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Steam power in a particular form—the Corliss engine—was sweeping the country. A factory could be built anywhere: No longer did a factory need fortuitous geography and hydrology; instead, all it needed was a Corliss engine, a steady supply of coal, and something to make. By the end of the nineteenth century the cheap land, labor, and easy access to the continent’s natural resources turned Western cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit into manufacturing powerhouses.2

These cities looked different from those built before railroads and steamboats, and steam engines had been used to eliminate the sense of human scale and distance that had been created in the horsedrawn era. “As trains moved faster, geography seemed to shrink,” historian David Nye wrote of the time:

The space between the new steam cities was annihilated, reduced to a passing panorama behind plate-glass windows. The passenger soon learned that it was impossible to focus on nearby objects as the foreground was reduced to a passing blur. Railway travel refocused the eye on the distance, and travelers lost touch with the landscape’s sounds, smells, and textures.3

Expectations of power and its possibilities changed, too. If factory owners wanted to use animal or water power to drive a factory, they were limited by the amount of horses they could reasonably keep or the hydrology of their region. Coal from Indiana and Illinois was cheap, so they could burn a lot of it, but steam engines couldn’t transmit power very far. The towns had to be dense. A single steam engine’s energetic output could supply energy to dozens of productive stations in a factory. There were no automobiles. Mass transportation amounted to horse-drawn buses on rails and then, later, trolleys of various types. Because of this, workers and their families had to live pretty close to where they worked; the exurbs would not have made sense.

As such, steam power allowed large Midwestern cities to come into being. Between 1830 and 1870 Chicago grew from fifty people on the shore of a lake to a bustling three hundred thousand–soul metropolis. By the last decade of the century a million people lived in the windy city. No Merrimack River could have provided the power for such massive growth. With the geographical constraints of renewable energy removed, cities could be built where the raw materials of mass production were, these being trees, cattle, water, and iron.4

Stationary steam power was a city thing. Although it allowed factories to get bigger, it didn’t make sense out in the hinterlands of what was still a pretty sparsely populated country west of the Mississippi River and east of San Francisco. A few steam-powered plows started to appear in the country’s great middle, but the centralized distribution networks required in order to get engines, steady fossil fuel supplies, and electricity to rural areas wouldn’t really develop until the rise of long-distance electrical transmission, oil, and automobiles in the twentieth century.5

chapter 6

The Wind and the West

WHEREAS COAL BOOMED in the cities, in the arid West, energy wasn’t really the limiting factor. What mattered—and still matters—in what was once known as the Great American Desert is water. As steam power scaled up the Middle Western cities, windmills, built and maintained by entrepreneurs and settlers, removed a key barrier to settling the country’s interior.

With a windmill, a family could move to a place where less than twenty inches of rain fell per year so the land was cheap. With some luck and hard work improving the land, perhaps they could sell that farm and buy a nicer one, moving up a notch in the social hierarchy and securing a more permanent existence.

That was the promise of the West, “the frontier!”—as men and women who had never been there heard it whispered in their ears. Some people even told them that the “rain follows the plow,” and as more people moved west, the nice, rainy