Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go - Wade Frazier

[Magda Hassan]

Epochal Event 4.5 The Rise of Oil and Electricity

Chapter summary:

• American whaling peaks
  
  
• The first commercial oil well is drilled
  
  
• American plutocracy and political assassinations
  
  
• Gilded Age, the rise of the robber barons, and John D. Rockefeller
  
  
• Encounters of FE and related activists with Rockefeller interests
  
  
• Relative unimportance of American presidents
  
  
• Ultra-elite power games I have known
  
  
• Global elite and psychopaths in their employ
  
  
• Conspiracism and hacking at branches
  
  
• Organized suppression of alternative and free energy
  
  
• Robber baron influence in fluoridation
  
  
• Nuclear industry influence in fluoridation
  
  
• Influence of J.P. Morgan
  
  
• First uses of electricity
  
  
• Tesla, Edison, and Morgan
  
  
• First "free energy" threat to the robber barons
  
  
• Modern uses of electricity
  
  
• Interacting dynamics of industrialization
  
  
• Human "morality" and imperial competitions
  
  
• La Belle Époque and the starvation of imperial subjects
  
  
• Rise of oil in transportation
  
  
• West's dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and its oil politics and genocides ever since
  
  
• Rockefeller control of economics and how neoclassical economics ignores energy
  
  
• Fear and greed become cornerstones of modern economic theory
  
  
• Modern economics is not a science
  
  
• Disdain that scientists hold for economists
  
  
• Professional racketeering the elite benefit derived from it
  
  
• Robber baron control of the medical establishment
  
  
• Crescendo of American nationalism and Japanese attempts to catch up to the West
  
