant is identified as the pollution source. |
| 1943 | The Rockefeller Foundation establishes the precursor to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, providing the research thrust on high-yield variety crops that will eventually launch the Green Revolution. |
| 1943 | The Soviet Union sets up a nuclear research program under the direction of physicist Igor Kurchatov, with the goal of building an atomic bomb. |
| 1943 | U.S. anthropologist Leslie White proposes that like biological systems, cultures evolve around the strategies that they use to exploit energy. |
| 1944 | Based on experiments with pneumococci, Oswald T. Avery determines that DNA is the material carrying genetic properties in nearly all living organisms. |
| 1944 | In FPC v. Hope Natural Gas Co., the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a regulatory body may fix rates, provided the return to the utility company is “just and reasonable” to allow it to operate successfully and compensate investors for the risks they assume. FPC v. Hope becomes the basis for most U.S. court decisions on energy pricing regulation. |
| 1944 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Maria Telkes designs a portable, solar-powered seawater distiller for the life rafts of pilots shot down over the ocean. Telkes will develop many solar-powered devices, including the first residential solar heating system in 1948. |
| 1944 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt writes to Winston Churchill that the U.S. concern with maintaining a sufficient oil supply is not a sign that he is “making sheep’s eyes (looking with envy) at your oil fields in Iraq or Iran.” Churchill responds in kind, “We have not thought of trying to horn in upon your interests and property in Saudi Arabia.” |
| 1944 | Tennessee Gas and Transmission Company completes a pipeline to bring natural gas from Texas to Appalachia to fuel wartime industry. |
| 1944 | The first full-scale nuclear reactor begins operation at the U.S. Army’s Camp Hanford (Richland, Washington). Hanford is part of the Manhattan Project and produces plutonium for use in an atomic bomb. |
| 1944 | The Shasta Dam is completed in northern California after six years of construction. The waters of the Sacramento, McCloud, and Pit rivers, plus dozens of smaller streams, back up to create Lake Shasta. |
| 1944 | Wernher von Braun’s A-4 rocket is renamed the V-2 and converted to a combat weapon. The V is for “Vergeltung,” (revenge), since this is Hitler’s retaliation against Allied bombing of German cities. When the first V-2 hits London, von Braun is said to have remarked, “The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.” |
| 1945 | The Atomic Age begins, and the U.S. Manhattan Project reaches its goal, at a test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico. A team of scientists headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer detonate the world’s first nuclear explosive. |
| 1945 | The atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another bomb, Fat Man, is dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The first bomb is uranium-235 based and the other is plutonium-based. Japan surrenders on August 15, ending World War II. |
| 1945 | The end of gasoline rationing in the U.S. is announced after the surrender of Japan; this had been in place since 1942. In Britain fuel rationing will not end until 1950. |
| 1945 | The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is formed by the United Nations, with a mandate to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living, improve agricultural productivity, and better the condition of rural populations. |
| 1946 | Architect Arthur Brown designs the world’s first solar-heated public building, the Rose Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona. It obtains over 80% of its heat from solar energy for the next decade. |
| 1946 | In return for the withdrawal of Soviet troops occupying its northwestern provinces, Iran makes a long-term agreement to provide oil to the Soviet Union. However, the following year the Iranian parliament nullifies this agreement. |
| 1946 | John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert unveil an electronic digital computer at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC (“Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer”) uses punched cards for input and output data, contains 17,000 vacuum tubes, weighs over 30 tons, and occupies 1500 square feet of space. |
| 1946 | The Magnolia Petroleum Company (later part of Mobil) builds an oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, considered the first oil exploration effort in open ocean waters. It is a dry hole, but the following year Kerr-McGee brings in a producing well in the same area. |
| 1946 | The U.S. Atomic Energy Act is signed into law by President Harry Truman. It establishes the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a civilian body to control nuclear weapons development and explore peaceful uses of nuclear energy. |
| 1946 | The U.S. carries out the first subsurface detonation of a nuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, followed by demonstrations in Times Square, New York, against nuclear testing. |
| 1946 | United Nations establishes the International Atomic Energy Commission. |
| 1947 | Barium titanate is the first piezoelectric (electricity produced by mechanical pressure) ceramic to be used commercially, in its application as a phonograph needle. |
| 1947 | Cecil Frank Powell discovers the pion, a particle with mass between that of electrons and protons that interacts with neutrons and protons in the atomic nucleus. It is believed to be the meson-particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa twelve years earlier. |
| 1947 | The coal industry of Great Britain is completely nationalized under the auspices of the National Coal Board. |
| 1947 | The Grandcamp, a barge loaded with fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate, catches fire and explodes, destroying a nearby city and killing an estimated 570 people in what would later become known as the “Texas City Disaster.” |
| 1947 | The microwave oven is introduced by Raytheon, which developed the device after one of the company’s engineers, Dr. Percy Spencer, accidentally discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted due to microwave energy. Microwave ovens for the home are introduced in the early 1950s and by the mid 1970s their sale will surpass that of gas ranges. |
| 1947 | The Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation purchases the Big Inch and Little Big Inch and begins the process of converting them from oil to natural gas. |
| 1947 | The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission establishes the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a major research facility on eastern Long Island, New York. |
| 1947 | U.S. Air Force test pilot Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager flies the Bell X-1 rocket plane faster than the speed of sound, becoming the first pilot to break the sound barrier. |
| 1947 | Willard Frank Libby introduces a method of dating archaeological objects by determining the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 in the item of interest. |
| 1948 | John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, publicly unveil the first transistor, a device composed of semiconductor material that can both conduct and insulate. By 1952, transistors are being used in radios and hearing aids. |
| 1948 | Carl Nielsen of Ohio State University is credited with building the first ground-source heat pump. |
| 1948 | George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman formulate the Big Bang theory, explaining the origin of the universe in terms of a huge explosion producing a burst of energy. |
| 1948 | Norbert Weiner publishes Cybernetics, a detailed account of the mathematics of communication and a forerunner of computer science. |
| 1948 | The basic-oxygen steelmaking process comes into use in Switzerland (Linz-Donawitz process). |
| 1948 | The first nuclear reactor in France, the Zoe, begins operation at Fontenay-aux-Roses, using uranium from the Belgian Congo. |
| 1948 | The first successful continuous miners are introduced in U.S. underground coal mining. These machines break up the coal with huge bits or teeth, eliminating the need for blasting, and then load the broken coal directly into shuttle cars. |
| 1948 | The Ghawar Field is discovered in Saudi Arabia; it is the largest conventional oil field in the world (about 80 billion barrels). |
| 1948 | Twenty people die when a “killer fog” hovers over Donora, Pennsylvania. About 7,000 others are hospitalized or become ill, about half the population of the entire town. This is described as the first incident to make Americans generally aware of the health hazards of air pollution. |
| 1949 | A major advance is made in the measurement of time with the development of the first atomic clock, designed by Dr. Harold Lyons of the National Bureau of Standards in 1949, using a molecule of ammonium. |
| 1949 | The first natural gas deliveries to the New York City area arrive at Staten Island through the New York and Richmond Gas Company. |
| 1949 | The Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb (known as Joe-1) is detonated at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. It is a copy of the Fat Man bomb that the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, with a yield of 21 kilotons. The nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviets is now underway. |
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| 1950 | Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test as a means of determining whether a machine can be described as intelligent. He suggests that computers should be able “learn” from experience and then modify their activity accordingly; this provides the basis for the field of artificial intelligence. |
| 1950 | Great Britain’s first plutonium production reactor, Windscale’s Number 1 Pile, begins operation. |
| 1950 | Oil begins to flow through the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline). Oil fields in Saudi Arabia are now linked with the Mediterranean Sea at Sidon, Lebanon, over 1,000 miles away. The pipeline greatly reduces the number of tankers required to transport oil around the Arabian Peninsula through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean. |
| 1950 | Russian scientists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm present an idea for a controlled thermonuclear fusion reactor, the Tokamak (abbreviated from the Russian term for Toroidal Chamber with Magnetic Coil). The Tokamak design becomes one of the most popular in subsequent fusion energy research. |
| 1950 | The first European offshore oil well is drilled 1.5 miles from land in the North Sea at the mouth of the Elbe River in Cuxhaven, Germany. |
| ca. 1950 | Oil has replaced coal as the dominant fuel in the U.S. economy, as the discovery of cheap, abundant oil and the development of the internal combustion engine cause the coal-fired steam engine to be abandoned. Coal thereafter is used almost exclusively in power generation and steel production. |
| early 1950s | Home ownership of a television set becomes commonplace in the United States. |
| 1951 | At the National Reactor Testing Station in Arco, Idaho, the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-1) becomes the first nuclear reactor in the world to produce useable quantities of electric power, lighting four 100-watt light bulbs. |
| 1951 | Mauchly and Eckert follow up on their ENIAC computer by creating UNIVAC I, the first electronic computer to store data on magnetic tape and to be mass-produced is dedicated. |
| 1951 | An announcement is made that Philip Edwin Ohmart of Cincinnati, Ohio invents the radioactive cell, a battery that converts nuclear energy to electrical energy. |
| 1951 | The first full-fledged offshore drilling in the Persian Gulf is carried out in 19 feet of water, 3 miles from shore, and 20 miles south of Ras del Misha’ab. |
| 1951 | The first mechanized U.S. longwall mining system is in use; longwall is a high-extraction method in which a large rectangular block of coal is isolated and then extracted in a single continuous operation by an automated cutting head moving parallel to the coal face. |
| 1951 | The Iranian parliament votes to nationalize Iran’s oil industry; oil production then comes to a virtual standstill as British technicians leave the country. In response to Iran’s action, Britain imposes a worldwide embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil, freezes Iran’s sterling assets, and bans the export of goods to Iran. |
| 1951 | An atomic reactor was first used in medical therapy at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. |
| 1952 | A group led by Edward Teller develops and explodes a hydrogen bomb at the Eniwetok atoll, in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. This is the first thermonuclear device to employ the enormous power of nuclear fusion. It is described as 700 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. |
| 1952 | Britain’s De Havilland Comet becomes the first commercial jetliner, with a flight from London to Johannesburg. However, crashes due to metal fatigue then cause the plane to be grounded for several years, and by the late 1950s two U.S. rivals, the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, take over the lead in commercial jet service. |
| 1952 | Canada’s Chalk River nuclear reactor experiences a potential calamity when human error causes an unintended reaction. The resulting explosion blows the four-ton lid off the reactor, spurting radioactive water and setting off warnings of lethal radiation levels. Fortunately the building is evacuated and there are no casualties. |
| 1952 | The first offshore well in California with no connection to land is drilled, in 45 feet of water 1.5 miles offshore from Seal Beach. |
| 1952 | The Great Smog of London occurs after an exceptionally cold winter forces homes and factories to burn large quantities of coal. A temperature inversion forms, trapping pollutants above the ground. More than 4,000 people die from respiratory ailments within the following week. This leads to major reforms in air quality controls for Britain. |
| 1952 | The keel for the U.S. Navy’s first nuclear submarine, Nautilus, is laid at Groton, Connecticut. Nautilus is launched in 1954 and will set many records for submerged speed and distance traveled. |
| 1953 | Britain and the U.S. take part in Operation Ajax, a plan to oust nationalistic Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh. The coup succeeds and the pro-Western Reza Shah Pahlavi establishes a new oil consortium that restores Iran’s oil to the West. The U.S. then replaces Britain as the major foreign player in the Iranian oil industry. |
| 1953 | Discovery of the Great Global Rift in the Atlantic Ocean by Maurice Ewing and Bruce Charles Heezen establishes the study of plate tectonics and revolutionizes geology. |
| 1953 | Eugene P. Odum of the University of Georgia publishes Fundamentals of Ecology, with the aid of his brother Howard. This is the first textbook in the field; it employs a “top-down” approach starting at the ecosystem level and describes energy as a currency shared among the Earth’s various life forms. |
