FROM FOOTCANDLES TO QUADRILLIONS OF BTU'S IN ONE GENERATION

The energy revolution in the twentieth century has transformed America within lifetimes. Twenty million older Americans remember reading by oil, gas, or candlelight, and splitting wood or carrying coal to feed the cook stove or potbellied room heater. They put ice cards in the window and stored perishables in the cool cellar or winter window box. They used tin basins and tubs, chamber pots and outdoor privies. Cooking, washing, cleaning houses, and doing farm chores were tedious, hard work.

In the country during the early 1900s farmers worked their land with muscle power—human and animal. Housewives scrubbed clothes on washboards, beat rugs with sticks or brooms, cooked in big pots over slow fires, and pumped water and plucked chickens by hand. Few town or city families owned even a horse, much less a carriage. Children walked to school, and after a few years they walked to work or to the store. Motor buses were not common in cities until the twenties and trolley cars not until the thirties (see Table 1-1). To quote David Boorstin, "Streetcar tracks were rigid channels. A man in a streetcar had to go where it took him. And the streetcar, in almost any city, was likely to take him into the center; there were the great consumers' palaces."

Even though electric power was a reality by the turn of the century, only a few households had it. True, electric lights illuminated the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and the Edison Electric Light Company was formed in 1878. Even so, only 8 percent of all American houses were wired for electricity by 1907, and these were the homes of wealthy people living in big cities. Most people then were rural dwellers—60 percent in 1900. One-fifth of all other Americans lived in small towns.