  
• Economic motivation behind World Wars
  
  
• The UK's rape of India
  
  
• German scientific advances
  
  
• Jewish intellectual achievement
  
  
• American industrialist support for Hitler
  
  
• Childishness of imperial ideology and those adhering to it
  
  
• Hitler learned his racist ideology Henry Ford
  
  
• Social managers' scientific population management
  
  
• Industrial Revolution's reliance on fossil fuel energy
  
  
• West rides on the backs of a trillion energy slaves
  
  
• True economic benefit of oil
  
  
• Imagining the role of energy in our world
  
  
• Energy efficiency and societies
  
  
• Industrial Revolution's dramatic rise in energy consumption
  
  
• Capitalism's formation of the ownership class
  
  
• Capitalism's speculative frenzies
  
  
• Hitler's mistakes
  
  
• The USA founding its CIA with death camp Nazis
  
  
• First application of nuclear energy
  

When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, published in 1851, American whaling expeditions had lengthened from brief excursions near Nantucket to three-year voyages that circled the world, which hunted the remaining whales. American whaling peaked in 1847, in a classic resource depletion scenario, as whaling's EROI fell fast. The primary whale "product" was oil for lighting lamps. In 1848, the USA completed the theft of more than half of Mexico, which began with the seizure of Texas. The same year, the biggest gold rush in American history began, and those seeking the easy money got to California any way they could. The genocide of California's remaining natives began in earnest, and California's first governor declared an open season on natives. The Pacific whaling fleet was crippled when its crews deserted in San Francisco and swarmed into the Sierra's gold fields.
In 1859, the USA's first commercial oil well was drilled, and its Civil War began in 1861. The southern rebels sank most of the Pacific whaling fleet during the war, and that, combined with the petroleum industry's establishment, spelled the end of American whaling. Railroads were the USA's first big businesses, and in the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad was built. The telegraph was an early use of electricity, and it proliferated with the railroads; telegraph lines ran alongside the rails as the USA expanded across the continent. Those railroads were instrumental in the extinction of the passenger pigeon, the near-extinction of the bison, and the disappearance of the American frontier. As with World War II, the USA's Civil War stimulated its industrial production. In 1830, the USA's industrial production was a quarter of the UK's, a third in 1860, two-thirds in 1880, and a third greater in 1900.[780] On the eve of World War I, the USA's industrial production was more than twice the UK's, and the USA was far and away Earth's greatest industrial power. It grew even more dominant by 1929, and was virtually alone on the world stage in 1945.[781]
The USA has been a plutocracy since the very beginning. George Washington was the USA's richest man; he was a slave-owning land baron whose armies he commanded made him richer. John Jay was the USA's first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and strongly believed that those who own the nation should govern it. Possibly beginning with Zachary Taylor, assassinating American presidents became a sport, with Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Kennedy, Ford, and Reagan and others subject to assassination attempts that were often successful, and presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace were also subjected to assassination attempts. Other political figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Fred Hampton, and John Lennon were assassinated, and they may well have all died in operations like those that killed the Kennedys and other attempts of that era. Only the Lincoln assassination has been widely acknowledged to have been part of a conspiracy. Every other time it was attributed to a "lone nut" assassin, if the weak conclusion given by the second official John Kennedy assassination investigation is ignored. I have no doubt that John Kennedy's death resulted from a conspiracy, and in 2013, for the first time ever, the Kennedy family publicly stated the truth: the Kennedy family never believed the "lone nut" theory regarding John's murder, and Robert Kennedy considered the Warren Report to be a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship." Robert Kennedy's son made that public admission, and if the Kennedys never believed the official story for John's murder, they certainly do not believe it for Robert's murder. The Kennedys have not revealed that opinion yet, but probably do not need to.[782] Fear probably kept them silent for 50 years. I consider it very possible that none of the prominent assassinations and attempts were the work of "lone nuts." The spooks were busy in 1960s and 1970s, and assassinating American political figures would have been a modest undertaking compared to the Phoenix Program and killing several million people in Southeast Asia. Creating scapegoats to deflect attention from covert activities may have become a science in certain circles.
