Nowadays, it is the most commonplace thing to walk into a room and turn a light switch on. Most of us don’t even think about it but, when we stop to reflect a moment, even the act of turning a light switch on becomes a fantastic and out of the ordinary action. It’s not just the light switches either. All of our world is run by a massive amount of oil and electric power. It turns on our computers, runs our cars, runs our power plants which, in effect, power our entire world. Power is even in places you wouldn’t suspect such as woodworking, construction plants and other places. Everything in our modern world depends on this power to some capacity but it wasn’t always like this. Not long ago, people were still grappling with how different the ability to have easy power on hand made the world. It hasn’t been that long since the ability to walk into a room and turn on a light switch was unthinkable even to the upper echelons of society. There were no such thing as electric light bulbs at all, let alone nuclear power, diesel fuel delivery, firm fixed gas or anything else that we have in our convenience heavy world. Having a diesel supply, an electricity company or even have clean running water was something not even kings had, let alone most of the common workaday people. But how did we progress from that state of largely agrarian society to a society that relies so heavily on different forms of electric and gas power? Where and when did that change occur and where might it go next? How are we going to handle where our world takes us next in terms of power?
The Start of Power
The idea of powering machines with some sort of external energy source is older than you might think. Though ancient Greece was a long way from having diesel fuel delivery or any sort of power amenities that didn’t mean people weren’t constantly tinkering and experimenting with what they had on hand. Even back then, inventors saw the potential power of various natural forms such as gas and steam and there was even a crude engine drawn up by a designer that would have run solely on steam power. Sadly, the time was not right for these sorts of technologies and they could think of no way to reliably deliver enough steam in time to power a machine. Without access to burning coal, the engine was forced to be a prototype design and nothing more, destined to sit in archives for thousands of years with no real use.
Headed Towards the Modern Day
For the next thousand years, the idea of external power running machines to make things easier, the same dream that would one day lead to diesel fuel delivery and diesel fuel suppliers, was relegated largely to fantasy and eccentric inventors. Alchemists and early scientists tried hard to make a perpetual motion machine that might run indefinitely, unaware that no power source could run forever. The laws of thermodynamics don’t let that happen, after all. All systems run out of energy eventually due to entropy. But this didn’t stop them from trying repeatedly and eventually steam power came back into fashion in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Metals, conductors and knowledge in general had advanced enough to the point where people could begin to conceivably build an engine, a primitive engine but an engine nonetheless, that could be powered by some sort of steam.
What Does the Future Hold?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? As we move to clean natural gas and other types of fuel, we have to wonder if people in one thousand years are going to look at us as the primitive ones who couldn’t figure out how to build and maintain sustainable energy sources. They will live in a world with different types of diesel fuel delivery and other strange things we can’t imagine. But we have to protect the world now so they have a chance to build even more amazing things for history.