| 1953 | James Watson of the U.S. and Francis Crick of Britain describe the double-helical structure of DNA, leading to a revolution in the science of biology. |
| 1953 | President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a famous “Atoms for Peace” speech, proposes to the General Assembly of the United Nations the creation of an organization to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy; this eventually leads to creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. |
| 1953 | Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes the development of Calder Hall in West Cumbria, a complex of four reactors that is the world’s first commercial nuclear power facility. Queen Elizabeth officially opens the first of these in 1956. |
| 1953 | The British begin nuclear testing at the Maralinga nuclear test site, a tract of Aboriginal land in the state of South Australia. The area will later be the target of a massive clean up campaign. |
| 1953 | The deepest known well dug by means of cable tool drilling, normally used for wells a few hundred feet deep, is completed when the New York Natural Gas Corporation drills a well to a depth of 11,145 feet. |
| 1953 | The EBR-I reactor demonstrates the feasibility of the breeder reactor concept; a team led by Walter Zinn shows that uranium can be “bred,” or transformed, into plutonium, thus making it possible to use virtually all of the energy in natural uranium. |
| 1953 | The first gas-turbine, propane-fueled locomotive is placed in service by the Union Pacific Railroad. |
| ca. 1953 | Architect Frank Bridgers designs the Bridgers-Paxton Building in Albuquerque, New Mexico; this is the first office building to use passive solar heating. |
| 1954 | Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow invent a highly precise timing device called the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). This is a forerunner of the laser, which Townes and Schawlow describe in theory in 1958 but do not actually produce (see 1960). |
| 1954 | Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller, and Daryl Chapin, researchers at New Jersey’s Bell Laboratories, develop a method of producing electricity directly from sunlight, using an array of silicon-based solar cells. |
| 1954 | President Dwight Eisenhower signs the first major amendment of the original Atomic Energy Act, giving the civilian nuclear power program further access to nuclear technology. |
| 1954 | Researchers at RCA describe the photovoltaic effect in cadmium sulfide; eventually a large segment of the solar energy industry will use cadmium in its photovoltaic modules. |
| 1954 | South African Synthetic Oil Limited begins operation of SASOL One, the first civilian coal-to-fuel plant in the world. |
| 1954 | The Association for Applied Solar Energy (AFSE) is founded in the U.S. to encourage the use of renewable energy. The organization later becomes known as the American Solar Energy Society (ASES). |
| 1954 | The first purpose-built submersible drilling unit is used in the Gulf of Mexico by Odeco (Offshore Drilling and Exploration Company). |
| 1954 | The Soviet Union begins operation of the first nuclear reactor built for the peacetime production of power at the Obninsk plant. It is known as AM-1, with the letters being a Russian-language acronym for “peaceful atom.” |
| 1954 | The U.S. Supreme Court rules that interstate natural gas producers are subject to regulation by the Federal Power Commission. An era of regulated gas prices is established, based on the cost of providing gas rather than its market value. This keeps prices low, encouraging demand, but it discourages exploration and thus contributes to shortages in the 1970s. |
| 1954 | UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the government of India sponsor a symposium on solar and wind power in New Delhi. |
| 1954 | Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicts that electricity produced by nuclear power will soon be so abundant that “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,” during a speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York. |
| 1954 | "U.S.S. Nautilus," the nation’s first atomic-powered submarine, was launched at Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut. |
| 1955 | Arco, Idaho, population about 1,300, becomes the first town in the U.S. to receive its entire supply of power from a nuclear source when electricity produced in an experimental nuclear power plant operated by Argonne National Laboratory at the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission’s National Reactor Testing Station, twenty miles from Arco, starts feeding energy into transmission lines supplying the small town. The experimental boiling water reactor BORAX-III produces approximately 2,000 kilowatts of electrical power for about two hours. |
| 1955 | Geneva, Switzerland hosts the first United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. About 1,500 delegates attend, representing 73 countries. |
| 1955 | The Atomic Energy Basic Law is passed in Japan, limiting the use of nuclear technology to peaceful purposes. Japan imports its first commercial nuclear power reactor from the UK and begins power production in 1966. By 2000, Japan gets about one-third of its power from nuclear plants. |
| 1955 | The first World Symposium on Solar Energy is held in Phoenix, Arizona, where engineers and scientists from around the world assemble to review the current state of the field. Accompanying this meeting is an exhibition, “The Sun at Work,” attended by about 30,000 people. |
| 1955 | W. Fred Cottrell, a sociologist at Miami (Ohio) University, is the first to comprehensively apply the concept of net energy and energy surplus to the analysis of economic and social development. |
| mid 1950s | Many factories now employ electrostatic precipitators to filter out some pollutants from smokestack emissions before they reach the atmosphere. |
| mid 1950s | Various workers in the U.S. and Europe report that bundles of glass fiber can be used for image transmission. One of them, Indian-born researcher Narinder Singh Kapany, reportedly coins the phrase “fiber optics” to describe this technology. |
| 1956 | At the urging of President Eisenhower, the U.S. Congress enacts the Federal Aid Highway Act, a program of interstate highway construction that greatly expands the U.S. network of modern roadways. Originally conceived as a system of military transport, its eventual effect will be to ensure the demise of the railroad as a major form of interstate transportation. |
| 1956 | British engineer Christopher Cockerell invents the Hovercraft, a vessel that travels over water on a cushion of air. |
| 1956 | Celilo Falls, a traditional Indian salmon fishing site, is flooded by the waters of The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River. This leads to controversy over the conflict between tribal rights and hydropower development. |
| 1956 | French engineer Felix Trombe develops the Trombe wall, a solar collector consisting of a south-facing glass wall with an air space between it and a blackened concrete wall. The blackened wall is heated by sunlight passing through the glass, and it then releases heat, causing warm air to rise in the space between the glass and the concrete. |
| 1956 | The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) authorizes construction of the world’s first two large, privately owned nuclear power plants, one at Indian Point, New York, and the other in Grundy County, Illinois. |
| 1956 | The first transatlantic telephone cable laid between Newfoundland and Scotland is inaugurated; this links the phone networks of Canada and the U.S. with the UK, and, via London, with various nations on the European continent. |
| 1956 | The National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. recommends deep geologic disposal of the long-lived, highly radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors, suggesting that buried salt deposits and other rock types be investigated for permanent repositories. |
| 1956 | The Suez Crisis erupts as Israel, supported by Britain and France, attacks Egypt after that country nationalizes the Suez Canal. The crisis ends when the U.S. and the Soviet Union force a cease-fire. The resulting loss of prestige and influence for Britain is often described as the final step in her decline as a colonial power. |
| 1956 | To retaliate for the actions of Britain and France against Egypt in the Suez War, King Saud of Saudi Arabia cuts off oil supplies to Britain and France. This marks the first time such a step is taken by an Arab state. |
| 1956 | U.S. geologist Marion King Hubbert predicts that oil production in the lower 48 states will peak around 1970, which in fact it does. Hubbert’s work becomes a lightning rod for debate about oil supplies for decades to come. |
| 1956-1957 | Engineer Johannes Juul develops the first alternating current windmill for the electricity company SEAS at the Gedser coast in southern Denmark. For many years the Gedser turbine remains the largest in the world. |
| 1957 | A converted version of the U.S. B-57 military aircraft flies with power from a liquid hydrogen fuel system. |
| 1957 | A reactor fire at England’s Windscale (Sellafield) nuclear power plant burns out of control for about 24 hours. An estimated 20,000 curies of radioactive iodine escapes along with other isotopes such as plutonium, caesium, and the highly toxic polonium. Prime Minister Macmillan orders news of the accident to be suppressed for fear of alarming the public (see also 1982). |
| 1957 | Felix Wankel operates his rotary engine, an idea he first conceived in the mid-1920s. This is a four-cycle internal combustion engine that does not use pistons. Though the Wankel engine has great simplicity of operation and an excellent power-to-weight ratio, it does not come into use until the 1970s and to date it has not had a major commercial impact. |
| 1957 | IBM introduces the Model 608 computer, the first solid-state computer for the commercial market. |
| 1957 | Japanese physicist Leo Esaki discovers the tunnel diode, a high-speed current-switching device that is the first semiconductor quantum electron structure. |
| 1957 | Melvin Calvin, a U.S. chemist, uses radioactive carbon-14 to map the complete route that carbon travels through a plant during photosynthesis, starting from its absorption as atmospheric carbon dioxide to its conversion into carbohydrates and other organic compounds. This becomes known as the Calvin Cycle. |
| 1957 | Nobel laureate Linus Pauling writes and lectures on the dangers posed by nuclear fallout for human life and the environment. In the following year he presents a petition to the United Nations opposing further nuclear weapon testing, signed by more than 11,000 scientists from 49 different countries. |
| 1957 | Novelist Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road; it becomes a best seller and eventually will be known as the “Bible of the Beat Generation.” The author’s memorable descriptions of marathon car trips across the American continent epitomize the love affair between mid-century Americans and their automobiles. |
| 1957 | Oil is discovered at Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula near the Swanson River, the first significant oil discovery in the state. |
| 1957 | Power from a civilian nuclear unit is generated for the first time by the Sodium Reactor Experiment at Santa Susana, California. The unit provides power until 1966. |
| 1957 | Roger Revelle of the U.S. and Hans Suess of Austria demonstrate that carbon dioxide has increased in the atmosphere as a result of the use of fossil fuels. Revelle concludes that “Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” |
| 1957 | The cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctions and explodes at a nuclear facility in Chelyabinsk province of the Soviet Union. About two million curies are released, exposing a quarter of a million people to radiation. The facility also is responsible for decades of dumping that release large amounts of radiation. |
| 1957 | The first long-distance coal pipeline goes into commercial service. It moves coal slurry (a mixture of water, fine coal particles and other wastes from washing coal) from a mine in Ohio to a power station over 100 miles away. |
| 1957 | The Price-Anderson Act provides financial protection to the American public and Atomic Energy Corporation licensees and contractors if a major accident occurs at a nuclear power plant. |
| 1957 | The Space Age begins with the launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union. In the following month Sputnik 2 is launched with the first animal to go into in space, a dog named Laika. |
| 1957 | The United Nations creates the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. |
| 1957 | The world’s first large-scale nuclear power plant begins operation in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. The plant reaches full power three weeks later and supplies electricity to the Pittsburgh area. |
| 1957 | Three physicists at the University of Illinois, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer, develop the “BCS” model of why superconductors behave as they do. They show that electrons in a superconductor condense into a quantum ground state and travel together collectively and coherently. |
| 1957 | U.S. ecologist Howard T. Odum publishes a landmark paper that quantifies the energy flow among the trophic levels in the ecosystem of Silver Springs, Florida. |
| 1958 | A geothermal power station begins operation at Wairakei, New Zealand; this is the second commercial geothermal plant in the world (after Larderello, Italy) and the first to exploit a wet geothermal resource. |
| 1958 | After years of unsuccessfully trying to harness fusion, scientists from the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union declassify their fusion research at the second United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva. |
| 1958 | Based on the work of Willard Thomas Grubb and Leonard Niedrach, the General Electric Company develops the first commercially successful fuel cell, which will be used by NASA in the Gemini earth-orbit space program. |
| 1958 | Chrysler introduces the first mass-produced electronic fuel injection system, designed by Bosch. It is not welcomed by consumers and in the 1960s the Bendix patents are sold to Bosch; that company then develops an improved version that becomes successful. |
| 1958 | Construction begins on the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, the N.S. Savannah, in Camden, New Jersey. The ship is launched the following year. |
| 1958 | In response to the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the United States creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Defense Department to promote the development of new technologies with military application. ARPA will be a catalyst for the development of the modern computer, the Internet, and other information technology. |
