Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [4]
Then, Microsoft Office—for a variety of business, not technical reasons—began to gain market share.4 For example, it often came preinstalled on new PCs, which already ran Microsoft-made operating systems. Microsoft competed fiercely and won, but few believe “the best technology” won. Word worked, and Microsoft was a strong force in the market, but it wasn’t as if there were no alternatives.5 Microsoft Word and Excel became the de facto standard for exchanging files between users, thereby also increasing the momentum of their product. Using Microsoft Word simply became easier than completing the series of tiny actions necessary to convert some other word processor’s native output into a file that Microsoft Word could read.
Economists describe this process as “the network effect,” and it’s associated with all kinds of positive feedbacks as success breeds success.6 Historians sometimes call the broader version of this phenomenon “technological momentum.”7 Its effect is to transform a series of marginal choices (“What the hell, maybe I will use Word, not WordPerfect”) into market dominance.
If we run a lot of energy technologies through the paper clip and Microsoft Word filters, we find many of the same patterns. Because energy technologies tend to require a lot of concrete and steel and money, momentum is even more important. A decision made at a particular moment for particular reasons will have repercussions for decades; after all, the Hoover Dam is now almost seventy-five years old.
That’s why the solar hot water heater and the rest of the projects in this book aren’t mere curiosities. They got researched and built for a reason. Some people, at some time, thought they were a viable alternative to the systems in place. We have to go back to that moment when someone picked Word or a gasoline-powered car and ask, Why was that choice made?
Political scientist Langdon Winner faulted a predecessor of green technology, the “small is beautiful” school of appropriate technology, for a “grievous” historical amnesia. “Those active in the field,” he wrote, “were willing to proceed as if history and existing institutional technical realities did not matter.” This book is an attempt to answer the questions that Winner thinks an insurgent technological group has to address if they want to make their revolution:
One ought to be able to discover points at which developments in a given field took an unfortunate turn, points at which the choices produced an undesirable instrumental regime. One could, for example, survey the range of discoveries, inventions, industries, and large-scale systems that have arisen during the past century and notice which paths in modern technology have been selected. One might then attempt to answer such questions as, Why did the developments proceed as they did? Were there any real alternatives? Why weren’t those alternatives selected at the time? How could any such alternatives be reclaimed now?8
The next section delves into the alternative energy technologies that existed over the last century. We’ll find good ideas that were dropped and bad ideas that were probably better forgotten. We’ll see mad inventors trying to navigate the choppy seas of fossil fuel prices, bad luck, dirty dealing, a lack of government support, societal shifts, competing new energy technologies, and a host of other factors. Despite being tossed about, many of them succeeded in creating real alternatives that merely lacked funding and scale, not technical sophistication. The bottom line is that we’ve missed chances to have a cleaner energy system, and if we don’t heed the lessons of the past, we could blow this opportunity, too.
In 1900 people could use the sun to heat the water for a shower. They could drive across New York City