In the mid-nineteenth century, a new industry emerged, based on the refining of petroleum. The human use of petroleum is ancient, and may (for all we know) date well into pre-history. In the form found most often in nature, as thick pools of bituminous tar, this sticky, potentially flammable substance found use as a caulk, an embalming fluid, a lubricant, a weapon of war, and a medicine. Another source of petroleum, less widely exploited but also known for centuries, were oil seeps, where liquid petroleum emerged from the ground. Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, was named after the substance that tended to pool along its edge, and its skimmings were sold as a cure-all at least as far back as the eighteenth century. But until the middle of the nineteenth century, petroleum was never used extensively as a fuel source for heat or light.[1]

Petroleum: A Product in Search of Solutions

Why did it take so long for this substance, the load-bearing keystone of the industrial society of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to be tapped for its energy? There were several obstacles. The first was chemical: it was not obvious how to extract a useful fuel from raw petroleum, and the chemical knowledge and techniques needed to guide this distillation did not emerge until the nineteenth century. The second obstacle was industrial: to refine petroleum in a laboratory was one thing, to do it at the scale needed to create a national or global market was another. The final obstacle was logistical: tar (or bitumen, or asphalt) was heavy (it had to be mined, not pumped), and difficult to process. Oil appeared at the surface in fairly small quantities, and there was no obvious reason to believe, given geological knowledge at the time, that it represented leakage from a large, liquid reservoir below, nor were there obvious means to access such a reservoir if it existed.

By the mid-nineteenth century the tools were at hand in North America and Europe to overcome all of these obstacles, given enough effort. Europeans had begun constructing large-scale chemical manufacturing plants, primarily for the making of soda, earlier in the century. Around 1860, the chemical industry began a massive expansion into synthetic organic compounds, primarily dyes extracted from the tarry residue left over after cooking coal to make illuminating gas. Chemical knowledge advanced rapidly over this same period, in part because of its increasing commercial value.  Meanwhile, salt miners had created the boring machinery needed for drilling deep into the earth, which they used to extract subsurface brine.[2]

But a reason was still needed to put in the effort to apply these tools. The reason, as it turned out was a simple enough one: the ancient incantation of “let there be light.” As we have already seen, the nineteenth-century had brought forth an ever-growing demand for illumination. Modernity, with its contempt for the rhythms of nature, had taken a firm hold in the culture of Europe and North America. Town gas had brought on-demand light to urban public spaces and townhouses, but even the poor and those living far from the bustle of cities no longer accepted that the setting of the sun must mean the end of the day’s work and leisure, nor was the feeble light of a candle deemed good enough any longer. 

Whale oil was the premium-grade illuminating fluid of the time. It gave off a clean, bright light, but it cost as much as $2.50 a gallon in the United States. With the remaining whales disappearing from every corner of the oceans under the harpoon thrusts of a hundred Ahabs, prices could only be expected to rise. Lamps burning animal fat or vegetable oil could serve if nothing else was available, but the most popular cheap substitute, at only 50 cents per gallon, was camphene, made from tree resin and alcohol. Volatile camphene, however, burned all to readily, bringing with it the risk of deadly fires or even explosions. It also had a rather unpleasant odor.[3]

Abraham Gesner, a Canadian doctor and amateur geologist and chemist, was the first to figure out how to turn petroleum into a useful source of light. In 1849, he distilled a coal oil from bitumen that came from a huge lake of tar in Trinidad. He dubbed the oil kerosene: “keros” from wax (because of its wax-like solid form) and “-ene” to invoke the familiar camphene. Within a decade, he had set up a plant in New York making five thousand gallons of his illuminating oil a day, in competition with dozens of other companies making similar products.[4]

But tar-based illuminants were always limited by the difficulty of extracting and transporting the heavy raw material from its limited, often remote, origin sites. A group of northeastern businessmen led by George Bissell, a New York lawyer and man of all parts, became convinced that liquid rock oil would solve this problem and provide an alternative to whale oil of equal quality at a much lower price. So it was that Oil Creek became the epicenter for an eastern Gold Rush. Bissell and his colleagues convinced Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman to have a crack at distilling the oozings of Oil Creek into an effective lighting source, a feat he accomplished in 1855. It took a further four years for the group to hit paydirt at Oil Creek, drilling down seventy feet through bedrock with the same techniques used to bore for salt water. Then, finally, the oil boom was on.[5]

