Electrical Conquest: New Approaches to the History of Electrification

by W. Bernard Carlson (Editor), Erik M Conway (Editor)

Overview

This book, drawing on fresh scholarship, investigates electrification in new places and across different time periods. While much of our understanding of electrification as a historical process is based on the seminal work done by Thomas P. Hughes in Networks of Power (1983), the scholars in this volume expand and revise Hughes’ systems approach to suggest that electrification is a heterogeneous and contingent process. Moreover, the contributors suggest that the conquest of the world by electricity remains incomplete despite more than a century elapsing. Above all, though, this book provides context for thinking about what lies ahead as humans continue their conquest of the earth through electricity. As we become increasingly dependent on electricity to power our lights, heat and cool our homes, turn the wheels of industry, and keep our information systems humming, so we are ever more vulnerable when the grid runs into trouble.

Chapter "Surveying the Landscape: The Oil Industry and Alternative Energy in the 1970s" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031445903
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Series:	Archimedes , #67
Edition description:	1st ed. 2023
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

W. Bernard Carlson manages the M.Sc programs in TechInnovation and AgInnovation at the University of Galway in Ireland. He is also the Joseph L. Vaughan Emeritus Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is also a lecturer in the Tech Innovate program at the National University of Ireland Galway. He has written widely on inventors and electrical history, and his books include Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Erik M Conway is an independent scholar and an author on seven books, including Merchants of Doubt and The Big Myth, both with Naomi Oreskes, and Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.- Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. A Model for Heterogeneous Energy Transitions.- Chapter 3. Surveying the Landscape: The Oil Industry and Alternative Energy in the 1970s.- Chapter 4. We Have No Niagara”: Electrifying the “Britain of the South.- Chapter 5. Formation and Transformations of the Cuban Electric Company/Unión Eléctrica, 1920s-1980s.- Chapter 6. Between Material Dependencies, Natural Commons and Politics of Electrical Transitions: The State as Networks of Power in Greece, 1940-2010.- Chapter 7. Large-scale Renewables and Infrastructure Gatekeepers: How Local Actors Shaped the Texas Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) Initiative.- Chapter 8. Co-ops Against Castroism: USAID and the Electrification of the Global Countryside.- Chapter 9. Vehicle-to-Grid, Regulated Deregulation, and the Energy Conversion Imaginary.