| 1958 | Sam Cohen, formerly of the Manhattan Project, develops the concept for a neutron bomb, a “smart” type of nuclear weapon modified to have a smaller overall blast effect but to release high-energy neutrons that will take lives far beyond the blast area. |
| 1958 | The U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency launches Explorer I, the first artificial satellite placed into orbit by the United States. In the same year the U.S. will launch five more Explorer satellites (some of which reach orbit and others not). |
| 1958 | The United States launches Vanguard I, the first PV-powered satellite, in cooperation with the U.S. Signal Corp. This is now the oldest satellite still in orbit. |
| 1958-1959 | Engineers Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce of the U.S. separately invent the integrated circuit, a miniaturized electronic circuit that will possible the development of much smaller, cheaper, and more powerful computers and other modern electronic devices. |
| 1959 | An oil well drilling platform is constructed in over 200 feet of water offshore from Louisiana. |
| 1959 | British scientist Francis Bacon demonstrates a fuel cell device that can produce 5 kilowatts of power, enough to run a welding machine. This is the culmination of nearly 30 years of effort by Bacon to produce a workable fuel cell. Later that same year, Harry K. Ihrig of Allis-Chalmers displays the first fuel cell vehicle, a 20-horsepower tractor. |
| 1959 | The Dresden-1 Nuclear Power Station in Illinois, the first U.S. nuclear plant built entirely without government funding, achieves a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. |
| 1959 | The first man-made object lands on the moon, the Soviet Lunik II rocket. |
| 1959 | U.S. brewing company Coors sells beer in aluminum cans for the first time, and other beverage companies soon follow suit. By the 1970s aluminum cans will replace bottles as the leading type of drink container, giving rise to a huge recycling program to recover the used cans. |
| 1959 | Verner Suomi, a U.S. meteorologist, uses data from the Explorer VII satellite to estimate the global radiation heat budget of the Earth-atmosphere system. This is the first use of a satellite to characterize the Earth’s energy balance. |
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| ca. 1960 | The human population reaches 3 billion. |
| 1960 | Physicist Theodore Harold Maiman designs the first working laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), using a pink ruby medium. Within two years, the laser is being employed in eye surgeries. The term “laser” was reportedly coined earlier by Gordon Gould, and he will eventually win several key laser patents. |
| 1960 | President Eisenhower establishes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which will eventually consist of more than 19 million acres. Later this area will become the focus of an intense debate between environmentalists and developers over whether to allow oil drilling in the coastal plain of the Refuge (see 1980). |
| 1960 | The final steam locomotive is built by British Railways, the Evening Star. |
| 1960 | The first large-scale geothermal power plant in the U.S. begins operation at The Geysers geothermal field in northern California. The Geysers soon becomes the world’s largest steamfield, reaching its peak production in 1987, when it produces enough electricity to supply 1.8 million people. |
| 1960 | The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is created at the four day Baghdad Conference, starting on September 10, among the five original members: Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Qatar joins OPEC in 1961, followed by Indonesia and Libya (1963), the Emirates of Abu Dhabi (1968), Algeria (1969), Nigeria (1971), Ecuador (1973), and Gabon (1975). The latter two leave OPEC in the 1990s. |
| 1960 | The transition in the U.S. from manufactured gas to natural gas is virtually complete. However, environmental concerns still exist because of toxic byproducts remaining in soil and groundwater at the sites of former manufactured gas plants. |
| 1960 | The Yankee Atomic Electric Company plant (Yankee Rowe) begins operation on the Deerfield River at Rowe, Mass. The company is formed by twelve New England utilities to supply electrical power. Yankee Rowe operates for more than 30 years until being shut down due to reactor vessel embrittlement. |
| 1960 | West Germany builds its first industrial nuclear reactor, the Kahl am Obermain experimental nuclear power plant. It will operate until 1985. |
| 1960 | The Atomic Energy Commission announced the successful development of a 220-pound nuclear reactor designed to provide electric power for space vehicles. |
| 1961 | Self-advancing hydraulic longwall supports are introduced to U.S. coal mining. These provide greater support for the roof of the mine and also reduce deformation, fracture, and movement around the coal face, |
| 1961 | The U.S. Navy Transit 4A spacecraft is launched. This is the first use of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator for space applications. These generators provide electrical power for spacecraft by direct conversion of the heat generated by the decay of plutonium-238. |
| 1961 | The Soviet Union sends the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, who orbits Earth in a 108-minute mission aboard the Vostok I. The following month, Alan Shepherd becomes the first American in space when he makes a suborbital flight of 15 minutes. |
| 1961 | The U.S. Navy commissions the world’s largest ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise. It is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with the ability to operate for distances up to 400,000 miles without refueling. |
| 1961 | U.S. physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others propose a system for classifying subatomic particles which Gell-Mann terms “the eightfold way.” The system is the foundation of the quark theory. |
| 1961 | U.S. President Kennedy says that citizens can survive a nuclear attack if they take refuge in a fallout shelter. A national survey identifies large buildings and other sites such as mines, caves, and tunnels that could protect people from fallout radiation; these areas are designated as public shelters. |
| ca. 1961 | Small nuclear-power generators are first used in remote areas to power weather stations and to light buoys for sea navigation. |
| early 1960s | Regulations to limit harmful emissions from motor vehicles are introduced in the U.S. and other nations. Emission control devices are then installed in new vehicles. |
| early 1960s | The Pratt and Whitney Division of United Aircraft (now United Technologies) takes out a license on the fuel cell patents of Francis Bacon (see 1932) and uses the concept of the Bacon cell to provide electrical power for the Apollo spacecraft. |
| 1962 | A trash fire in an open-pit anthracite coal mine in Centralia, Pennsylvania ignites an exposed vein of coal. This in turn burns through old coal mines under the town, and fire, smoke, and toxic gases reach the surface and eventually force the abandonment of most of the town’s buildings. As of this writing, the fire still burns. |
| 1962 | General Electric scientist Nick Holonyak creates the first light-emitting diode (LED). LED displays will become a universally used light source in consumer electronics, traffic signals, public information messages, and many other applications. |
| 1962 | In Natick, Massachusetts, a solar furnace is built by the U.S. Army to simulate radiation burns and to experiment with pigs wearing sunscreen lotions that might protect soldiers from nuclear radiation. |
| 1962 | Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, the first widely read work to describe the effect on health and the environment of human-produced toxic chemicals, such as the insecticide DDT. This book is often given credit for launching the modern environmental movement at the popular level. |
| 1962 | The U.S. Congress creates the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT). Agencies from 17 other countries join with COMSAT in 1964, forming an international consortium to establish a satellite communications network. By this time the U.S. has launched a series of satellites, beginning with Echo I in 1960. |
| 1962 | Telstar satellite launched; the first commercial telecommunications satellite; project of Bell Telephone Laboratories, proposed in 1955 by John R. Pierce. Initial power, 14 watts. |
| 1962 | The U.S. Navy constructs a nuclear power plant at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, to supply power for the American research installations there. |
| 1963 | Ffestiniog Power Station in Wales goes into operation, the UK’s first major pumped storage power facility. Pumped storage involves two reservoirs at different levels. Water is pumped to the higher of the two, then released to flow downward through high-pressure shafts linked to turbines, thus generating power for electricity. |
| 1963 | Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse publish the first empirical analysis of the supply of natural resources in the U.S. It shows that the cost of timber, fish, minerals, and fuels generally declined from 1870 to 1957 due to what they call “self-generating technological change.” This is used by some to argue that human ingenuity can overcome natural resource constraints. |
| 1963 | Japan installs a 242-W photovoltaic array on a lighthouse, the world’s largest array at that time. |
| 1963 | The Jersey Central Power and Light Company announces its commitment for the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, the first time a nuclear plant is ordered as an economic alternative to a fossil-fuel plant. |
| 1963 | Semisubmersible platforms are in use for offshore oil drilling. In semisubmersible technology, ballasted, watertight pontoons below the sea surface and its wave action provide a base for columns that penetrate the water surface and support the operating deck. |
| 1963 | The U.S. Congress passes the first Clean Air Act, legislation intended to “improve, strengthen, and accelerate programs for the prevention and abatement of air pollution.” Various other Clean Air Acts will follow in the 1960s and after. |
| 1964 | George Heilmeier heads a research group at RCA that produces the first liquid crystal display (LCD). This becomes a widely used technology for various electronic applications, such as watches and clocks, computer displays, and eventually television screens (the original use envisioned by the RCA team). |
| 1964 | Japan’s Shinkansen (also known as the Bullet Train) becomes the world’s first high-speed railway system. It runs between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka at a maximum business speed of over 200 km/h (130-160 mph). |
| 1964 | Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently introduce the three-quark model of elementary particles. |
| 1964 | The Baltimore Light Station on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland becomes the first nuclear powered lighthouse in the United States. |
| 1964 | The General Electric PEM fuel cell represents the first successful application of a fuel cell in space. |
| 1964 | Three U.S. nuclear-powered surface ships, the Enterprise, Long Beach, and Bainbridge, complete “Operation Sea Orbit,” an around-the-world cruise. |
| 1964 | U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Private Ownership of Special Nuclear Materials Act, which allows the nuclear power industry to own the fuel for its units. |
| 1965 | A year of major advances in space technology, with the Soviets making the first space walk, the United States launching the first nuclear reactor in space (SNAP, or Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power), the Americans completing the first space rendezvous between two satellites, and the Soviets sending out a space probe that lands on Venus. |
| 1965 | Geologists discover oil and natural gas in the West Sole Field of the North Sea, off the coast of Great Britain. Eventually North Sea oil will make Britain roughly self-sufficient in energy and also bring great prosperity to Norway, which will become one of the world’s leading oil exporters. |
| 1965 | The Great Blackout of 1965 covers 80,000-square miles of the northeastern U.S. and Canada. The failure affects four million homes in the New York City area, and leaves between 600,000 and 800,000 people stranded in the city’s subway system. The events of the blackout become the subject of a Hollywood film, Where Were You When The Lights Went Out? |
| mid 1960s | Both the United States and the Soviet Union have deployed a full-scale system of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). |
| mid 1960s | The era of the supertanker is underway as ultra-large vessels are used to transport oil around the globe, especially from the Middle East to western Europe and the U.S. |
| mid 1960s | U.S. ecologist Eugene E. Likens describes the phenomenon of acid rain in North America, based on observations at Hubbard Brook, New Hampshire, a leading research site he co-founded for studies in ecosystem science and biogeochemistry. Acid rain will be tied directly to pollutants from the combustion of fossil fuels. |
| 1966 | The world’s largest tidal power plant goes into operation at the mouth of the La Rance river in northern France. The tide is channeled through the narrow entrance to the river, across which is a dam with turbines and generators. |
| 1966 | U.S. economist Kenneth Boulding publishes The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, the first explicit application of the law of conservation of matter to describe the physical limits to economic growth. |
| 1967 | Egypt, Syria, and Jordan oppose Israel in the third Arab-Israeli War. This becomes known as the “Six-Day War” because of the swift Israeli victory. The war results in territorial gains for Israel and increased tensions between the Arab World and the West. |
| 1967 | Saudi Arabia leads an Arab oil embargo against the U.S. and Britain, who were accused of aiding Israel against Arab countries in the Six-Day War. The boycott, however, lasts for only two months and does not significantly affect the Western economies. |
| 1967 | The first barrel is shipped from the Great Canadian Oil Sands Project, the first commercially successful operation to tap the rich Athabasca oil sands in the province of Alberta. The project ushers in an era of rapid development of this oil sand resource base. |
| 1967 | The Oroville Dam on the Feather River in northern California is completed; it is the tallest dam in the U.S. |
| 1967 | The supertanker Torrey Canyon runs aground on a reef near the coast of Cornwall in southwestern England. The ship spills an estimated 30 million gallons of oil into the sea, producing environmental damage on a scale not even imagined before that time and blighting the entire region for years to come. |
| 1968 | A coal mine explosion in Farmington, West Virginia results in the death of 78 miners. This mine is just a few miles away from Monongah, the site of the worst mine disaster in U.S. history (see 1907). |
| 1968 | Large oil deposits are discovered in Alaska at Prudhoe Bay, but it is not until 1977 that the first oil is shipped via the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. |