With its skyrocketing industrial growth, economic empires expanded as never before and the USA's Gilded Age was born, which was dominated by robber barons. Industrial, financial, pharmaceutical, and other empires were born or began steep growth trajectories during the Civil War, and John Davison Rockefeller's oil empire was the most notorious and successful. Rockefeller established an oil refining business in 1863 after careful study of the new industry. As with bears and early elites, Rockefeller quickly realized that controlling production was unnecessary. If he positioned himself properly between the producers and market, then he could seize control of the entire industry. Rockefeller's father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who mentored his sons and was John's early financier. John used the rich man's exemption to buy his way out of military service in the Civil War and began building his empire. He decided that controlling refining and distribution was the path to dominance. John Rockefeller was a genius. He negotiated kickbacks from the railroads used to transport oil, but took it further when he negotiated kickbacks on the railroad traffic of his competitors, in one of history's most clever and unscrupulous plans. Beginning in Cleveland, he used his shrewd kickback scheme and various carrots and sticks to wipe out or buy out all other refiners. Rockefeller's Standard Oil eliminated the hundreds of small refiners that formed the initial industry. By 1879, his empire controlled 95% of American oil refining, which set the stage for him to become history's richest person, with several times Bill Gates's relative wealth. Recalcitrant Standard Oil competitors could have mysterious explosions destroy their refineries, and more than one came to an untimely demise, but if Rockefeller's prey put up a good fight or showed talent, he hired them and soon amassed a team unmatched in capability and ruthlessness. John Rockefeller only became excited when pondering how rich he would become.[783] He became a "philanthropist" early on but he was a standard phony humanitarian, as became evident with the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.
The Rockefeller Empire's tale is far from an irrelevant historical curiosity. During my days of pursuing FE, we encountered the Rockefeller name many times. Companies they controlled were directly involved with wiping out energy companies that we worked with. When my partner was offered about a billion dollars to abandon his efforts, the Rockefellers may well have been involved, and we later had direct dealings with Rockefeller heirs, including one of the biggest names. The Rockefeller Empire probably inflicted some of the organized suppression activities that we suffered. Long after I "retired" from the field, my partner kept trying to make an impact before he was run out of the USA, soon after direct contact from the Rockefeller Empire. Rothschild interests were also involved. The Rockefeller and Rothschild dynasties are subjected to many conspiracy theories in the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, and our encounters demonstrated that the allegations may not be groundless. However, the fact that they identified themselves by name means, to me, that they are no longer at the top of the global power structure, if they ever really were. The people who really run the world are not household names. I call them the Global Controllers ("GCs"), my partner called them the Big Boys, a leading name in the FE field called them "Godzilla," and other terms such as "Sinister Secret Government" and "Shadow Government" have been applied. Whatever name is used, the organization is real. We also had dealings with them, more than I can publicly disclose, and they do not identify themselves by name. They act through intermediaries and have developed their cloak-and-dagger methods into a science. Whether it was the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or GCs, we never contacted them, but they contacted us.
Anybody knowledgeable about that milieu realizes that naming names is dangerous and I usually make it a point to not know the names. Others who should know have named some organizations or, more accurately, factions of some organizations. We also had encounters with provocateurs from one of those organizations when they helped destroy our companies. This can be a difficult and delicate subject, and what follows is my view as of early 2014, which has not changed much since the early 2000s. Sitting American presidents operate far below the tops of those organizations, in the dark and out of the loop, and they all know that they are not near the top. They have power of a sort, but are largely actors, not necessarily following orders, but they know their place or have a good idea what it is, and they cannot impact important issues. The last president who thought that he could was John Kennedy, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.
From the beginnings of civilization, all elites have always played the same basic games, which were concerned with gaining economic power as a path to political power. All ruling classes exploited those they ruled. The elites of city-states, whether they were in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica, tried to militarily conquer their neighbors and form larger polities. Nations and empires have constantly formed, fragmented, and fallen over the millennia, and they almost always disintegrated because they ran out of energy. Greed and megalomania can never be satiated, and those in their thrall continually feed their addictions. Psychologists have found that psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their affliction is advantageous when amassing wealth and power are primary organizational goals. For those who have encountered today's ultra-elite and lived to tell about it, the evils that they relate about such environments are difficult for "normal" people to understand. Those at the top have elevated greed and a lust for power to nearly inconceivable levels. Just as John Rockefeller hired talented psychopaths, so do the GCs. I have encountered their agents and they were talented; I will grant them that. The man responsible for the death of a woman in our organization tried to blame my former partner for her death at the funeral. He probably worked for the GCs, but was a contract agent, as many are. He later defrauded the public with the same tactics he used to help destroy our company, as did another contract agent provocateur, who sat in prison as of 2014. People like them do not have consciences. They could have done well in Hitler's SS, for instance.
