Energy and Society (winter 2022)

Assigned reading:

"The resolution of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris not to entertain communications relating to Perpetual Motion" (1775). (From Dircks, Perpetuum Mobile)

Robert H. Thurston, "The modern steam-engine," A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine, 2nd. ed. (1886), 144-220. (This is a bit long, so don't get bogged down in the details, but do try to get a sense of the shape of the narrative, and especially how he depicts engineers.)

Crosby, Children of the Sun, 63-84.

Suggested reading:

John Adolphus Etzler, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery (1833), iii–viii, 1–5, 52–59, 164–165.

Simon Schaffer, "The show that never ends: Perpetual motion in the early eighteenth century," British Jour. Hist. Sci. 28 (1995): 157-189.

Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the times,” Edinburgh Review 49 no. 98 (June 1829): 439–459.

Mary Poovey, "From conjectural history to political economy," A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998), ch. 5.

Paul Warde, "The First Industrial Revolution," Power to the People, Part II.

Peter A. Shulman, "Engineering economy," Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (2015), chapter 2.

Rolf Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (2001).

Eric H. Robinson, "The Early Diffusion of Steam Power," The Journal of Economic History 34 (1974): 91-107.

E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010).

Crosbie Smith, Coal, Steam and Ships: Engineering, Enterprise and Empire on the Nineteenth-Century Seas (2018). 

P. W. B. Semmens and A. J. Goldfinch, How Steam Locomotives Really Work (2000).

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016). 

V. S. Virginskii, Vozniknovenie zheleznykh dorog v Rossii do nachala 40-kh XIX veka (1949). [ask instructor if you need this]

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