| 1968 | Lev Asimovich, director of the Soviet controlled-fusion program, announces that the Soviet T-3 tokamak has confined a plasma at a temperature of more than 10 million degrees centigrade for more than 10 thousandths of a second. Europe, Japan, and the U.S. all strive to develop tokamak designs. |
| 1968 | OPEC Resolution XVI.90 sets forth major new demands; this signals an era of stronger national control of Mideast oil, and the declining ability of Western multinational oil companies to control the global oil supply. |
| 1968 | The Odeillo solar furnace, the most powerful in the world, is built at Font-Romeu in the Eastern Pyrenees region of France. It has 10,000 small mirrors that concentrate the sun’s energy into useable power. |
| 1968 | The Soviet Union operates an experimental tidal power station near Murmansk. |
| 1968 | The Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144 becomes the first supersonic transport plane (SST) to take flight, preceding the Concorde by two months (see 1969). The TU-144 begins service in 1975 and makes its last commercial flight in 1978. The U.S. funds its own SST project in the 1960s, but the program is dropped in 1971 without any aircraft ever being flown. |
| 1968 | The U.S. Congress creates the Wild and Scenic Rivers System, which will “preserve selected rivers or sections thereof in their free-flowing condition to protect the water quality of such rivers and to fulfill other vital national conservation purposes.” |
| 1968 | U.S. space scientist Peter Glaser presents the concept for the Solar Power Satellite system, to supply power from space for use on the Earth. The SPS system would have a huge array of solar cells, perhaps tens of square miles, that would generate electrical power to be beamed to earth in the form of microwave energy. |
| late 1960s | The advent of more powerful digital electronic computers make it possible to model the global general atmospheric circulation for the first time. By the 1970s, general circulation models (GCMs) are the central tool of climate scientists such as Syukuro Manabe and Kirk Bryan, and they will play a key role in describing climate change. |
| late 1960s | The agricultural movement known as the Green Revolution is underway, featuring the widespread use of new, high-yielding crop varieties and new technologies such as increased use of irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticides. This increases harvests for millions of farmers, although with some negative social and environmental impacts. |
| 1969 | An offshore oil drilling platform at Santa Barbara, California, suffers a natural gas blowout, releasing about 200,000 gallons of crude oil. The spill mars 35 miles of coastline and causes extensive environmental damage, especially to the local populations of marine mammals and seabirds. |
| 1969 | ARPANET, the technological forerunner of today’s Internet, is established. It links four nodes: the University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and Stanford Research Institute. Its basic services of remote log-in, file transfer protocol, electronic mail, continue as functions of the Internet. |
| 1969 | Big Muskie, described as the world’s largest earth-moving machine at over 200 feet in height and weighing some 13,500 tons, is put into use in Cumberland, Ohio. Big Muskie is what is known as a walking dragline, a machine designed to expose deeply buried coal seams that smaller machines could not reach. |
| 1969 | Boeing’s 747, the first “jumbo jet,” makes its inaugural flight. Jumbo jets such as the 747, the Lockheed L-1011, and the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 will be the stars of air travel in the coming decade, but rising fuel costs later cause the airlines to turn to smaller planes and today only a single model of the 747 is a holdover from the jumbo jet era. |
| 1969 | Ted Hoff of Intel proposes the microprocessor, a new type of computer architecture based on a single-chip general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Intel will release the first working CPU in 1971; this single chip has as much computing power as the ENIAC computer, which filled an entire room. |
| 1969 | The British-French supersonic aircraft Concorde makes its first flight. It will begin transcontinental commercial passenger flights in 1976. The Concorde ceases flying in 2003 because of safety concerns and the high cost of operation relative to passenger revenue. |
| 1969 | The Cuyahoga River, flowing through Cleveland, Ohio, catches fire from oil and chemical pollution. The paradoxical image of a burning body of water becomes a rallying point for passage of the Clean Water Act. |
| 1969 | The first person to step on the moon is Neil A. Armstrong of the United States, followed by Buzz Aldrin, with Michael Collins orbiting the moon in the Apollo 11 spacecraft. |
| 1969 | The S.S. Manhattan, an ice-breaking tanker, becomes the first commercial ship to sail the fabled Northwest Passage, a dream of navigators for 500 years. The purpose of the expedition is to test the feasibility of using the Northwest Passage to transport oil from Alaska’s North Slope to the markets of the eastern U.S. and Europe. |
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| 1970 | At California’s Geysers project, the injection of spent geothermal fluids back into the production zone begins, as a means to dispose of waste water and maintain reservoir life. |
| 1970 | Earth Day is celebrated for the first time in the U.S. as a nationwide demonstration advocating environmental protection and preservation. This demonstration is conceived by Gaylord Nelson, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, and organized by Denis Hayes. |
| 1970 | IBM introduces an 8-inch “floppy disk” as a medium for data storage in its 370 computer. |
| 1970 | Premier Zhou-Enlai of China delivers a speech emphasizing the necessity for exploring the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The first nuclear reactor in China will not come on line until the 1990s. |
| 1970 | The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is officially opened in the U.S., with the mission to “protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment—air, water, and land—upon which life depends.” |
| 1970 | The first silica fiber optical cable is produced at the Corning Glass Works (New York), using chemical vapor deposition techniques to reduce attenuation and improve signal transmission. |
| 1970 | The Geothermal Steam Act is enacted by Congress; it authorizes and governs the lease of geothermal steam and related resources on public lands. The Geothermal Resources Council is formed to encourage the development of geothermal resources worldwide. |
| 1970 | The level of production of crude oil in the United States reaches its all-time high. |
| 1970 | The U.S. Congress adopts a law requiring federal agencies, including the Atomic Energy Agency, to consider thermal pollution in their licensing process. This is the first time that environmental issues are seriously raised in the context of nuclear power, and is a harbinger of more intense scrutiny of nuclear power’s potential impact. |
| 1970 | The United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and forty-five other nations sign the Treaty for the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. |
| 1970 | British Petroleum company announces that it struck oil in the North Sea. Such a discovery makes a large difference in British oil prices since most of its to that point has been imported. |
| 1970 | The Black Mesa coal pipeline becomes operational, transporting coal slurry 273 miles from a mine on Navajo Indian land in northern Arizona to the Mojave Generating Station at Laughlin, Nevada. This is currently the only coal slurry pipeline in operation in the U.S. |
| 1970–1974 | Paul Crutzen and Harold Johnston identify an ozone-destroying catalytic cycle involving oxides of nitrogen. Richard Stolarski and Ralph Cicerone propose another such cycle involving chlorine, and Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland link this cycle to ozone depletion by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions. |
| 1971 | For the first time, surface mined coal production in the United States exceeds the amount of coal mined underground. |
| 1971 | Howard T. Odum publishes Environment, Power, and Society, a classic and comprehensive application of thermodynamics and ecological energetics to the analysis of human economic and social systems. |
| 1971 | Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a Hungarian-born mathematician and economist, publishes The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which the second law of thermodynamics plays a central role in production theory. This work becomes a cornerstone of the fields of ecological and evolutionary economics. |
| 1971 | Ray Tomlinson of Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. sends the first e-mail message across the ARPANET system. The content of the message is chosen at random, probably something like ‘qwertyuiop’ or ‘Testing 1-2-3.’ |
| 1971 | Twenty-two commercial nuclear power plants are in full operation in the United States. They produce 2.4% of U.S. electricity at this time. |
| 1971 | Chamber of Commerce director warns of the potential "collapse of entire industries" from pollution regulation, especially oil and automotive. Later the speech is seen as a classic example of industry exaggeration about pollution controls. |
| early 1970s | Ecologists Robert Whitaker, Eugene Likens, H. Leith, and other biologists quantify the net primary production and plant biomass for the Earth’s major biomes. |
| early 1970s | Kalundborg, Denmark, a small coastal town, begins a web of energy and material exchanges among several firms seeking income-producing uses for waste products. Eventually, the firm managers and town residents realize they are generating environmental benefits as well. The term “industrial symbiosis” is used to describe this system. |
| early 1970s | Russian-born chemist Ilya Prigogine extends the second law of thermodynamics to systems that are far from equilibrium, and shows that stable, coherent patterns could emerge under such conditions. He calls these “dissipative structures;” this concept is used to describe phenomena such as the growth of cities and the physics of car traffic. |
| 1972 | Ford Motor Company develops a sodium-sulfur battery for use as a power source in electric vehicles. |
| 1972 | The Clean Water Act is passed, establishing the basic structure for regulating the discharge of pollutants into the waters of the United States. |
| 1972 | The Club of Rome publishes The Neo-Malthusian Limits to Growth, warning that if the world’s consumption patterns and population growth continue at the same high rates of the time, various calamities will befall the Earth and mankind. |
| 1972 | The first large-scale commercial waste-to-energy facility is used by the Union Electric Company’s Meramec Plant in St. Louis, Missouri. Refuse is shredded and burned with coal to generate electricity. |
| 1972 | The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announces a ban on the pesticide DDT. This is part of a trend in which DDT is generally banned worldwide. In recent years, however, critics have argued that the ban should be lifted because of the huge numbers of deaths in the developing world from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. |
| 1972 | The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), is begins in Stockholm, Sweden, with 113 countries represented; this is the first global environmental summit. Treatment of energy is largely limited to the environmental effects of energy extraction, processing, and consumption. |
| 1972 | U.S. scientist Paul Berg assembles the first DNA molecules that combine genes from different organisms. In the following year Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen report the construction of functional organisms that combine and replicate genetic information from different species. |
| 1972 | Negligent strip mining led to buildup of floodwaters at the Buffalo Creek Dam in West Virginia that broke through "tipple" dams, killing 125 people and leaving 4,000 homeless. |
| 1972 | The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announces all gasoline stations required to carry "nonleaded" gasoline. But the EPA delays setting standards until 1973, then is sued by Ethyl Corp. |
| ca. 1972 | The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announces that a salt mine at Lyons, Kansas, will be developed as a high-level radioactive waste repository. The decision is reversed in 1972 after geologists learn that the site is riddled with abandoned oil and gas exploration boreholes. |
| 1972-1982 | More than 100 orders for nuclear power plants in the U.S. are canceled, due mainly to cost overruns, a decline in the demand for power, and public concerns about safety. The number grows to 124 cancellations by 2000. |
| 1973 | A huge pumped-storage facility goes into operation on Lake Michigan. The Ludington power plant pumps water uphill from the lake to a storage reservoir when demand is low, then releases the water to flow back downhill and generate electricity as needed by turning giant turbines. |
| 1973 | A total of 109 nuclear power plants operating in the United States generate 610 billion kilowatt-hours of net electricity, providing about one-fifth of the nation’s electricity. |
| 1973 | America’s public and private utilities form the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. EPRI will grow to be one of the world’s most influential electric power research and development organizations. |
| 1973 | An international journal known as Energy Policy begins publication. This is the first social science journal pertaining to the study of energy. |
| 1973 | Chemist Nathaniel Wyeth receives a patent for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) beverage bottles. This is the first practical plastic that is strong enough to hold carbonated beverages without bursting, and it soon becomes a recyclable material. |
| 1973 | Conventional natural gas production peaks in the U.S. Abundant quantities of unconventional gas (deep gas, coalbed methane, tight gas) still remain today, but their economic, technological, and environmental viability are the subject of considerable debate. |
| 1973 | Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack against Israel in what will become known as the Yom Kippur War. Many other Arab states also provide troops and supplies, including Iraq and Saudi Arabia. |
| 1973 | Members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) meet in Kuwait as the Yom Kippur War goes on. They reach agreement on a coordinated policy of cuts in oil production coupled with price increases. |
| 1973 | The Arab oil-producing states impose a complete embargo on oil shipments to the U.S. in retaliation for American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The embargo will later be extended to The Netherlands. Japan and other nations in Europe will also be hard hit by the combination of price increases and production cuts. |