The illuminant that Silliman had extracted from raw oil also acquired the name kerosene, due to its similarity to Gesner’s tar extract. It provided a cheaper, cleaner, and brighter alternative to whale oil. During the 1860s, an entire industry emerged to extract, transport, and burn this kerosene, and in the 1870s it came under the increasing domination of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Then came electric light: a potential threat to the illuminating oil business, just as it was to the illuminating gas business. As long as it remained confined to dense town centers, electricity was more of a problem for gas than kerosene, given the latter’s advantage in portability. But the advent of long-distance electrical transmission around the turn of the century changed matters. It would take huge capital investments over many years to bring electricity to every town in the richer parts of the world, but it was only a matter of time. The oil magnates were on the lookout for a new kind of buyer for their product, before electric light relegated it to a niche fuel, useful only to the most rural and remote customers.[6]

Petroleum and Internal Combustion: Symbiosis

Conveniently, while the extractors and refiners of petroleum were looking for new buyers for their product, makers of combustion engines were looking to petroleum for a new source of fuel. Illuminating gas made for a convenient fuel supply in towns with the infrastructure for piping gas already in place, but as long as their engines depended on it, they could not make sales to more rural workshops.

What’s more, a combustion engine, requiring neither firebox, nor boiler, nor water tank, had great potential as a lightweight motor for a moving vehicle: it could finally make practical the dream of the self-propelled carriage, a dream dreamed since the time of Nicolas Cugnot and even earlier, but which no one had been able to realize using bulky steam engines.

Attempts to use more portable liquid fuels began in the 1870s: reliable, familiar kerosene was one possibility. But even more attractive was a volatile newcomer, gasoline: a light distillate of petroleum which as of yet had little commercial value. A liquid hydrocarbon fuel had to be mixed with air before putting into the cylinder, a process called carburetion, and lighter gasoline vaporized and carbureted more readily than heavier fuels. Several effective gasoline carburetors were invented in the mid-1880s at Deutz (home of the Otto engines), Karl Benz’s Benz & Cie, and the new workshop of Daimler and Maybach, who left Deutz together in 1882 to pursue the design of small, portable engines.[7] 

Daimler and Maybach wanted to create a general-purpose light engine that could be used equally well in a workshop or a mobile vehicle. To do this, they needed to generate more horsepower with less weight than a typical stationary engine, and the easiest way to do that was to turn the engine faster, generating far more rotations-per-minute (rpm) (a typical Otto engine would run at 100 rpm or less). This, in turn, required a new ignition mechanism: the typical engine of the time used an ignition flame, re-lit on each cycle of the engine from a permanent pilot light, then snuffed out again. This mechanical process was too slow for the speeds Daimler and Maybach wanted, so their Standuhr engine (so-called because it resembled an upright pendulum clock) instead used a hot tube of metal that protruded into cylinder for ignition. A flame outside the cylinder kept the tube at the right temperature to ignite the fuel-air mixture at the desired point in the compression stroke (the more compressedthe mixture, the more easily it ignited). With a hot tube, surface carburetor and water cooling, the Standuhr reached 650 rpms. One could be found putting about Daimler’s property in September 1886 mounted to a carriage, providing, aptly, about one horsepower.[8]

Benz, on the other hand, set out to make a vehicle designed from start to finish a motor car, with a bicycle frame as the basis for the chassis, and a new engine custom-designed for the vehicle. He used electric rather than hot-tube ignition: a safer approach than the hot tube and with the potential for more precise control, but finnicky with the battery technology available at the time. He did not achieve the same engine speeds as Daimler, but also made a working vehicle.[9]

Over the following years, Daimler, Benz, and other inventors (primarily in Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S.) steadily refined combustion automobile design, borrowing features from both the Daimler and Benz traditions and making many other design refinements (including improvements that made electrical ignition much more reliable) to produce something recognizable as the template for the modern automobile by about 1900. This new market for petroleum as a vehicle fuel rather than a light source was small, but promising, and poised to grow (dare I say it) explosively in the following decades.

