Electrifying America

MIT Press selected Electrifying America as one of 50 books to celebrate when it was 50 years old.  I was asked to prepare a short reflection about it, which appears below. 

The late 1980s was a good time to reflect on and analyze electrification, a process that had begun in the 1880s and been completed in my childhood. When I took up the subject, electricity had become "natural" but it was not difficult to recover its recent novelty. I was also experienced enough, with three previous books (on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and General Electric), to realize that this was a wonderful subject and to know how fortunate I was to start work with the encouragement of a contract from MIT Press.

I researched Electrifying America when there was no email or Internet, although I proudly wrote on a new word processor (that had no hard disk). Most documents had to be gathered in libraries and archives, which was less a hardship than a pleasure. Where could I better get a sense of the early electric light than at the Edison National Historic Site? I did research in Muncie Indiana (better known as Middletown) to understand how a typical small city had adopted electricity. Likewise, I studied the electricity-mad Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where it had been held in 1901. Such experiences gave me an invaluable grounding in the material culture of my subject.

That grounding stretched back to my childhood. I often visited my grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, which, when I first was there, lacked electricity. I also glimpsed the pre-electric world among the Amish and Mennonites whom I encountered while growing up in central Pennsylvania. During summers in Boston, I delighted in streetcars, and pestered my father to take me for rides, demanding to know how the system worked. A mechanical engineer who had co-authored a book about steam-power plants, he explained to me elementary mechanics and electrical machinery. Decades later he was still teaching me when we discussed sections of Electrifying America in draft form. By then, I was also teaching him some social and cultural history. They are at the center of the book, which fuses my education in American Studies with an understanding of technical details and an immersion in specific places. It proved to be the longest and one of the best of the books I have written for MIT Press, though an author always likes to think the next book will be the best one. (My America's Assembly Line will appear with MIT Press in spring, 2013.)

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology received a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in September, 1991, and that December it was named a Times Notable Book for the year. It won the 1991 Abel Woolman Award from the Public Works History Association, and in 1993 it received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. It is still in print.

Rethinking the Consumption of Energy

In histories of energy, before c. 1980 supply was the main story, while demand was taken for granted. Business historians, anthropologists, and Marxists alike long treated energy as largely a question of supplying a necessity. Business historians sought inspiration in the work of Joseph Schumpeter or Alfred Chandler where entrepreneurs held the centre stage. Historians of coal, oil, and gas focused on extraction, organization, and marketing, and wrote relatively little about end users. Early studies of electrification dealt with inventions, power generation, transmission, and the formation of monopolies, but said little about how and why ordinary people adopted this new form of energy. Likewise, automotive history before c. 1975 focused on invention, production, labour relations, product design, and marketing, with far less about the popular reception and use of automobiles. 

Luna Park, Coney Island, c. 1910
Courtesy of the Library of Congress

During this early period, Anthropologists considered energy to be a fundamental need, along with food, water, and shelter. In 1949 Leslie White argued in The Science of Culture (Grove Press) that systems of energy were so fundamental that societies could be classified according to how much light, heat, and power they had mastered. The society with the greatest access to energy was the most advanced. The most primitive were those that controlled nothing more than their own muscle power. The domestication of animals such as oxen and horses thus placed Renaissance Europe at a higher stage of evolution than the Aztecs; the British mastery of steam power placed them above colonial peoples; full electrification lifted American and European societies to a still higher stage. In such theories, societies with atomic energy occupied the highest level, which apparently promised perpetual inexpensive power. Early Marxist authors were not at odds with these assumptions about energy, as they also viewed history in terms of advances in productivity. They argued that the hand-mill gave way to waterpower followed by the steam engine, and each increased the scale of industry. Even when writing about advertising, Stuart Ewen proclaimed that advertisers were Captains of Consciousness (McGraw Hill, 1975). Workers and the means of production, not the consumer, played the central roles. All these approaches saw energy primarily in terms of increasing supply and paid less attention to demand. The business historians, anthropologists, and Marxists all tended to see consumers as a passive 'nation of sheep' whom advertising could easily manipulate. 

By the 1980s, however, historians began to understand consumers as actors whose decisions shaped which products succeeded in the market, as documented elsewhere in this volume. The notion that advertisers controlled consumption collapsed after Roland Marchand's seminal Advertising the American Dream (University of California Press, 1986) revealed that agencies continually responded to changes in public taste, and were forced to follow trends beyond their control. Ruth Schwartz Cowan persuasively argued that purchases were negotiations at a 'consumption junction'. Her argument was part of the contextualist approach championed by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (The Social Construction of Technological Systems. MIT Press, 1987). They presented technologies as parts of the lifeworld, and they focused on the cultural factors that shape the invention, use, and interpretation of new objects. My own work along these lines (Nye, Electrifying America, MIT Press, 1990) examined the social construction of electricity between 1880 and 1940 by ordinary people, who wove it into urban life, factories, the home, the farm, and the sense of the future, as could be seen in newspapers, novels, popular speech, painting and photography. In such studies, consumers were not passive but selective, and they used energies for their own purposes.

But consumers are not the whole story. Hughes advanced an alternative approach that focused on organizations and institutions in Networks of Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) He argued that once a society made initial selections in the design of its energy system and these became institutionalized, a 'soft determinism' set in. The whole complex of machines, installations, personnel, and educational programs acquired a 'technological momentum' that was difficult to change. Once utilities or oil companies had geared up to supply what millions of consumers had become accustomed to buy, the energy system moved with great force in a single direction. In the industrialized West, by c. 1920 both the automobile and the centralized electrical system had attained this 'technological momentum'. Even the 1970s energy crisis did little to alter the form of either system in western countries. (See Nye, Consuming Power, MIT Press,1998)

Any study of energy consumption needs to recognize the constraints of technological systems whose momentum has been established. These systems are large in scale and embedded in landscapes, where decisions of previous generations are built into the layout of settlement, lighting, transportation, and recreation. This approach assumes that one must look at both institutional and personal energy consumption. It also has environmental implications, because the consumption of energy is not only difficult to modify but it is inseparable from problems of mining, acid rain, smoke pollution, CO2 emissions, climate justice, and global warming. Because of this intersection, much recent work on energy history intertwines the histories of technology, the environment, and consumption, including my When the Lights Went Out which provides a history of power failures in the United States during the twentieth century (MIT Press, 2010).

More recently, historians of energy have been developing international comparisons, as I also did, in American Illuminations (MIT Press, 2018). A good deal of that book compares and contrasts nineteenth century lighting in Europe, Britain, and the United States.  It demonstrates that their transitions from gas to electricity were by no means identical. Indeed, many scholars are now concerned with energy transitions, both in the past and in the present. As I result, I developed an essay on energy transitions for an on-line seminar held in the fall of 2020, where ten scholars sought to rethink energy history. Each of us presented a paper, including many that did not deal with the US, Britain, Germany or France, but rather turned the spotlight Latin America, New Zealand, Greece, and Canada. My essay has the provisional title,  "A Model for Heterogeneous Energy Transitions."  I hope this collection will soon have a publisher.