| 1973 | The first major energy crisis in the United States occurs as a result of the Arab oil embargo. By the following year the price of crude oil will be four times its level of 1972. The oil embargo will be lifted in March of 1974, but the U.S. and other Western nations will continue to feel its effects for years to come. |
| 1973 | President Richard Nixon launches "Project Independence," with the goal of achieving energy self-sufficiency by 1980. |
| 1973 | The Federal Energy Office replaces the Energy Policy Office. The new office is assigned the tasks of controlling the price of oil and gasoline and allocating reduced petroleum supplies to refiners and consumers. |
| 1973 | President Nixon announces standby gasoline rationing in light of the Arab oil embargo. New provisions include a ban on Sunday sale of gasoline. Various states also impose forms of rationing; e.g., sale of gas to motorists on alternate days depending on a car’s license number. |
| 1974 | U.S. President Richard Nixon announces a series of measures to cope with fuel shortages, such as a national 55-mph speed limit and year-round daylight saving time. |
| 1974 | As a response to the oil crisis, England reduces speeds limits on dual carriageways they the year limited 60mph (96kph), and on all other roads to 50mph (80kph). |
| 1974 | The anger of independent truckers over the high cost of fuel comes to a head on a stretch of Interstate 78 outside of Lenhartsville in Berks County. A group of men hurl a large rock off an overpass at a truck being driven by Spring Grove resident Ronald Hengst. The rock crashes through Hengst’s windshield, causing a collision. Hengst is killed in the crash. |
| 1974 | A group known as the Owners Operators Independent Drivers Association of America stages a massive nationwide strike protesting spiraling cost of fuel, fuel shortages, and reduced speed limits. Violence erupts when an estimated 5,000 members within Pennsylvania participate in the 10-day trucking shutdown and attempt to halt truckers not participating in the strike. |
| 1974 | The oil embargo is lifted. During the embargo, OPEC members earned more than $100 billion because of the increase in the price of crude oil. |
| 1974 | A well that bottoms out at 31,441 feet is drilled in Oklahoma, the deepest well ever drilled in the U.S. at the time. It is a dry well. |
| 1974 | Entrepreneur Robert Beaumont revives the consumer electric vehicle market with his CitiCar. Several thousand of these will be produced, due to interest in alternative vehicles spurred by the oil crisis of 1973. However, the CitiCar is essentially a glorified golf cart and by the late 1970s it is no longer produced. |
| 1974 | Faced with rising oil prices and a heavy dependence on imported oil, the French government embarks on an ambitious plan to develop nuclear power. By 2000, France has built 58 reactors that supply nearly three-quarters of its power. |
| 1974 | Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow develop the first Grand Unified Theory (GUT) to unite strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. The attempt to develop a unified field theory was the focus of Einstein’s work for many years. |
| 1974 | The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is founded to advocate the development of wind energy as a reliable, environmentally superior form of alternative energy in the U.S. and around the world |
| 1974 | The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is formed in New Delhi, India. TERI will grow to be one of the world’s leading organizations focusing on all forms of natural and human resources, with a special interest in sustainable energy and the environment. |
| 1974 | The first International Conference on Hydrogen Energy and the Hydrogen Economy is held in Miami Beach, Florida. From this meeting springs the International Association for Hydrogen Energy (IAHE), the first professional society dedicated to hydrogen energy. |
| 1974 | The first known use of the term "Internet" appears in a paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. |
| 1974 | The International Energy Agency is created, a forum for 26 member countries who are committed to taking joint measures to meet oil supply emergencies. IEA collects and publishes a wide array of energy and environmental data and research reports. |
| 1974 | The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is dissolved. The Energy Reorganization Act divides its functions between two new agencies: the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), to carry out research and development, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to regulate nuclear power. |
| 1975 | Ceremony in Scotland is held to officially to formally begin operations on a 130-mile (209-kilometre) pipeline from Cruden Bay to Grangemouth built by British Petroleum. The Queen inaugurated the flow of oil by pushing a gold-plated button in BP’s control centre at Dyce near Aberdeen. |
| 1975 | As a result of the oil crisis of 1973-74, the U.S. Congress enacts the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). EPCA sets minimum fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, and also establishes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an emergency oil store intended to counteract a severe supply interruption. |
| 1975 | Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) also requires that home appliances such as refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines be sold with a label to indicate their energy usage. West Germany introduces a similar voluntary energy labeling program in the same year. |
| 1975 | Opinion polls in the U.S. show that about 20% of the public is opposed to the construction of more nuclear power plants. On the eve of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1978, that number had risen to nearly 40%. By the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, opposition had grown to about 80%. |
| 1975 | The development of microchips makes possible the first personal computer to have a significant public impact, the Altair, with 256 bytes of memory. It is sold by MITS, Inc. of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bill Gates and Paul Allen then develop a BASIC software program for the Altair. |
| 1975 | The U.S. Geological Survey releases the first national estimate and inventory of geothermal resources. |
| 1975 | Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975, is assassinated by his nephew in Riyadh. |
| ca. 1975 | The human population reaches 4 billion. |
| 1976 | A U.S. Federal court rules that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate leaded gasoline. The lead phase-out begins, and by June 1979, nearly half of all U.S. gasoline is unleaded. |
| 1976 | An Energy Modeling Forum is established at Stanford University to provide a structured forum within which energy experts from government, industry, universities, and other research organizations can meet to study important issues of common interest. |
| 1976 | British journalist Anthony Sampson publishes The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made, a history of the large multinational firms that have historically dominated the oil industry. Sampson’s “Seven Sisters” are Exxon, Mobil, Socal (Chevron), Texaco, Gulf, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch/Shell. |
| 1976 | In a watershed year for the personal computer, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs form the Apple Computer Company and introduce their first Apple computer. The trade name “Microsoft” is registered, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen begin to work full time for the company. |
| 1976 | U.S. President Jimmy Carter enacts legislation which authorizes the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct an Electric and Hybrid Vehicle (EHV) program. |
| 1976 | The Alaska Natural Transportation Act calls for a pipeline to transport natural gas from deposits in Alaska through Canada to the lower 48 United States. The plan remains stalled for decades due to opposition from environmental groups, cost considerations, uncertainty about future gas prices, and Canada’s proposal for a different route. |
| 1976 | The U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to control hazardous waste from “cradle-to-grave.” This includes the generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste. |
| 1976 | Due to faulty design and lack of monitoring, 14 people are killed when the Grand Teton Dam in Idaho, United States undergoes a catastrophic failure. |
| 1976 | Approximately 100,000 tonnes of oil is released into the ocean when the tanker Urquiola runs aground at La Coruna, Spain. |
| 1976 | The Argo Merchant, a Liberian tanker, transporting 7.7 million gallons of oil from Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela to Boston, broke apart 25 miles south off Nantucket Island after running aground 6 days earlier. |
| 1977 | The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the 1973 Endangered Species Act and stops construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. Its development would have flooded the critical habitat of the snail darter (an endangered species of fish). |
| 1977 | Congress abolishes the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which was established in 1946 to oversee the Atomic Energy Agency. With the demise of the JCAE, supporters of nuclear power lose control of strategic junctures of policy-making that had been favorable to the industry. Jurisdiction is now spread over many agencies. |
| 1977 | New York City and neighboring Westchester County are plunged into darkness as lightning downs major transmission power lines. Looting and violence erupt, and within a span of two days, police arrest nearly 4,000 looters and the city suffers an economic loss estimated at $300 million. |
| 1977 | President Jimmy Carter signs the Department of Energy Organization Act in the White House Rose Garden, creating the Department of Energy (DOE). |
| 1977 | President Carter installs solar panels on the White House and promotes incentives for solar energy systems. President Ronald Reagan removes these panels in 1980, and eliminates many of the policy incentives for renewable energy. |
| 1977 | Scientists develop the first hot dry rock reservoir at Fenton Hill, New Mexico to “mine” geothermal energy from beneath the earth. |
| 1977 | The Apple II becomes the first highly successful mass-produced personal computer. |
| 1977 | The Department of Energy (DOE) began operations as a cabinet-level agency in the U.S.; the DOE takes over the activities of the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Federal Energy Administration. |
| 1977 | The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is established in the U.S., succeeding the Federal Power Commission. FERC is a quasi-independent agency within the DOE with jurisdiction over such issues as interstate electricity sales, wholesale electric rates, hydroelectric licensing, natural gas pricing, and oil pipeline rates. |
| 1977 | The first oil flows through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (TAPS). Actual construction began in 1974 and it ultimately will cost $8 billion, at the time the largest privately funded construction project in history. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, TAPS carries as much as 20% of total U.S. oil production. |
| 1977 | The first shipment of oil, approximately 412,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian light crude, is delivered to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an emergency oil supply stored in huge underground salt caverns along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. |
| 1977 | The International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) is founded. IAEE is the largest non-profit professional organization devoted exclusively to energy, with members in 70 countries. IAEE publishes one of the most respected academic journals on energy. |
| 1977 | The non-governmental organization Alliance to Save Energy is founded in the U.S. The Alliance will play a major role in the education, communication, and political aspects of energy efficiency in the U.S. |
| 1977 | The Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), later to become the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), begins operation in Golden, Colorado. |
| 1977 | The U.S. Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act is enacted. It sets Federal mining standards for coal, as well as standards for the reclamation of mining sites. |
| 1977 | The Voyager 1 spacecraft is launched; it is powered by thermoelectric generators that produce energy from the radioactive decay of plutonium. |
| 1978 | A tank truck over filled with propylene gas exploded on a coastal highway south of Tarragona, Spain, killing hundreds at a nearby camp site. |
| 1978 | A 15% energy tax credit is added to an existing 10% investment tax credit, providing incentive for capital investment in solar thermal generation facilities for independent power producers. |
| 1978 | CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons, or Freons) are banned in the U.S. as spray propellants because of fears over their role in the depletion of the ozone layer. |
| 1978 | In the same vein as the first Earth Day earlier in the decade, people around the world celebrate “Sun Day” to focus on the use of solar energy as a replacement for fossil fuel sources. |
| 1978 | President Carter signs the National Energy Conservation Policy Act, which includes various specific acts to promote conservation and develop greater energy efficiency. |
| 1978 | Shortages of natural gas prompt the U.S. Congress to pass the Natural Gas Policy Act, which effectively ends decades of natural gas price controls by the federal government. The goal of the legislation is to deregulate natural gas prices over time, to encourage exploration, and to reduce the price differentials between interstate and intrastate markets. |
| 1978 | The last two orders for new nuclear power plants in the United States are placed during this year. |
| 1978 | The U.S. Department of Transportation issues CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards for passenger cars, with an original standard of 18 mpg and an increase to 27.5 mpg within seven years. DOT also establishes standards for light trucks, starting with the following model year. |
| 1978 | The U.S. Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) mandates the purchase of electricity from qualifying facilities (QFs) meeting certain technical standards regarding energy source and efficiency; this especially favors independent sources that are not fossil fuel-based, helping wind and other renewables. |
| 1978 | Heating oil is the first energy product sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) futures market, with 22 contracts the first day. This is followed by crude oil (1983), natural gas (1990), and electricity (1996). |
| 1978 | Energy Tax Act creates federal ethanol tax incentive of 5 cents per gallon, expanding use of ethanol in US. By the mid-1980s the idea of community based ethanol plants proves impractical as major grain processing companies move in to soak up the incentive. |
