The Lost History of American Green Technology
Bruce Sterling points to Alexis Madrigal's project to create a history of American renewable energy development - The Lost History of American Green Technology.
You’ll soon be able to cruise around a map of green tech history in America and scroll through a timeline of the major events in the history of the industry.
"Right now, I’m working on building an American Green Technology Historical Registry that will mark out the places that have been important for wind, solar, hydrokinetic, geothermal, and other renewable power sources. You will be surprised when you see the results. It’s not just northern California, it’s Ohio and Boise, Florida and Death Valley, Texas and Montana, York, PA, and Rutland, Vermont.
"The map would be farther along if it weren’t so hard to find a good mapping application. I guess I’ve settled on just using Google Maps, but if you’ve got a great tool, let me know..." ((((crowdsourcing, truly the joy of Internet research)))
"Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute must-reads about the history of alternative energy.
"I’m the farthest in Righter’s book and I’m immensely pleased with how well-researched and fanatically sourced it is. He’s particularly good at combing through the agricultural journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferret out the story of the small wind-electric plants installed on farms across the country. He argues that most farmers got their first exposure to the pleasures of electricity through these small units produced by Jacobs and Wincharger and Aero-Electric. The section on Marcellus Jacobs and his turbines is one of the finest pieces of alt energy history that I’ve read.
"He traces this reliable, excellent wind power generator through its various ups-and-downs, including a unit’s travel to Little America in Antarctica with Byrd, the explorer. (That’s the image). That picture was borrowed from the still-operating Jacobs Wind Electric Co...."