Diesel

Gasoline engines created a new market for light, self-powered vehicles—automobiles and later aircraft—but did not supplant steam engines in the role of pulling heavy loads on steamships and locomotives. It was another genus of combustion engines that would snuff out the nimbus of steam that had shrouded ports and train stations throughout the nineteenth century.

The fire piston, a simple but ingenious fire-starting device, was used in Southeast Asia and the surrounding islands for centuries—no one knows exactly how long. It consists of a hollow wooden cylinder into which a matching piston can be snugly fitted. The piston contains a small niche at the end to hold flammable tinder. When forced rapidly into the cylinder, the compression of the air will heat it up rapidly, igniting the tinder. Fire pistons were found across Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, and were often used, like Volta’s electric pistol, in scientific demonstrations. The principle of their operation provided the foundation for this new genus of combustion engine, the kind we now know after the name of its inventor, Rudolf Diesel.[10]

Diesel had a peripatetic childhood: born in 1858 in Paris to parents from Augsburg in Bavaria, briefly exiled to London due to the anti-German feelings sparked by the Franco-Prussian War, he returned with his family to Paris, then moved in with cousins in Augsburg in 1873, where he enrolled in an industrial high school. It was likely at Augsburg that Diesel witnessed a demonstration of a fire piston with glass walls, exposing the magic moment of ignition. Did the sight of this spark kindle the concept for a new kind of engine deep in the recesses of young Diesels’ mind? It’s unlikely: he did not create his famous engine for another twenty years. But he remembered the event well enough, and considered it important enough, to relate it to his children years later.[11]

After completing his schooling at Augsburg, Diesel moved on to study engineering at Munich’sPolytechnic School (founded by the “Mad” king Ludwig II, and now known as the Technical University of Munich). There he was disgusted to learn how thermodynamically inefficient were the steam engines that powered industrial society; he became fascinated by Carnot and wondered how to replicate a perfect Carnot heat engine, to convert the heat from coal directly into work “without intermediaries.” He also met an important mentor, Carl von Linde, a mechanical engineering professor with a sideline in refrigeration machines.[12]

After college, with the aid of his mentor, Diesel entered the refrigeration business; he worked in France throughout the 1880s, selling refrigeration equipment and patenting his own ice-making machines, while toiling away at his solution to the heat engine puzzle. Another victim of the seductive reasoning that the problem with the steam engine was steam, Diesel was building an engine that would use ammonia for its working fluid instead. He presented his creation at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, in the shadow of Eiffel’s grand new tower. No great acclaim followed; this was not the Diesel engine that we know today. The exposition also marked the end to his life in France; with anti-German sentiment on the rise again, Diesel moved to Berlin in 1890.[13]

At the same exhibition Diesel could have seen Benz’ three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen and Daimler and Maybach’s Standuhr engine. Perhaps it is no coincidence then, that around this time he abandoned his ammonia engine and developed the idea for a new kind of internal combustion engine, one that would achieve new heights of efficiency through “the extreme compression of ordinary air.” How would it work? His goal was to achieve an ideal Carnot cycle by maintaining constant temperature in the chamber throughout combustion. His conceptual four-stroke engine would compress air to an astonishing 250 atmospheres, driving the temperature up to 900 degrees Celsius. The fuel could not be premixed with the air in the chamber, as in the gasoline engine, because it would then ignite too early. Instead, he would then inject the fuel just as the piston reached dead center in its compressing cycle. The fuel would then ignite immediately like the kindling in a fire piston, driving the piston backward, and giving up all of its heat to expanding the air back to its original volume, without any waste lost to the walls. Diesel filed for a patent on this idea in 1892.[14]

The problem was the 250 atmospheres. This was, to his contemporaries, an absurd figure; as one Diesel biographer points out, “[a]s far as was known in 1892, pressures of that magnitude had only occurred in volcanoes and bombs.” Diesel expected to rely on help constructing his engine from his good friend Heinrich Buz, head of the Bavarian manufacturing plant Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, but Buz would have nothing to do with it until Diesel agreed to reduce his pressure requirement to about forty atmospheres, at which point Buz agreed to build an experimental engine.[15]