| 1978 | The drama series Dallas begins a five-year run as the most popular show on U.S. television, and also wins large audiences abroad. It features a family of Texas oil millionaires, and it continues the image established by Hollywood films such as Boom Town (1940) and Giant (1956) of the American oil business as a world of dynamic, risk-taking individualists. |
| late 1970s | German automobile makers Daimler-Benz and BMW begin the experimental development of hydrogen-powered internal-combustion engine vehicles. |
| late 1970s | Japanese automobile brands such as Toyota, Honda, and Datsun (Nissan) now play a major role in the U.S. market; these vehicles appeal to American buyers looking for greater fuel efficiency in an era of rapidly increasing gas prices. |
| 1979 | A blowout of the experimental Ixtoc-1 well off the coast of Mexico releases about 140 million gallons of crude oil. This is the largest non-war related oil spill to date (though its environmental impact is relatively small). |
| 1979 | At the Papago Indian Reservation in Schuchuli, Arizona, NASA’s Lewis Research Center completes a 3.5-kW photovoltaic system; this is the world’s first village PV system. |
| 1979 | In a time of rising energy prices and fuel shortages, President Carter gives a speech in which he speaks of a crisis in the American spirit. He calls for import quotas, a tax on oil profits, development of synthetic fuels, and individual energy conservation. Now known as the “malaise” speech, it is poorly received by the public and contributes to Carter’s loss in the next election. |
| 1979 | Iran’s pro-Western ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi is driven from power and replaced by exiled Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranian militants seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding more than 60 staff members hostage. In response, President Carter places an embargo on importing Iranian oil into the United States. |
| 1979 | Oil prices rise sharply following the revolution in Iran, largely because of fears that overall supplies from the Persian Gulf will be disrupted. By 1981 they will reach an all-time high of $36.47 per barrel or nearly triple the price prior to the revolt. Once again political events of the Middle East cause an energy crisis in the U.S. |
| 1979 | Seventy-two licensed nuclear reactors generate 12% of the electricity produced commercially in the United States. |
| 1979 | T.T. Jahre Viking, the world’s largest oil supertanker (in fact the largest floating object on earth) returns to the high seas after extensive repair work. This ship is over 1500 feet long and can carry more than 4 million barrels of crude oil. |
| 1979 | The worst accident in U.S. commercial reactor history occurs at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is caused by a loss of coolant from the reactor core due to a combination of mechanical malfunction and human error. No one is injured, and no overexposure to radiation results from the accident. |
| 1979 | Appropriate Community Technology demonstration on Washington DC mall. Hundreds of emerging renewable energy businesses — solar manufacturers, alcohol fuels producers, windmill companies and other alternative energy groups– demonstrate new ideas and proposed solutions to the energy crisis. |
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| 1980 | A solar-cell power plant is dedicated at Natural Bridges National Monument (NBNM) in Utah by a partnership of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Park Service. The system provides uninterrupted electricity to NBNM for 10 years until being retired (restored in the 1990s). |
| 1980 | In a public referendum in Sweden, voters choose to build no new nuclear power plants, which at the time provide about 50% of their power. However, in 2003 the Swedish government admits that it cannot close the first few reactors on schedule because it has not find a suitable alternative source of power. |
| 1980 | Southern California Edison begins operation of a 10-MW experimental power plant at the Brawley, California geothermal field, with steam produced by Unocal (Union Oil Company of California). This is the first geothermal flash plant in the U.S. |
| 1980 | The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act greatly expands the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). However, the act leaves future lawmakers the option of authorizing oil and gas exploration in the area. ANWR becomes the focus of an intense debate over the balance between environmental protection and energy security. |
| 1980 | The Department of Energy initiates the Three Mile Island research and development program to develop technology for disassembling and de-fueling the damaged reactor. The program will continue for 10 years and make significant advances in nuclear safety technology. |
| 1980 | The Energy Security Act is signed by President Carter, with provisions for energy conservation, solar and geothermal energy, and biomass and alcohol fuels. The act also creates the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, with an initial authorization of $20 billion to be allocated for joint projects with private industry. |
| 1980 | The Synthetic Fuels Corporation is established to develop tar sands and shale oils so as to reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil. It enjoys little commercial success due to low energy prices, lack of interest from the private sector, and the high cost of synfuel production. Congress ends the Corporation in 1985. |
| 1980–1983 | The Greens establish a political party in West Germany and gradually develop into an important faction. They attract support with their anti-nuclear campaign slogan: “Atomkraft? Nein, Danke” (Nuclear Power? No, Thanks). Eventually they will form part of a coalition that wins the German popular vote. |
| 1980s | Bicycle production in China reaches 40 million units per year, which at the time is greater than the total world output of automobiles. |
| 1980s | High efficiency (greater than 50%) is achieved for combined cycle gas/steam turbine power plants. |
| 1981 | An aircraft known as the Solar Challenger flies across the English Channel powered entirely by energy from the Sun. |
| 1981 | An explosive growth of wind farms in California begins as a result of favorable government support. |
| 1981 | French president François Miterrand inaugurates service for the high-speed French railway program known as TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse). The first TGV train with paying passengers leaves Paris five days later. |
| 1981 | Ormat Technologies successfully demonstrates the technical feasibility of larger-scale commercial binary power plants for geothermal energy, in the Imperial Valley of California. |
| 1981 | The Chinese government approves a proposal to build a pressurized light water reactor at Haiyan in Zhejiang province. The Qinshan 1 nuclear reactor will take a decade to complete. |
| 1981 | The Columbia, a manned, reusable space shuttle, is successfully launched into space and then returned to earth. |
| 1981 | U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs an executive order effectively ending price controls on crude oil and refined petroleum products. These controls on energy prices were the last legacy of the comprehensive wage and price controls that President Richard Nixon had enacted in 1971. |
| early 1980s | The Energy Research Group at the University of Illinois (Urbana) pioneers the use of input-output analysis to study energy flow in economic and ecological systems. The group publishes more than 300 studies on the subject. |
| 1982 | The Shippingport, Pennsylvania Power Station is shut down after 25 years of service. Decommissioning will be completed in 1989; this is the first U.S. nuclear power plant to be decommissioned. |
| 1982 | Solar One, the first commercial solar-thermal power plant in the U.S., opens near Daggett, California. |
| 1982 | The British National Radiological Protection Board issues an official estimate of the health impact of the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear plant. This indicates that 32 deaths and at least 260 cases of cancer could be attributed to the radiation released by the fire. However, other analysts claim that the fire actually caused more than 1,000 deaths. |
| 1982 | The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory produces power from nuclear fusion. Tokamak will set records for high plasma temperatures and make other advances in fusion technology; the reactor is decommissioned in 1997 in the wake of cutbacks in funding for fusion research. |
| 1983 | A fire aboard the tanker Castillo de Bellver, off South Africa, releases 78.5 million gallons of crude oil, the largest tanker-related oil spill to date. |
| 1983 | Eastman Chemicals of Rochester, New York is the first coal-to-chemicals facility to produce acetyl chemicals from coal rather than petroleum. The use of domestic high-sulfur coal displaces oil previously used to produce acetyl chemicals. |
| 1983 | Kary Mullis conceives and helps develop polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technology for rapidly multiplying fragments of DNA. This technique will have application in a wide range of scientific fields, such as molecular biology, gene analysis, biomedical research, clinical diagnosis, paleontology, and forensic science. |
| 1983 | Microsoft announces Windows, an extension of the MS-DOS operating system that will provide a graphical operating environment for PC users. |
| 1983 | President Reagan signs the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), the first comprehensive U.S. nuclear waste legislation. NWPA establishes a program for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste, including spent fuel from nuclear power plants. |
| 1983 | The Itaipu Dam, a joint project of Brazil and Paraguay on the Parana river, begins operation of its first unit. When completed Itaipu will become the largest hydroelectric power facility in the world and will eventually supply about one-fourth of Brazil’s electrical power and nearly all of Paraguay’s. |
| 1983 | The U.S. Congress cuts off funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, an ambitious but highly controversial plutonium-based breeder reactor program near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. |
| 1983 | For the first time in its 23-year history, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed to cut the price of its crude oil. The decision in London reflected declining worldwide demand for OPEC products. |
| 1983–1986 | Faced with reduced demand for its oil and increased oil production from non-member nations, OPEC oil production is cut by more than one-half; a “free-for-all” situation prevails with a rapid rise in Saudi Arabia’s production, culminating in an oil price collapse in July, 1986 with Arab Light selling at less than $8 per barrel. |
| 1984 | Advanco Corporation and McDonnell Douglas demonstrate the potential for a high-efficiency 25-kilowatt solar dish. |
| 1984 | Nuclear power overtakes hydropower to become the second largest source of electricity in the U.S., after coal. Eighty-three nuclear power reactors provide about 14% of the electricity produced in the nation. |
| 1984 | The Annapolis Royal power station is established on the Bay of Fundy coastline of Nova Scotia, the first tidal power plant in North America. The Bay of Fundy is known for the largest tidal changes in the world (a difference between high and low tides of as much as 50 feet). |
| 1984 | The first in a series of commercial solar thermal electricity generation plants is established in California, based on parabolic trough technology. |
| 1984 | The Great Plains Synfuels Plant goes into operation in Beulah, North Dakota, the first commercial coal gasification plant in the U.S. The plant converts North Dakota’s abundant lignite coal to methane. |
| 1984 | The Macintosh computer is introduced by Apple, the first affordable personal computer with a graphical user interface and a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. It has a CPU speed of 8 Mhz and initially sells for $2,495. |
| 1984 | The University of Wisconsin introduces the Domain Name System. In 1985 Symbolics Technology, Inc. registers the first Domain Name: symbolics.com. The second registration is made by BBN Corporation, followed by several universities (Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue, Rice, and University of California, Berkeley). |
| mid 1980s | Many passenger cars are now available with diesel engines, as a fuel economy strategy in response to price shocks of the preceding decade. For the most part consumers will decide that the saving in fuel cost is not enough to compensate for other disadvantages of the diesel engine, and today a relatively small percentage of passenger cars are diesel-powered. |
| 1990s | Scholars use the term “rebound effect” to describe the relationship between an increase in energy efficiency and the ensuing rate of consumption. They argue that the rebound effect can exceed 100%; i.e., improved efficiency will produce greater consumption, not less. This supports Jevon’s paradox (see 1865). |
| 1985 | Richard Smalley and others at Rice University in Texas identify a new form of pure carbon (in addition to graphite and diamonds), a large molecule of 60 carbon atoms resembling a soccer ball. This is called a “bucky ball” for architect Buckminster Fuller, who designed a geodesic dome with the same shape. |
| 1985 | Scientific concerns about damage to the ozone layer prompt various governments to adopt the Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer, which establishes an international legal framework for action. |
| 1985 | The U.S. Institute of Nuclear Power Operations forms a national academy to accredit every nuclear power plant’s training program. |
| 1985 | Wind energy facilities totaling more than 1,000 megawatts are installed in California on the Tehachapi Pass between Barstow and Bakersfield and on the Altamont Pass east of Oakland. |
| mid 1980s | A policy is introduced to set fixed subsidy tariffs for the purchase by utilities of electricity from renewable electricity providers (especially in North America and Europe). |
| 1986 | Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the flamboyant oil minister for Saudi Arabia, is fired by King Faud. Sheik Yamani was a powerful figure within OPEC who steered Saudi policy—and, indeed, much of OPEC policy—through the roller-coaster period of price increases and decreases of the 1970s and early 1980s |
| 1986 | At the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the world’s most powerful laser, Nova, creates a one-billionth of a second fusion reaction with temperatures and pressures greater than the Sun. |
| 1986 | Britain announces that canaries in coal mines will be replaced by electronic sensors. For centuries caged canaries had been brought into mines to signal the presence of dangerous gases, the idea being that a canary would succumb quickly to the gas and thus warn the miners to get out. “Canary in a coal mine” is a metaphor for an early warning of oncoming danger. |