What psychologists call psychopaths or sociopaths, mystics call dark pathers and other terms. Such people have simply made self-service a science (their in-group is one person: themselves), and reaching high levels of "evil" requires great commitment. Genghis Kahn was a busy man, slaughtering millions and producing millions of descendants. That takes hard work and a sense of duty. Dark path professionals were sicced on us, and being on the receiving end of their evil deeds engendered a certain kind of awe and was an effective way to lose one's naïveté.
But the dark path can be quite dark, and although indoctrination and other kinds of limbic conditioning help form "cohesion" in societies, in GC and other criminal enterprises the carrots and sticks uniting those organizations can be breathtaking. I avoid knowing very much about it, as that knowledge can be damaging to a normal person's psyche. I was damaged by merely studying the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide of the Western Hemisphere's natives, and today's recent and continuing imperial genocides inflicted by my nation. Those diabolical global organizations are always in danger of fragmenting as everybody vies for wealth and power, and I doubt that there is an unbroken line of conspiring elites that stretches back to civilization's beginnings. They have risen and fallen along with their civilizations, and they could only play a regional game at most. However, with Europe's conquest of the world, power-addicted elites could begin thinking on a global scale for the first time. I would not be surprised to discover that some ultra-elite organizations have a pedigree that stretches back for centuries, and conspiracists have long traced those lineages. But my impression is that turnover regularly happens at the top, which is generally beyond the purview of conspiracists. With retail dynasties (Rome, Mayans, European royalty, China, etc.), they could trust relatives more than others, so heredity played a role, and apparently also does with the GCs. A close relative nearly tried to recruit me into the family "business," and his employers played at a higher level than John Perkins's employers did, but it still seemed down a level or two from the GCs' stratum.
One major problem with making a positive impact on a global level, ultra-elite machinations aside, is that almost nobody focuses on what is important, which I hope to help remedy with this essay. Almost everybody hacks at branches if they hack at all. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, which is of dubious benefit to begin with, but they often become paranoid and also confuse retail elites or other interests with the GCs. Bill Gates and David Rockefeller are probably not members of the GCs' organization. Also, I learned that ultra-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The GCs are only a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. They cannot be beaten at their game, and it is counterproductive and can even be suicidal to try. Making them obsolete is probably the best that we can do. While conspiracists often fixate on ultra-elite machinations, intellectuals, academics, and scientists tend to deny that such activities even exist or are meaningful. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging ultra-elite existence, and I think it partly relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that considers consciousness to be nothing more than a byproduct of biochemical reactions. They have an ideological aversion to the notion that anybody manipulates events on a global scale, and believe that what seems conspiratorial is only anarchic elites competing with each other, which is like Darwin's view of evolution. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists, or that the situation can be explained without invoking conscious intent, like materialistic hypotheses of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have openly admitted their ideological objections to the existence of such elites; such an idea scares them. Neither obsession nor denial helps people attain productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, is their primary limitation. Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces, and energy ranks above all else. Victims are reactive instead of proactive, and only combined positive intention and resulting action has a prayer of working, in my opinion.
I do not make it a point to collect stories, but I am aware that there are literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, of cases of technology suppression, largely performed by the GCs' agents, and I have not only survived a few episodes of such activities, but I have heard of many others, either firsthand or secondhand. Most involve alternative and free energy, but they also include exotic materials, antigravity technology, and technologies that would make almost all of humanity's major industries immediately obsolete. Much of what has been suppressed would appear magical to the masses. The GCs and other private interests often use governments and other public organizations to their ends. That happened each time our companies were wiped out. Public officials wielded the public ax, always acting in concert with the media, but they always performed on behalf of their private interest patrons.