It took Diesel and his colleagues at Maschinenfabrik Augsburg two years to get this experimental engine to run for a full minute straight, and a further three years (until early 1897), to get a really useable engine. The greatest engineering challenge was the fuel injector, which had to add just the right amount of fuel at just the right time within a window of less than one hundredth of a second, into a cylinder pushing back on the injector at far higher than atmospheric pressure. Gasoline would not do as a fuel for diesel engines because it would begin combustion too early: its volatility, an asset for easy mixing with air in an Otto engine, became a liability. Kerosene and other heavier oils worked well, vegetable oils and even coal dust were considered as alternatives.[16]

The 1897 engine was not the ideal heat engine that Diesel had first dreamed of, but at 26% efficiency (including both heat and mechanical losses), it surpassed any of its competitors: a typical Otto gasoline engine sat at around 15%. Because of the need to withstand high pressures in the chamber and for a separate pump to supply the fuel injector, it was heavy and bulky compared to Otto-style engines, but its enormous compression ratios allowed it produce high power output at low rpms, a valuable feature for overcoming momentum when starting heavy machinery or pulling a large load from a standstill. Over the long run Diesel engines would also prove more durable and reliable than their gasoline counterparts.[17]

Diesel and Buz now had something much closer to a marketable engine, and they soon had licensing agreements for construction of engines in Scotland, France, and Germany – including an agreement with Deutz, the leaders of the German internal combustion market. Adolphus Busch, the St. Louis beer magnate, acquired the exclusive rights to make Diesels in the United States for one million German marks, while Emmanuel Nobel (nephew of Alfred), acquired similar rights in “all the Russias” for 800,000 marks.[18]

Because their high compression ratios created high torque at low rpms, diesel engines became the engine of choice for heavy-duty applications: ships, tractors, electrical power (Kiev used diesel for its streetcar system) and eventually trains. Each application brought its own challenges which required new inventive creativity to overcome: the size and weight of the early diesel engines, for example, as well as the inability to put them in reverse, made them unsuitable for shipboard use; while diesel-electric locomotives (which used electric motors powered by diesel-supplied electricity), overcame the complex mechanical transmission problems of bringing direct diesel power to all the wheels of the locomotive. It would fall to other men than Diesel to overcome these obstacles, allowing the diesel to continue to scale up in power and find new uses over the decades. In 1911, the Swiss manufacturing firm Winterthur built a diesel with a cylinder one-meter across that generated about 2,000 horsepower. The following year, the ten-thousand-ton diesel-powered Danish freighter Selandia debuted to great success, “…carrying cargo faster, farther, and cleaner than steam-powered freighters, on less fuel and without any stops for bunkering.” In 1934, the Pioneer Zephyr achieved a new record time on the Denver-to-Chicago run under diesel-electric power, at an average speed of seventy-seven miles per hour.[19]

The later life of Diesel the man was less happy than that of his engine. A proud inventor, he was stung by the withering critiques of engineers who emphasized how little he had contributed to the creation of the diesel engine in its many useful forms. Profligate with money, he seemed compelled to live as if his means were inexhaustible rather than merely substantial. A pacifist, he was disturbed by the growing bellicosity of the European powers in the opening years of the twentieth century. Among his friends, Diesel could count Charles Parsons of steam turbine fame. While they dined together at Diesel’s home in June 1913, “…56,000 kilowatt Parsons turbines were being built into the five British battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class…and pairs of ultralight 1250-kilowatt Diesel engines were being installed in the Unterseebooten U-19 to U-23, the first Diesel-powered submarines of the German Navy.” Several months later, at age 55, a broke and broken Diesel hurled himself mid-sea from the deck of the steamer Dresden.[20]

Gas Turbines

By the end of the first third of the twentieth century, things looked increasingly grim for the age of steam. Having been upstaged by gasoline engines in the new markets for cars, trucks, and aircraft, been supplanted in the low-end of the power spectrum by easy-to-use combustion engines, and with its remaining share of train and sea-power steadily eroding, steam had one last, unconquered bastion. The sources of electric power remained dominated by a mix of coal-fueled steam and hydroelectric. Up through the 1930s, they more-or-less split global electrical production between them, with coal tending to take the larger share.[21]

But combustion held one last insult to inflict upon steam, albeit a long-delayed one. A side effect of petroleum extraction operations was the emission of large quantities of hydrocarbon gas, called natural gas in contrast to the longstanding synthetic coal gas industry. In a sense it was the lightest petroleum distillate of all, pre-separated in the bowels of the earth and released from the borehole like an enormous, long-held flatulation.

