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By Root 606 0

estate near Paris, watched by wide-eyed grandees of the London Institute of Mechanical Engineers. A cascade of inventions followed: electric railways from William Siemens, better light bulbs from Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison, alternating current from George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla and Sebastian de Ferranti, turbine generators from Charles Parsons. The electrification of the world began, and although like the computer it took decades to show up in the productivity statistics, its triumph was inexorable and its effect far-reaching. Today, 130 years later, electricity is still transforming people’s lives when it first reaches them, bringing colourless, smokeless, weightless energy into the home. One recent study in the Philippines estimated that the average household derives $108 a month in benefits from connecting to the electricity grid – cheaper lighting ($37), cheaper radio and television ($19), more years in education ($20), time saving ($24) and business productivity ($8). Heck, it even affects the birth rate as television replaces procreation as an evening activity.

The earth receives 174 million billion watts of sunlight, about 10,000 times as much as the fossil-fuel output that human beings use. Or, to put it another way, a patch of ground roughly five yards by five yards receives as much sunlight as you need to run your techno life. So why pay for electricity, when there is power all about you? Because, even allowing for inconveniently timed winter, night, clouds and the shade of trees, this drenching rain of photons is all but useless. It does not come in the form of electricity, let alone car fuel or plastic. Joule for joule, wood is less convenient than coal, which is less convenient than natural gas, which is less convenient than electricity, which is less convenient than the electricity currently trickling through my mobile telephone. I am prepared to pay good money for somebody to deliver me refined and applied electrons on demand, just as I am for steaks or shirts.

Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out no sewage, because water, gas and a magic form of invisible power called electricity would come into their home through pipes and wires. They would jump at the chance to have such a home, but they would warily ask how they could possibly afford it. Suppose that you then told them that to earn such a home, they need only ensure that father and mother both have to go to work for eight hours in an office, travelling roughly forty minutes each way in a horseless carriage, and that the children need not work at all, but should go to school to be sure of getting such jobs when they started work at twenty. They would be more than dumbfounded; they would be delirious with excitement. Where, they would cry, is the catch?

Heat is work and work is heat

Can I stretch the industrial revolution upon the Procrustean bed of my hypothesis, as I have done for the upper Palaeolithic, Neolithic, urban and commercial revolutions, too? Thanks mainly to new energy technologies, what took a textile worker twenty minutes in 1750 took just one minute in 1850. He could therefore either supply twenty times as many people in a day’s work, or supply each customer with twenty times as much cloth, or free his customer to spend 19/20ths of his income on some thing other than shirts. That was in essence why the second half of the industrial revolution made Britain rich. It made it possible for fewer people to supply more people with more goods and more services – in Adam Smith’s words, to make ‘a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work’. There was a step change in the number of people that could be served or supplied by one person, a great leap in the specialisation of production and the diversification of consumption. Coal had made everybody into a little Louis XIV.

Today, the average person on the planet consumes power at the rate of about 2,500 watts,