| 1986 | Human error causes a core meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine (former Soviet Union), the world’s most severe nuclear accident. Thirty-one people die in the accident or soon after, and another 134 are treated for acute radiation syndrome. Total related deaths probably number in the thousands. |
| 1986 | Karl Alex Muller and Johannes Georg Bednorz discover a superconductor that operates at about 35° Kelvin. This sets off a flurry of research on “higher” temperature superconductors. |
| 1986 | Leaded gasoline is banned in the U.S. due to its health effects. By 2000 many other countries have also banned leaded gasoline, though it continues in use in the developing world. |
| 1986 | The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) group is formed, an international collaborative aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of commercial fusion energy. |
| 1986 | OPEC announces that oil prices have dropped below $15 a barrel for the first time in many years. |
| 1986 | The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, our Nation’s oil supply held on reserve in the event of an emergency, reached the half billion barrel mark. The planned size of the Reserve is 750 million barrels. |
| 1986-1988 | OPEC abandons the practice of fixed oil prices and switches to netback pricing, a market-based system that guarantees purchasers a certain refining margin. This enables Saudi Arabia to recapture a significant market share from the rest of OPEC; it also contributes to a collapse in oil prices. The netback system lasts just two years. |
| 1986-1992 | The Deep Gas Project in Sweden drills experimental wells in the Siljan Ring, a crater formed by a meteor impact, to test a theory that methane migrates upward from the inner regions of the Earth. Two wells are drilled, one to a depth of nearly 5 miles, but they encounter no commercial amounts of hydrocarbons. |
| 1987 | OPEC changes its pricing system of using Saudi Arabian Light as the reference price for other OPEC crudes and replaces it with a “basket” of seven crudes as reference: Sahara Blend of Algeria; Dubai Crude; Saudi Arabia’s Arab Light; Minas of Indonesia; Bonny Light of Nigeria; Tia Inana of Venezuela; Isthmus of Mexico. |
| 1987 | The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is signed, requiring industrialized countries to reduce their consumption of chemicals harming the ozone layer; requirements are strengthened through later amendments (1990–99). |
| 1987 | The U.S. Department of Energy announces President Reagan’s approval of the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), planned as the world’s largest and most advanced particle accelerator. Congress decides to halt the project in 1993 after two billion dollars had been spent. |
| 1987 | The U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) is amended. Congress directs the Department of Energy to study only the potential of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, site for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste. |
| ca. 1987 | The human population reaches 5 billion. |
| 1988 | Alaska’s oil production at Prudhoe Bay peaks at 2 million barrels per day. |
| 1988 | In the midst of record heat and drought in the U.S., NASA scientist James Hansen tells a Congressional hearing he can say “with 99% confidence” that a long-term warming trend is underway, and that the greenhouse effect is to blame. The news media publicize Hansen’s statements, bringing about a new level of public awareness of climate change. |
| 1988 | OPEC abandons a fixed-price system, replacing it with an agreement on “target prices.” |
| 1988 | The government of Saudi Arabia officially establishes the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco). This is the successor to the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), the original developer of oil in the country, which the Saudi government had gradually taken over beginning in the early 1970s. |
| 1988 | The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is formed, and becomes the leading scientific authority on climate change. |
| 1988 | T.T. Jahre Viking, the world’s largest oil supertanker, is hit by the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war while transiting the Hormuz Straits. |
| 1988 | The Piper Alpha drilling platform, 176 km north east of Aberdeen, catches on fire after initial explosions occur in the gas compression module. One-hundred sixty seven men died in what is considered the world’s worst oil rig disaster. |
| 1988 | Olympic Dam mine is officially opened by the South Australian Premier John Bannon. It is the world’s largest uranium deposit, and is the largest multi-mineral mining in the world, producing copper, gold, silver in addition to uranium. |
| late 1980s | A flowering of modern European wind technology takes place; wind energy also experiences dramatic growth worldwide. |
| 1989 | The new Hungarian government abandons the Nagymoros dam project on the Danube River, alleging that it entailed grave risk to the environment and the water supply of Budapest. |
| 1989 | US Department of Energy estimates that it could cost $53 billion to $92 billion to clean up radioactive and chemical pollution at plants used to manufacture nuclear bombs. |
| 1989 | New York State Governor Mario Cuomo announces that the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, although already completed, will not go into service, due to intense opposition from local citizens. |
| 1989 | The Berlin Wall falls, as East Germany opens its borders with West Germany. |
| 1989 | The Long Valley Exploratory Well project commences near Mammoth Lakes, California. Theoretically, wells completed to depths near a magma body could bring that heat to the surface, and thus provide a new source of geothermal energy. |
| 1989 | The oil tanker Exxon Valdez runs aground on Alaska’s Bligh Reef and spills an estimated 10.8 million gallons of crude oil, fouling the waters of Prince William Sound and eventually more than 1,000 miles of beach in south-central Alaska. This causes widespread environmental damage, which according to a December 2003 study continues even to this day. |
| 1989 | The world’s first hybrid (organic Rankine/gas engine) geopressure-geothermal power plant begins operation at Pleasant Bayou, Louisiana, using both the heat and the methane of a geopressured resource. |
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| 1990 | Iraq’s oil minister demands that OPEC curb supplies until petroleum prices have risen to $25 a barrel (from the existing $15 level). Iraq President Saddam Hussein wants a price increase to help pay off the country’s debt, and charges that Kuwait had conspired with the U.S. to depress world oil prices through overproduction. |
| 1990 | Kuwait is invaded by Iraqi forces; Six days later, Saddam Hussein declares the country to be a province of Iraq. Crude oil prices rise to above $30 a barrel amid great uncertainty in world markets. The UN then embargoes the export of oil from Iraq in response to the invasion. |
| 1990 | Results of a Gallup poll indicate that about 75% of Americans consider themselves to be “environmentalists.” |
| 1990 | The annual production of coal in the U.S. tops 1 billion tons for the first time. |
| 1990 | The city of Tokyo has approximately 1.5 million buildings with solar water heaters (more than in the entire U.S.); Israel uses solar water heating for approximately 30% of its buildings and all new homes there are required to install solar water heating systems. |
| 1990 | The number of vehicle-miles per year traveled by Americans exceeds 2 trillion for the first time. |
| 1990 | The U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments require many changes to gasoline and diesel fuels to make them pollute less, including mandated sale of oxygenated fuels in areas with unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide. This helps resurrect production of gasohol, an ethanol-blended gasoline, which had been used in the early days of the auto industry. |
| 1990 | The unified German government closes the last of eight nuclear power plants in the formerly Communist East Germany (DDR). |
| 1990 | Tim Berners-Lee, working with Robert Cailliau at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), proposes a distributed information system, based on hypertext, a way of linking related pieces of information stored on computers. The name “World-Wide Web” is chosen for this system. |
| 1990 | With natural gas prices decontrolled, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) launches its first natural gas futures contracts. Natural gas can now be bought and sold by consumers and producers at a pre-determined time in the future. This leads to short-run volatility, but in principle, greater long-term price stability. |
| 1990s | Russia, after having become the world’s largest oil producer in the late 1980s, experiences a decade-long slide in production. The causes are resource depletion, poor management, reduced maintenance, and curtailed exploration, all of which are exacerbated by the economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union. |
| 1991 | In what will become known as the Persian Gulf War, the United States and allied countries launch Operation Desert Storm against Iraq to end its invasion of Kuwait. After about 6 weeks of fighting Iraqi forces are expelled from Kuwait and a cease-fire is declared. |
| 1991 | More than 600 oil wells are set ablaze in Iraq and Kuwait by retreating Iraqi forces. The fires burn for more than nine months, creating giant oil lakes in the desert and massive regional air and water pollution. In addition, 240 million gallons of crude oil are released to the marine environment from oil terminals and tankers, the largest oil spill ever. |
| 1991 | Operation Desert Storm causes the U.S. government to withdraw oil from the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve). This is the only occasion to date when the U.S. has made use of this emergency supply. |
| 1991 | Sony offers the first commercial version of the lithium ion (Li-Ion) battery. Li-Ion and its contemporary the NiMH (nickel metal hydride) battery offer greater capacity and will largely replace the earlier nickel cadmium version. |
| 1991 | Sweden introduces the first tax aimed specifically at reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Consumers pay a tax of 0.25 SEK/kg (about $100 per ton) on the use of oil, coal, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, petrol, and aviation fuel. Renewable fuels are largely excluded, and industry pays a substantially lower rate. |
| 1991 | The European Energy Charter is adopted by 51 nations. Its objectives are to facilitate energy cooperation between countries, to improve the security of energy supplies, and to provide greater efficiency in the production, conversion, transport, distribution and use of energy, as well as technology transfer. |
| 1991 | The first commercial nuclear reactor in China, Qinshan 1, is connected to the power grid. |
| 1991 | The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit begins in Washington, D.C., with a focus on environmental justice (the principle that underrepresented groups are disproportionately impacted by the negative effects of power plant siting, uranium mining, and other energy-related facilities). |
| 1991 | The U.S. operates 111 nuclear power plants with a combined capacity of 99,673 megawatts. These plants produce almost 22% of the electricity generated commercially in the country. |
| 1991 | U.S. oceanographer John Martin stirs debate when he suggests that by sprinkling a relatively small amount of iron into certain areas of the ocean, one can create large algal blooms that could take in so much carbon from the atmosphere that they could reverse the greenhouse effect and cool the Earth. |
| 1991 | UN Antarctica treaty prohibits mining, limits pollution, and protects animal species. |
| early 1990s | China passes the U.S. and becomes the world’s largest producer of coal. Coal production has doubled in just 10 years due the expansion of power generation and steel production to drive China’s rapidly expanding economy. |
| early 1990s | Vaclav Smil of Canada and Peter Vitousek of the U.S. independently show that nitrogen fixation from human activity (fossil fuels and fertilizer production/use) is greater than that from natural nitrogen fixation (terrestrial systems plus lightning). In doing so, they document the extent of human alteration of global biogeochemistry. |
| 1992 | Three French workers contaminated after going into a nuclear accelerator without protection. Several executives jailed for failing to enforce safety rules. |
| 1992 | A National Energy Policy Act is signed into law under the Clinton administration. It makes several important changes in the licensing process for nuclear power plants. |
| 1992 | CERN releases the World-Wide Web. By the beginning of 2004 there are an estimated 50 million websites. |
| 1992 | Daniel Yergin receives the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his work The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, which traces the history of oil and its social political, strategic and economic importance. | 1992 | The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency introduces Energy Star, a government-backed labeling program that helps businesses and individuals adopt technologies with greater energy efficiency. |
| 1992 | The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly known as the Earth Summit, begins at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, bringing together nearly 35,000 participants. Treatment of energy expands from environmental effects to economic importance as well. |
| 1992 | The University of South Florida fabricates a 15.89% efficient thin-film PV (photovoltaic) cell, exceeding the 15% efficiency level for the first time. |
| 1993 | Oil poured on to the coast of northern Scotland’s Shetland Islands after the 89,000-ton Liberian-registered Braer hit rocks in heavy seas. The tanker carried 84,500 tons of crude oil. A huge oil slick stretched 25 miles (40 km) up the coast. |
| 1993 | A new tax on fuels is proposed by U.S. President Bill Clinton, based on the heat content of oil, gas, and coal. The tax would raise the price of gasoline by about 7.5 cents per gallon (gas price then about $1.05 per gallon). Congress rejects the tax in the face of opposition from special interest groups and from some segments of the public. |
| 1993 | NEMS (National Energy Modeling System) is released by the Energy Information Administration. It is the first computer-based, energy-economy modeling system of national energy markets for the express purpose of answering policy questions. |
| 1993 | President Clinton pledges that the United States will reduce its output of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000. Vice President Al Gore reaffirms this two years later. |
| 1993 | The 33M-VS, developed by Kenetech Windpower (U.S. Windpower), becomes one of the first commercially available, variable-speed wind turbines. |
| 1993 | Three hundred thousand Ogoni men, women, and children take to Nigeria’s streets in a massive protest of the destruction of their homelands by Shell Oil. Co, who found oil on their land in 1958. The date has been celebrated as Ogoni Day ever since |