The GCs have deep pockets, and keeping FE and related technologies such as antigravity under wraps is perhaps their greatest priority. If there is any good news to relate, it is that all informed observers know that humanity is quickly making Earth uninhabitable, which has made most GCs uneasy. They do not want to live in their underground and off-world survival enclaves if Earth's surface becomes at least temporarily uninhabitable, and members of that disenchanted faction gave a close friend an underground exotic technology show. In my circles, receiving such a demonstration was unexceptional.
Later in this essay, I will return to that theme. One lesson that I learned during my adventures is that with global events, far more happens than meets the public eye. Accepting events at face value is rarely appropriate. That stated, documented history and archeological and other physical evidence can provide important insights, and this essay will continue along a scientist's/historian's path for now.
Other robber baron empires profoundly affected not only industrial and national trajectories, but the very path of science and medicine. Andrew Mellon parlayed his robber baron heritage into becoming the USA's Secretary of the Treasury, and presided over fluoride (ionized fluorine) beginning its surreal makeover from toxic industrial waste to a tooth's best friend. Mellon controlled the world's largest fluoride polluter at the time. It was also the world's largest aluminum producer, and enjoyed an American monopoly. There is virtually no credible data or theory that justifies fluoride's status as a safe or effective cavity preventative for children. Also, indisputable evidence demonstrates that it is a highly effective enzyme poison, used in biological laboratories today for that purpose, and it also destroys teeth instead of protecting them. To revisit that "lock-and-key" analogy for enzymes, hydrogen bonds help form the lock's shape. An ion with an extra electron will be more negatively charged than any part of an uncharged molecule that unevenly shares electrons, such as in water and certain organic molecules, in which hydrogen atoms attain a slight positive charge, and the atoms that the hydrogen are bonded to have a slight negative charge. Consequently, negatively charged ions will attract hydrogen atoms that form hydrogen bonds more than what they were originally bonded to, particularly if the ions are small enough to slip into the molecules' structure. Because they are the smallest negatively charged ions known to science, fluorine ions readily displace hydrogen bonds in organic molecules. When fluorine ions disrupt an enzyme's hydrogen bonds, the lock becomes "bent" and the key no longer fits. That is how fluoride poisons enzymes. DNA's double helix is also held together by hydrogen bonds. The story of how industrial interests transformed fluoride into "medicine" is stupefying, and shows how severe the distortion of mainstream science and medicine has become. Lead, aluminum, and other industrial elements also received makeovers, and had early toxicity studies performed at an industrially funded laboratory that predictably gave a clean bill of health to all of them, at the same time that the medical establishment promoted cigarettes while citing similar industrial "research."
Other industries were also fluoride polluters and helped shape the "science" of fluoridation, most notably the nuclear industry, beginning with the Manhattan Project; its involvement has been partly revealed by declassified documents. The Manhattan Project's research into fluorine toxicity is still largely classified (although what has been declassified is disturbing enough), but a study performed by that industrially funded lab showed fluoride's dramatic harm to animals, and the results were buried because they did not provide an industry-friendly result. Because that study was performed by an industrial lab and not the federal government, a researcher discovered it while performing research for a book published in 2004. Among the more alarming effects of fluoride is brain damage. A scientist who stumbled into that connection had her career wrecked, and the man who ran the Manhattan Project's still-classified fluorine studies "consulted" on that scientist's research. The average American, who is history's most fluoridated person, has no awareness of the situation. The fluoride issue is one of many in which physical, biological, and medical science became subservient to economic interests. Is fluoride a population management tool used to help dumb down the public? Reality could be turned upside down, poison turned into "medicine," and such situations last to this day. People trying to rectify the situations can lose their careers or be branded "quacks," "pseudoscientists," "conspiracy theorists," and the like. Edward Bernays designed the propaganda campaigns to fluoridate the USA's water supplies and addict American women to tobacco.
The Rockefeller and Mellon empires were only two of many built during and after the Civil War. J.P. Morgan got his start just before the Civil War began and made a quick ascent as a banker and financier. He participated in some of the most momentous events in American and industrial history, such as forming U.S. Steel. It is a big story that this essay cannot do justice to, but Morgan was ubiquitous, including masterminding what became arguably the biggest swindle of the American government to that time: the purchase of land for the Panama Canal in 1903; which was the largest payment yet made by the USA's federal government. The future "trust-busting" president and Supreme Court Chief Justice was at the trough with Morgan on that scheme. After milking the government, Morgan rode to the "rescue" in 1907 to quell a bank panic, and several years later, the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through when Capitol Hill was virtually empty, two days before Christmas. Earlier in that same year of 1913, the Income Tax Amendment was passed, which prepared the USA's government to attain truly imperial stature. Those events were grist for conspiracists for the succeeding century, and many allegations may well be true. The most powerful Senator on Capitol Hill was Mark "Dollar" Hanna, who was a schoolboy friend of John Rockefeller and political fixer for Standard Oil at a time when the corruption was open in Washington, with politicians routinely bought by robber barons.[784]
