Scarcity, mother of invention
Stephen L. Sass
The New York Times Published: August 10, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/10/opinion/edsass.php
ITHACA, New York In the wake of the closure of a BP oil field in Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska, oil prices shot up to $77 a barrel on Wednesday, and the chorus of
doomsayers concerned about the dire consequences of our fossil fuel dependency
has reached a crescendo. If oil hits $100 a barrel, the impact on the economy
could be catastrophic, the handwringers warn. But while such a specter seems
novel and terrifying, it is in fact familiar and useful.
Throughout history, shortages of vital resources have driven innovation, and
energy has often starred in these technological dramas. The search for new
sources of energy and new materials has frequently produced remarkable advances
that no one could have imagined when the shortage first became evident.
Consider the transition from the use of bronze to iron in making tools and
weapons, which occurred around the 12th century B.C. Early in the second
millennium B.C., iron was known as the stuff of meteorites. It was rare and
highly prized: if you wanted to give a gift to a pharaoh or a king you didnt
give a gold dagger but an iron one. But when the eastern Mediterranean fell
short of tin from which to make bronze, a technological revolution occurred.
Artisans learned to extract metallic iron from iron-rich materials by heating
with charcoal (a process called smelting), which caused the price of iron to
fall by a factor of 80,000 over 1,200 years. The Iron Age had begun.
Later, in Britain in the 1600s, another shortfall would drive still more
invention. As the British Empire expanded, demands increased on the island
nations natural resources, particularly its forests. The British used so much
wood for heating homes, building the ships of its mighty fleet and making
charcoal to smelt iron and to fuel other industrial processes that there was
eventually a shortage that has been called a timber famine in England.
Wood shortages drove the use of coal. But coal had never been the choice fuel
for smelting iron because it contains sulfur, which renders iron brittle.
Indeed, King James II of Scotland was killed in 1460 by an exploding cannon
fashioned from brittle iron. Abraham Darby, the owner of an iron foundry at
Coalbrookdale along the Severn River in the west of England, solved this
problem when he developed a process to drive the unwanted impurities from coal,
producing coke in 1709. Coke was so cheap that Darby could sell cast-iron pots
and kettles at prices accessible to common folk.
The story goes on. In order to dig for coal, deep mine shafts were sunk, and
these tended to flood. The steam engine was first developed to pump out the
mines. The steam engine in turn became the primary new source of power for the
Industrial Revolution. All of which came about because of a shortage of wood.
Eventually, this cycle of shortage and invention would lead to the canal system
in England, railroads and thermodynamics.
The bottom line is that the very process of developing alternative sources of
energy to replace fossil fuels may yield benefits beyond our imagining. But if
instead we fail to innovate, the consequences could be devastating.
On a recent drive across the United States, my wife and I visited a
1,000-year-old Indian village that is being unearthed slowly in Mitchell, South
Dakota. The village existed for less than 100 years, because its inhabitants
ran out of the wood they used for fuel and to construct their homes. Forced to
migrate to the Missouri River, these Indians became the Mandan.
If there is anything to be learned from history, its that we need to face
the harsh reality of fossil fuel scarcity and begin something like a Manhattan
project to develop clean, economical and preferably sustainable new sources of
energy. Just as important, we need to innovate on the side of conservation and
efficiency. The Indians of Mitchell were able to move to the Missouri, but if
we use up, or more realistically, greatly deplete, the resources of this earth,
we have no place to go.
(Stephen L. Sass, a professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell
University, is the author of The Substance of Civilization: Materials and
Human History From the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon.)
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