The Switch to coal

In the United States and Great Britain, coal was not widely utilized until more easily available energy resources, such as wood were on the point of exhaustion. The shift to fossil fuels and the corresponding rise in energy consumption is illustrated by the transformation of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the world's ships had beer powered by wind and human power. The first river steamboats came into use around 1810-they first crossed the English Channel in 1821 and by 1839 had crossed the Atlantic. Technological developments, such as the introduction of iron and steel hulls (watertight bodies of ships) in the 1850s and 1860s, increased the effectiveness of sailing ships and the largest could still compete with the early, inefficient, and expensive steam-powered ships that operated from the 1840s. It was the development of the high-pressure steam boiler made from steel that transformed the situation. By the late 1860s, steamships could bring three times as much cargo from China to Europe in half the time taken by sailing ships. The amount of steam-powered shipping in the world rose from just 32,000 metric tons in 1831 to over three million metric tons by the mid-1870s, and then rose exponentially as sailing ships gradually died out and the steamship took over the world's merchant and naval fleets. Britain built a chain of coaling stations across the globe to sustain the worldwide deployment of the Royal Navy. Not only had the amounts of shipping in the world increased dramatically, its energy demands had increased even more.

The growing use of coal led to the rise of an important byproduct-the use of the waste gases to provide the first nonnatural source of lighting. Coal gas was first used to light a factory in Great Britain in 1807 and, six years later, a cotton mill in the United States. The advantage for the factory owners was that artificial lighting enabled far longer hours to be worked. Coal gas was cheap to use for street lighting once the high installation costs (laying gas pipes, known as mains, and installing new street lights) had been paid. It was cheaper than whale oil and available in much greater quantities. Street lighting could therefore spread on a much greater scale-by 1816 the first districts in London were lit by gas supplied from a central coal-burning plant through underground mains. By the late 1820s, gas lighting had been adopted in Boston, New York (which depended on imported British coal), and Berlin. The use of coal gas to light streets and houses and eventually for cooking spread through the industrialized world in the nineteenth century.

The peak of the world's dependence on coal for its energy came u in the first decades of the twentieth century. Coal's share of world energy consumption then fell from about 90 percent in 1900 to less than 25 percent in the early twenty-first century. However, coal production continued to increase-from about 760 million metric tons in 1900 to just over 5,000 million metric tons in 2000. The decline in the importance of coal occurred first in the United States because of its large oil reserves. In Europe the change came much later-in 1950 coal still provided over 80 percent of the continent's energy. Yet by 1970 the proportion had fallen to less than a third, as cheap imported oil replaced coal. Until the 1950s, Europe's railways still depended on coal-fired steam engines, as they had over a century earlier. Then, in the space of a couple of decades, they

were replaced by diesel-powered locomotives and electrified systems. In 1900, Britain was the second-largest coal producer in the world, and the industry employed about 1,200,000 men. By the end of the twentieth century, output was at 10 percent the level of a century earlier and there were only 10.000 coal miners. Production also shifted from deep mines to open-pit mining, which was much more destructive environmentally (but cheaper)-in the United States two-thirds of coal production now comes from open-pit mines. However, coal is still the second-most-important energy source in the world. About 40 percent of the world's electricity still comes from coal-fired plants, and in many countries of the world it remains the primary fuel.

1.In the United States and Great Britain, coal was not widely utilized until more easily available energy resources, such as wood were on the point of exhaustion. The shift to fossil fuels and the corresponding rise in energy consumption is illustrated by the transformation of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the world's ships had beer powered by wind and human power. The first river steamboats came into use around 1810-they first crossed the English Channel in 1821 and by 1839 had crossed the Atlantic. Technological developments, such as the introduction of iron and steel hulls (watertight bodies of ships) in the 1850s and 1860s, increased the effectiveness of sailing ships and the largest could still compete with the early, inefficient, and expensive steam-powered ships that operated from the 1840s. It was the development of the high-pressure steam boiler made from steel that transformed the situation. By the late 1860s, steamships could bring three times as much cargo from China to Europe in half the time taken by sailing ships. The amount of steam-powered shipping in the world rose from just 32,000 metric tons in 1831 to over three million metric tons by the mid-1870s, and then rose exponentially as sailing ships gradually died out and the steamship took over the world's merchant and naval fleets. Britain built a chain of coaling stations across the globe to sustain the worldwide deployment of the Royal Navy. Not only had the amounts of shipping in the world increased dramatically, its energy demands had increased even more.