The first practical use of electricity was for electroplating in about 1805, but the invention was suppressed by the French Academy of Sciences for the next generation. In 1816, the next use of electricity was the telegraph, but it was not until Thomas Edison's teams perfected incandescent lighting in 1879 that electricity production was industrialized. Perhaps Morgan's most portentous industrial undertaking was participating in the epic battle between Edison and his former employee, Nikola Tesla. Edison himself was not a particularly brilliant inventor; many of his inventions were the result of his employees' hard work. Electric lighting is a good example; his team engaged in brute force experimentation with thousands of filaments before they hit on something that worked in 1879, perhaps at Edison's suggestion for the filament that finally worked. When the Wizard of Menlo Park demonstrated electric lights near his laboratory, he was widely pilloried for his "idiotic" idea, which was called a "fraud" foisted on the public by scientists who would not leave the comfort of their armchairs to go see for themselves. Morgan financed Edison's electric light company and had the first home in New York lit by electricity. Edison was also notorious for stealing inventions, and there is even a tale of a rival inventor "disappearing," Mafia-style. It was simply a sign of the times, and an era that we still live in.
In the flood of immigrants to the USA during the 1880s came the Serbian Tesla, who had already worked for an Edison company in France. After a dispute in 1885 when Tesla redesigned Edison's inefficient motors and generators, and the reward that Tesla said that Edison promised was not given, Tesla quit and began his own electric company. The investors soon kicked him out, which left Tesla digging ditches in 1886-1887, and then he started another company.
Edison's companies were beginning to electrify the world in the late 1880s, but Edison used direct current. Direct current has advantages over alternating current, but its great limitation is that resistance in electric lines quickly saps low-voltage direct current in heat losses. The higher the voltage of current transmitted over electric lines, the less proportional energy is lost to heating. Alternating current's voltage could be stepped up by transformers and transmitted great distances with little line loss and then stepped back down for use, while direct current could not be manipulated that way. The primary upshot was that only one generator was needed to supply many miles of electric lines carrying alternating current, while direct current needed a generator every kilometer or so. The efficiencies of alternating current transmission and the economies of scale of centralized generation made direct current a poor alternative for electrifying the world. Edison was beaten from the beginning but did not go quietly; he is a household name today, while Tesla's name languishes in obscurity (at least until a car company was named after him).
High voltages are dangerous for various reasons, but the risk of electrocution is the main one. Even though he was beaten by a superior technology, Edison engaged in a disgraceful campaign against alternating current. He had thousands of animals electrocuted in demonstrations of the hazards of alternating current, including horses and even an elephant in 1903. Although Edison was personally opposed to the death penalty, his commercial sensibilities overcame his personal qualms and he made his most notorious invention, the electric chair, powered with alternating current. The first execution with Edison's new contraption was performed in 1890, and the victim was roasted. By that time, Tesla had partnered with George Westinghouse in the battle against Edison, and Edison tried coining the term for execution by electrocution as being "Westinghoused." By 1891, the short-lived "war" was largely over, and alternating current prevailed. In 1892, Edison's company was absorbed into what became General Electric, which J.P. Morgan controlled, and Morgan was also Westinghouse's financier. When you finance both sides, you will always win, such as arming both sides in a war or being the "house" in a poker game. In the courtroom, the lawyers always win. Enabling the combatants, not being one, is a tried-and-true strategy.
The War of Currents nearly bankrupted Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla relinquished his patent rights to his alternating current technology to Westinghouse for a modest lump sum in 1897. Tesla's original royalty agreement would have made him one of the world's richest men, and humanity might have taken a different direction if not for the battle with Edison. Tesla immediately began thinking in terms of what could be called free energy. Tesla's inventions were legion and were sometimes stolen by contemporaries such as Marconi. In 1898, Tesla began designing a tower for producing radio signals, and construction commenced in 1901. Morgan was Tesla's financier and was making money hand-over-fist with the alternating current technology that Tesla had relinquished his rights to. Tesla may have felt entitled to Morgan's support.