Like other forms of flatulence, natural gas was mostly treated by the petroleum industry as an undesirable embarrassment. But by the 1880s, pipeline technology became good enough to bring gas from wells to nearby cities, where it could provide light and heat with a cleaner burn and more energy density than coal gas. During the early U.S. petroleum boom in Appalachia and the Midwest, natural gas supply came to Pittsburgh, from the Haymaker well about twenty miles east of the city. Originally drilled in search of oil, the Haymaker had been left abandoned and burning for four years before being tamed and tapped. Natural gas came to Chicago from the wells to the southeast that gave Gas City, Indiana its name. Then, after coming, the gas went again, as these northern gas fields ran dry.[22]

The situation changed radically when the second American oil and gas boom took off in the Southwest in the early twentieth century. Prospectors found trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet in Louisiana and Texas. This created a huge imbalance in supply and demand between southern producers, “flaring or simply venting into the atmosphere hundreds of millions of cubic feet per day of natural gas” and northern cities eager for a clean, cheap source of heat.[23]

Huge investments of capital in the 1920s and 30s would finally rectify that imbalance. A group of investors, including Samuel Insull, best known as the czar of Chicago’s electrical system, pooled their resources to build a massive pipeline from Texas to Chicago. Nearly a thousand miles long and two feet in diameter, it could carry gas at a rate of 210 million cubic feet per day, ten times the capacity of the defunct lines that had once supplied Chicago from the Indiana gas fields. The newly developed technique of electrical resistance welding made the line feasible by fusing the sections of pipe together without any seam, allowing it to carry the gas under high pressure without leakage.[24]

That was all very well for chilly Midwesterners, but it was nothing to concern steam. Some areas of the Southwest burned gas instead of oil or coal in their electric plants—why not, when it was so abundant—but that was just another way to make steam.[25] But, as we know, gas could be burned inside an engine, too, and a new, very efficient and powerful kind of internal combustion engine was just about to come onto the scene.

Given that waterwheels had to make room for water turbines, and steam pistons for steam turbines, the appearance of internal combustion turbines (typically known as gas turbines, though they may burn liquid fuels) has the air of inevitability. The idea had a long, difficult gestation, however, in large part of because of the continuous high temperatures to which the moving parts were exposed, which could be withstood only be new heat-tolerant alloys. The basic idea is to burn fuel continuously within the turbine, and use the hot gas that resulted, rather than steam, to spin the turbine blades and provide power. Some heat is also drawn off to drive a compressor that continuously pushes fresh air into the chamber for combustion.

A few stationary power turbines were built in the early part of the twentieth century, primarily in Switzerland, but gas turbine technology got a massive boost from the intensified development of aeroengines before and during World War II. In the 1930s, both Frank Whittle in Britain and Hans-Joachim von Ohain in Germany designed experimental jet engines (which exhausted the hot gas directly for thrust instead of driving an axle) for combat aircraft, and a German jet engine saw combat on the Messerschmitt Me262 fighter. American engineers, meanwhile, gained experience in high-performance gas compressors by designing superchargers to enable piston-driven aircraft such as the P-47 and P-51 fighters to operate efficiently at high altitude.[26]

It took still more decades for stationary turbine technology to develop to the point where electricity generated by gas turbines became commonplace. Demand for gas power plants has grown over the decades since, fueled by environmental concerns (gas burns much more cleanly than coal and produces less carbon dioxide) and the need for excess capacity to respond to demand spikes (gas plants can be turned on quickly since they don’t need to build up a head of steam). The share of global electricity production claimed by gas rose from 13% to 24% between 1971 and 2019.[27]

The Twilight of Steam

Steam is still with us: roughly half of the electricity generated world-wide is still mediated by steam, whether generated by coal, nuclear power, or oil.[28] Most modern natural gas plants also use steam in a secondary role: they run the still-hot gas turbine exhaust through a steam-powered turbine in order to maximize the overall efficiency of the plant. A few warships still prowl the world’s oceans under a head of steam generated by nuclear fission, which allows them to stay on station for months without any local fuel source.