| 1993–1994 | U.S. oil imports exceed domestic oil production for the first time; import dependence will continue to grow in the coming years. |
| 1994 | California Energy becomes the world’s largest geothermal company through its acquisition of Magma Power. Near-term international markets gain the interest of U.S. geothermal developers. |
| 1994 | The Energy Charter Treaty is signed; the signatories include various nations of Europe, as well as the European Union itself, Japan, and Australia. The treaty’s objective is to facilitate Western investment in the development of energy resources in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. |
| 1995 | A United Nations resolution allows partial resumption of Iraq oil exports in “oil for food” deal; an embargo on Iraqi oil had been in effect since 1990 as a result of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. |
| 1995 | An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” By 2001 the IPCC states “there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” |
| 1995 | The European Union enacts energy labeling standards for household refrigerators and freezers, followed by energy efficiency standards (MEPS) in 1999. |
| 1995 | The nongovernmental organization ENERGIA (the International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy) is founded after the Fourth World Conference On Women in Beijing. ENERGIA coordinates diverse initiatives, individuals, and organizations to strengthen the role of women in sustainable energy development. |
| 1996 | The U.S. Department of Energy announces the National Center for Photovoltaics, headquartered in Golden, Colorado. |
| 1996 | World Bank joins World Health Organization and others in calling for global phase-out of leaded gasoline. The report links public health with economics and notes that the health costs of leaded gasoline are far higher than the benefits to a few refiners and gasoline distributors. |
| 1997 | Qatar installs the world’s first significant liquid natural gas (LNG) exporting facility. |
| 1997 | Ridership in the Moscow subway system, the world’s largest, reaches a total of 3.2 billion riders per year (followed by Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, and New York). The system, built in 1935, also is one of the world’s longest, with 340 km of track. |
| 1997 | The first modern hybrid-electric vehicle is marketed in Japan, the Toyota Prius. |
| 1997 | The so-called Kyoto Protocol is adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at a convention in Kyoto, Japan; this commits the signing nations to binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. |
| 1997 | Widespread protests against shipments of high-level nuclear waste take place in Germany; in 1998 the government temporarily halts the transport of nuclear waste. Waste shipments, and protests in response, will begin again in 2000. |
| 1997–1999 | Registered lobbyists for the oil and gas industry report expenditures averaging $60 million per year to influence the energy policies of the U.S. government. |
| 1998 | Based on annual growth rings in trees and chemical evidence contained in marine fossils, corals, and ancient ice, scientists at the University of Massachusetts conclude that the 20th century was the warmest one in 600 years, and that 1990, 1995, and 1997 were the warmest years in all of the 600-year period. |
| 1998 | The Protocol on Environmental Protection (Madrid Protocol) is approved by a body of nations; it imposes a moratorium on mining and oil exploration in Antarctica for a minimum of 50 years. |
| 1998 | The World Commission on Dams is formed with initial funding from the World Bank and IUCN, and subsequent support from many other organizations around the world. The Commission’s mandate includes evaluating the effectiveness of dams and developing standards for construction, operation, and decommissioning of dams. |
| 1998-1999 | In a wave of oil company mergers, BP announces plans to acquire Amoco for $48.2 billion; BPAmoco then acquires Atlantic Richfield (Arco). Chevron Corporation acquires Texaco for about $36 billion, and Exxon acquires Mobil for about $80 billion to create the world’s largest oil company. Total Fina and Elf Aquitaine agree to merge, as do Conoco and Phillips. |
| late 1990s | After increasing steadily for nearly two decades, improvements in new vehicle fuel efficiency in the U.S. level off at about 28 miles per gallon. This is due to the expiration of government regulations (corporate average fuel economy standards) that mandated efficiency improvements, and consumer demand for vehicles. |
| late 1990s | Green certificate trading is introduced in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Generators of electricity from renewable resources receive a certificate for a predetermined unit of energy produced. These certificates have a market value, thus providing a financial incentive for the use of renewable energy. |
| 1999 | A severe accident at the uranium processing plant at Tokaimura, Japan exposes 55 workers to radiation. |
| 1999 | An ice core two miles long, drilled out of an Antarctic ice sheet, shows that levels of greenhouse gases are higher now than at any time in the past 420,000 years. |
| 1999 | Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey agree to the Baku-Ceyhan route for a major new pipeline for Azeri oil exports. It will run a total of 1,038 miles (1,730 km) and cost up to 4 billion dollars. Oil is set to flow in 2005. |
| 1999 | Japan announces "Top Runner," a new set of energy efficiency standards for improved performance of cars, appliances, and other products. |
| 1999 | The first modern hybrid-electric vehicle is marketed in the U.S., the Honda Insight. |
| 1999 | The U.S. withdraws from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an international collaborative aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of commercial fusion energy, after Congress eliminates the funding required for U.S. participation. |
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| 2000 | The year 2000 (Y2K) begins and with it the possible onset of the “Y2K Problem,” a widely publicized potential disaster caused by failure of the world’s computer systems to accommodate dates beyond 1999. In fact Y2K produces no significant negative effects; analysts disagree as to whether this is because of adjustments made beforehand or because the problem was exaggerated. |
| 2000 | The Chernobyl nuclear facility is permanently shut down. |
| 2000 | The world’s first commercial wave power station on the Scottish island of Islay is connected to the electrical grid. Devices are placed on the shoreline or at sea, using wave motion to drive turbines or hydraulic pumps by means of compressed air. |
| 2000 | European Union bans leaded gasoline as a public health hazard. |
| ca. 2000 | The human population reaches 6 billion. |
| 2001 | Millions of people in California experience a new energy phenomenon known as a “rolling blackout;” this is a planned series of temporary, controlled power outages intended to prevent heavy demand from crashing the state’s electrical grid. Californians are faced with a combination of increased energy prices and reduced, uncertain supply. |
| 2001 | Enron, an energy services corporation, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It had become the seventh-largest U.S. company by buying electricity from generators and selling it to consumers, and was praised in the business media as the model for a new type of energy company. In reality Enron had been losing vast amounts of money and disguising the losses by false reports and accounting tricks. |
| 2001 | In the wake of the September 11th attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the city of Boston bars the liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Matthew from Boston Harbor because of fear of a terrorist attack. The event highlights the heightened concerns in the U.S. about the vulnerability of energy facilities . |
| 2001 | The Center for Disease Control in the U.S. lists 15,196 deaths in 717 disasters since the 1830s in the nation’s mines, most of them in coal mines. |
| 2001 | The Ecuadorean tanker Jessica runs aground on rocks off the Galapagos Islands, releasing about two-thirds of its cargo of 240,000 gallons of oil. The accident occurs in the prophetically named Shipwreck Bay, outside the tiny harbor of San Cristobal Island. |
| 2001 | The first oil flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) pipeline, a 1,700-kilometer pipeline originating in Tennis, Kazakhstan, and terminating near the port of Novorossiysk, Russia, on the Black Sea. The CPC pipeline is the first to connect the oil rich-region of central Asia with significant export terminals. |
| 2001 | The U.S. Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) releases the Energy Citations Database, which provides 2 million citations to bibliographic records for energy and energy-related scientific and technical information. |
| 2001 | The new George W. Bush energy plan emphasizes oil exploration and new construction of coal and nuclear power plants. |
| 2001 | Protests in China concerning the Three Gorges Dam increase as a massive relocation of over one million people begins. |
| 2001 | Over 210 million gallons of toxic coal sludge brakes through the dam wall of a slurry sediment pond in the southeastern Kentucky town of Inez. |
| 2002 | A general strike occurs in Venezuela against President Hugo Chavez. Oil production and exports drop to nearly zero, sending a shudder through world oil markets and helping oil prices to rise sharply. |
| 2002 | At a time when more than 50% of its electricity comes from nuclear power, Belgium makes a decision to completely phase out nuclear power over the next 25 years. |
| 2002 | President George W. Bush "un-signs" the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. President Bill Clinton had originally signed the Protocol in 1998, although it was never ratified by the Senate. President Bush says that it would cause undue economic harm to the U.S. economy. |
| 2002 | The Japanese government announces that it will expand its nuclear power generation by 30% by the year 2010, in order to achieve the reduction goals for greenhouse gas emission set by the Kyoto Protocol. |
| 2002 | The Prestige, a crippled oil tanker carrying nearly 20 million gallons of heavy fuel oil, breaks in half and sinks off Spain’s northwest coast. The tanker’s slow demise releases thousands of tons of oil into the waters of the Atlantic, causing one of Europe’s worst environmental disasters. |
| 2002 | The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) is held in Johannesburg, South Africa. Treatment of energy extends to its overarching role in sustainable development; i.e., the integration of environmental stewardship, economic development, and human well-being. |
| 2002 | The German government announced plans for a massive increase in wind generation capacity over the next 25 years. The wind energy strategy foresees offshore wind parks in the Baltic and the North Sea growing in stages to achieve 25,000 megawatts of installed capacity by 2030. |
| 2002 | The U.S. wind energy industry wins passage of an extended production tax credit for electricity generated by wind power. |
| 2002-2003 | Oil prices increase by 50% between November and March due to strikes in the Venezuelan oil sector, a shortage of home heating oil in a cold winter, and fears of what a U.S.-Iraq war will do to oil production and prices. Oil prices drop sharply in the opening days of the war when Iraq does not sabotage production facilities at home or in Kuwait. |
| 2003 | The first of the Three Gorges Dam’s 26 turbines - and the biggest in the world with capacity of 700 mw - was brought online. The last generator is not scheduled to commence service until 2009, at which point the dam’s output will reach 84.7 terawatt hours (twh) of power annually, making it by far the biggest single generating facility in the world. |
| 2003 | A massive power outage cuts electricity from New York north to Toronto and west to Detroit, an area in which some 50 million people reside. |
| 2003 | Hybrid-electric urban buses are delivered to the New York City Transit Authority by Orion Bus Industries, the first production models of such vehicles. |
| 2003 | In a historic recall election, California voters remove Governor Gray Davis from office. Dissatisfaction with his handling of the state’s energy policy is cited as the leading factor in his defeat. |
| 2003 | Mandatory energy labeling programs are in place in thirty-five different countries, covering as many as 25 product types. |
| 2003 | The Calder Hall nuclear power station in West Cumbria is closed down by BNFL (British Nuclear Fuel). This marks the end of an era for the British nuclear industry; Calder Hall was the world’s first commercial nuclear power facility when it opened in 1956. |
| 2003 | The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejects petition from environmental groups to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, saying it did not have the authority under the Clean Air Act. |
| 2003 | The new energy bill introduced in Congress would include ethanol mandates, nuclear power plant construction, liability exemptions for MTBE users, electrical reliability measures and other items. |
| 2003 | Invasion of Iraq by United States and British forces leads to widespread oilfield burning and other war-related environmental problems. |
| 2003 | Bush administration proposes "Clear Skies" legislation to Congress amending the Clean Air Act (the primary federal law governing air quality). New, weaker targets would be set for emissions of sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxides from U.S. power plants. |
| 2003 | Bush administration wins a court victory on mountaintop removal mining by continuing to allow companies to dynamite huge slabs of mountains and then dump the "spoil" — tons of rock and dirt — into valleys and streams. |
| 2004 | Automakers file suit against California to stop a greenhouse gas emissions law that requires better fuel economy. Automakers filing the suit are: Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Toyota. |
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| 2005 | With a majority of the world’s nations ratifying, the Kyoto Protocol officially goes into force without the U.S. |
| 2005 | The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology demonstrates world record-holding PAC Car operates on A car powered by a hydrogen-powered fuel cell. Using the lower heating values of hydrogen and gasoline as a conversion basis, this world record now stands at 5385 kilometers per liter of gasoline. |
| 2005 | Oil prices rise above $70 per barrel, highest front month price since the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) began trading contracts in 1983, as Hurricane Katrina comes ashore off the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico is home to a quarter of U.S. oil and gas production. |
| 2005 | President George Bush announces that the nation’s petroleum strategic reserve. Such a decision was made after prices surged above $70 a barrel due to Hurricane Katrina’s damage to oil platforms and refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. |