[785] As Tesla built his radio tower, he began telling of grander goals, such as producing energy that could be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere on Earth. His initial idea was tapping the electric potential between Earth and its upper atmosphere, and anybody on Earth could easily and freely use the current that Tesla induced. When Tesla made those proposals, however, robber barons were making big investments in copper mines to wire the nation for electricity. Morgan stopped funding Tesla's idea in 1903, just when he and the Guggenheim family financed what became the world's greatest copper mine. Many years later, Tesla's official biographer, who knew him, said that when Tesla began writing "free energy" articles and talked publicly about it, another Wall Street financier who was heavily invested in copper mines told Morgan that Tesla was acting "crazy" with proposing free energy for everybody that nobody could meter.[786] Wall Street then abandoned Tesla and he never regained his momentum. Tesla also advocated what today could be called Zero-point energy, although he couched it in the form of harnessing cosmic rays.[787] Tesla also originated an idea for a "death ray" weapon and other inventions that have cast him as an enigmatic figure.[788] Upon his death in 1943, the FBI seized his papers, and there is plenty of conjecture and some evidence that there was a surreptitious previous seizure by other agents.[789] There are some way-out allegations about Tesla, including time travel and myriad exotic technologies. I have looked into them somewhat, and knowing what some around me have witnessed makes the rumored technologies far from unreasonable. The publicly available evidence is relatively thin, however, but would be if they were genuine technologies and events, as many powerful interests would want them kept secret and under their control.
The modern use of electricity is little more than pumping electrons to power electrical equipment, in the same basic fashion that running water was used to run mills. The electron flow, like running water, is not the ultimate source of energy, but is just an energy flow that humans harnessed. With electricity, the first major applications had waterfalls as energy sources. But coal-fired electric generators quickly became the standard, for the same reason that coal overcame water and wind generations earlier, and coal power today provides nearly half of the USA's and world's electricity. Electrons pumped across copper wires became a major innovation that led to modern homes and cities. Before electricity was used to transmit energy, power was only available at the site where usable energy was produced. Watermills, windmills, and heat engines transmitted pre-electrical energy via gears, straps, and pulleys, which were cumbersome and dangerous. With the introduction of electricity to transmit energy, factories became far more versatile and humane, and as cities and homes were electrified, they were radically transformed. The USA led the world in introducing electrical appliances to homes; refrigerators, thermostatically controlled central heating and air conditioning, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, dish washers, radios, televisions, and computers, to name a few innovations, made the early 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century's home virtually unrecognizable to a home-dweller during the USA's Civil War. Electricity also powers the process used today to refine aluminum, and modern equipment of all kinds would simply be infeasible without electricity.
Isolating scientific, economic, social, and political dynamics is probably unworkable for analyzing the Industrial Revolution, as they all interacted like never before. In some ways the story was familiar, as a new class of elites ended the previous regime's primacy. But many changes were either unprecedented or reflected changes in dynamics with thousands of years of history. The trajectory of slavery demonstrated that how people treated each other was dependent on the economic situation, and makes the idea of an inherent human "morality" difficult to support. Virtually all wars have had economic motivation behind them, from the very beginning. Even though chattel slavery became obsolete with industrialization, imperial exploitation regularly reached genocidal levels. From the rubber boom during Europe's Scramble for Africa to wiping out the remaining American Indians that lived on coveted land to today's imperial genocides inflicted by the USA, the record is grim for such "civilized" peoples. Competing over world conquest kept Europeans from fighting each other while the plunder was plentiful. Most violence was directed toward relatively helpless preindustrialized peoples, as they were easy prey, no different in kind than chimp coalitionary violence or why male monkeys and apes murder infants that they did not sire. The USA's Civil War and the Crimean War, however, were both wars of empire, with one to hold a nascent empire together and the other a battle between rising empires carving up a declining empire. In 1870, France and a rising Prussia had a war that resulted in a Germanic victory. The victors imposed onerous war reparations on France. France returned the favor at World War I's end, which helped lead to World War II.