But the meaning and influence of steam in our economy, society, and culture have altogether diminished. No twenty-first century Edward Ellis will write of a “Steam Man of the Prairies” (1868) marching across the American West, nor a twenty-first century Verne of a Steam House (1880) puffing around India, nor a twenty-first century Wells of steam-powered “Land Ironclads” (1903) crawling over the battlefields of Europe. Visions of a steam-powered tomorrow now exist only at a second level of remove, not as something imagined in our future, but as something imagined in a future of the past, within the kitschy sub-genre of steampunk.

Steam did not decline all at once; a gradual process saw it shunted from foreground to background. Around the turn of the twentieth century, many writers wrote of the time in which they lived as an age of steam, though some believed it was in the process of being supplanted by an age of electricity.[29] As late as 1938, Henry Dickinson’s A Short History of the Steam Engine gives off no overtones of valediction or mourning. One leaves the book, after a discussion of contemporary improvements in turbines and boilers, with the sense that steam power is still on an upward trajectory.

Not long after that, an American G.I. headed to Operation Torch in North Africa in the fall of 1942 would have experienced a hybrid world. He might have ridden a train pulled by steam locomotive to his port of departure and boarded a Liberty ship powered by a triple-expansion steam engine. But he would have crossed an ocean prowled by diesel-powered U-boats, and would have mounted a two-and-a-half-ton truck to move forward with his unit, or taken up a crew station on an M4 Sherman tank, both vehicles equipped with gasoline engines. This is to be expected. The diffusion of new technologies is always gradual and, to some degree, incomplete. At this same time, the German army of the blitzkrieg could boast a spearhead of gleaming motorized divisions, but relied on old-fashioned horse-drawn wagons and carts for the rest.[30]

Certainly, by the 1960s, however, the age of steam had taken up decisive residence in the past, a historical era on which one looked back fondly, rather than a description of a present reality.[31] Google’s Ngram viewer traces its decline from vital concept to historical reminiscence quite vividly:

What can we say, in closing, about the age of steam? What was it, exactly, and what did it mean? Each of the aspects of the age of steam that we have visited—the pumping engine, the factory prime mover, the steamboat and steamship, the locomotive, the electric power—share a common theme, and that theme is modernity, and specifically the unhitching of mankind from the wagon of Earth’s natural, cyclical processes: day and night, summer and winter, wind and calm, sun and rain.

We cannot, of course, lay all of modernity at the feet of steam. The industrial revolution began under water power, and would probably have continued to develop in a quite similar direction for some time without steam. All of the political, social, and cultural features that we associate with the modern world (nationalism, individualism, secularization, and so on) have no obvious connection to steam power, and can be traced to antecedents dating centuries before steam power took off.

But steam power changed humanity’s relationship to the world in a profound sense. Almost all of the useful energy humans encounter comes, one way or another, from the light of the sun: the plants it feeds, the rain that it lifts into the sky, the wind that it drives across the plains. We must wait patiently for this bounty to grow, to fall, to blow. The age of steam refused to wait, borrowing instead from the banked solar energy of the past, stored beneath the earth in the form of coal, to get power on demand, at will. The petroleum age of internal combustion that succeeded steam was simply an extension and intensification of this process; we should perhaps speak of a single age, an age of fossil fuels.

Jevons’ paradox, formulated by the economist William Jevons in 1865, captures the impatient, spendthrift spirit of the age. Concerned about the future exhaustion of Britain’s reserves of coal, he noted that the obvious solution of making more efficient machinery would have the opposite of the intended effect: the less coal steam engines consumed for a given amount of work, the more useful coal became, and so the more of it the British nation pulled out of the earth to burn: “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”[32]

Now, awakening to the full implications of borrowing from the past with no intent to repay, and thus releasing all of Earth’s long-buried carbon into the open, humanity is embarked on a new quest, to supply our needs by more completely and effectively capturing the solar energy of today: renewable energy, that will come again tomorrow and the next day as long as the sun continues to shine. We want, we hope, to somehow give up our dependence on borrowing from the past, without giving up all the hard-won conveniences of the steam age. Wish us luck.