Between 1871 and 1914, Europe lived in a Golden Age called La Belle Époque. Between 1860 and 1910, English life expectancy rose from about 40 to more than 50, and obesity was no longer confined to the elite. It was one of humanity's most fecund artistic eras, when some of my favorite artists lived, including my all-time favorite. The Renaissance was also a time of great artistic advances, and the Enlightenment and Romantic eras produced the greatest music yet made. Those artistically fertile periods had relative economic abundance in common. However, while the imperial heartland had cultural awakenings and lived the good life, the sufferings of their imperial subjects were often greater than ancient Rome's. The "philanthropic" genocide in the African rainforests was one of the greatest ever for Old World peoples, with all European powers involved. The famines that began in 1875 were largely imperial creations, and another series of El-Niño-related famines began in the late 1890s, which hit China and India particularly hard, as their traditional famine-prevention systems were destroyed by imperial interference, especially British.[790] The famine in China led to the Boxer Rebellion, which the imperial powers brutally repressed. European powers used those droughts to further establish their capitalistic raping of Earth's preindustrial peoples, which contemporary observers noted.[791] India became the home of peaceful activists such as Mohandas Gandhi only after the British bloodily suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. The imperial powers always framed native resistance as "rebellions," "mutinies," and other terms designed to portray the conquerors as legitimate rulers. The famines of the 1870s and 1890s killed between 30 and 60 million people, while imperial Europe lived in an obesity-encouraging Golden Age.[792] There have been many academic attempts to separately analyze the rise of capitalism from Europe's conquest of the world, but they were deeply interrelated. There is even a school of thought called realism that tries to separate political from economic dynamics, with predictably strange results. While the USA was stealing North America from its natives and neighboring nations such as Mexico, it was not called imperial conquest but "settling" the continent by heroic pioneers and fulfilling a nation's divine destiny.
The rise of oil was the other radical energy event of the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century. Rockefeller's empire was originally built on replacing whale oil for lighting, but Edison's light bulb soon ended that need, and little did Rockefeller suspect it, but oil's big days were just ahead. Oil is the world's most coveted resource for a few reasons. Liquids are near-solids in partial-lattice states, where the temperature (energy of motion) is high enough so that lattices continually break and reform. Raise the temperature higher, and those partial lattices disintegrate and the liquid becomes a gas. Solids cannot flow, and liquids are far denser than gases, so a liquid energy resource will be far superior to a solid (coal) or gaseous (natural gas) fuel. A metric ton of oil contains nearly twice the energy of a metric ton of coal and can be pumped through pipes. Until World War I, most ships and trains were powered by coal (by the late 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century, some boats and trains used oil, but they were a distinct minority). In 1769, as Watt was working on his first steam engine, a Frenchman invented a steam vehicle to use on roads, and coal-powered cars were the standard until internal combustion engines replaced them. Electric and gas-powered vehicles also existed in those early days, but oil was quickly seen as a superior fuel for those reasons stated above, and Henry Ford's company, established in 1903, quickly led to the dominance of oil-powered cars. The Wright brothers could not have flown in 1903 with anything other than an oil-powered engine.
Rockefeller became a robber baron extraordinaire with the rise of oil in transportation. In the USA in 2011, more than 90% of all transportation energy was provided by oil, and the proportion is about the same for global industrial transportation. In the West, nearly all coal is used to produce electricity. A watershed event in oil's use in transportation was when Winston Churchill, after observing the rigors of loading ships with coal in 1911, converted the British Navy to oil. The UK did not have domestic sources of oil as the USA did, and thus began the West's domination of the oil-rich Middle East, which continues into the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century. By 1920, Churchill advocated chemical warfare against the peoples of what became Iraq, as the UK secured the region for oil interests, and before World War II was over, Churchill called for the complete genocide of the Japanese people, approved fire bombings of German cities, advocated poison gas and anthrax attacks on Germany, and his policies starved millions of people in Bengal, once again. His imperial crimes were numerous, but he is primarily remembered in the West as the great statesman who stood up to Hitler. Similarly, Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure that Dracula is based on and whose cruelties are legendary, is seen as a Romanian hero for fighting off the Ottoman Empire.
From carving up the Ottoman Empire at World War I's end to overthrowing Iran's government in 1953 to supporting both sides in the Iraqi-Iranian war of the 1980s to the first Gulf War and subsequent genocidal sanctions to the USA's invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the current oppression of Iran, it has been all about the oil. Everything else is a sideshow. Iraq's oil fields were history's greatest material prize, now controlled by American oil companies, and no informed observers were fooled for an instant by the "war on terror" pre-invasion rhetoric by the oil-executive-dominated Bush administration (Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. Rice even had an oil tanker named after her). Both World Wars had control over oil as a critical strategic goal, and arguably the critical goal.
John Rockefeller was a [url=http