Technology and Culture

162 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE A History ofIndustrial Power in the United States, 1780—1930. Vol. 3: The Transmission of Power. By Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Pp. xxv + 596; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $50.00. This bulky book is a pleasure to read. Lynwood Bryant, whom Louis Hunter called “the imaginative and persuasive architect” of the first volume of his trilogy on industrial power, is coauthor of the final volume. (Volumes 1 and 2 are reviewed in Technology and Culture 22 [April 1981]: 371-73 and 29 [July 1988]: 691-94.) The product is a truly satisfying example of technological history on a grand scale, its purpose “to clarify the role of mechanical power in the industrializa­ tion of an economy” (p. xxi). Where the first two volumes dealt with developments “in the century of the steam engine,” the third brings the story into the age of electrical systems. As Bryant notes in his introduction, each of the previous volumes traced the historical development of a “whole energy supply system” for 19th-century American industry, from “the source ofenergy in rainfall or coal mine ... to the prime mover and from the prime mover to the driven machine” (p. xxi). In those volumes, the “industry” was manufacturing, and the prime mover—waterwheel or reciprocating steam engine—was the main subject of interest. The present volume, however, deals with the transmission of power, generated either way, over increasing distances and in difficult circumstances. Besides bringing the story into the 20th century and explaining “the revolutionary significance ofelectrical transmission of power,” it broadens “industry” to include extractive as well as fabricating industry. The book’s nine chapters are grouped into three sections of uneven length. The first section comprises two chapters about “small prime movers”: man and animal powers, and types of mechanical power for small enterprises. The next section covers “the transmission revolu­ tion,” beginning with a chapter about wire rope, water pressure, gas, and compressed air as pre-electric transmitters of power. It then proceeds to three chapters on the beginnings of electric transmission, the rise of a separate industry to provide it, and the adaptation of water and steam prime movers to produce power for electric trans­ mission. The final section expands the book’s scope to the special problems for power transmission posed by mining. Two chapters discuss generating and transmitting power in the mining of metals and coal, and one discusses “petroleum mining.” Although Hunter and Bryant have eschewed any explicit grand theme of the unfolding of technology, espousing instead an “oldfashioned descriptive” history (p. xviii), the first two sections together provide a convincing narrative of search for divisibility of power. Fractions of horsepowers were needed for small enterprises in dispersed places. Of various other possibilities tried, the centralstation electric power system finally took shape to provide this TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 163 divisibility the most economically. In this context, horse mills, dog powers, and the American windmill take on more than antiquarian significance; Lenoir’s gas engine acquires meaning other than pre­ lude to the automobile. Historians of “flexible” alternatives to massproduction technologies should find much to interest them in the discussion here of power for non-Lowell, non-Colt industrial situa­ tions in the 19th century. Also in this context, the early history of the electric power industry achieves a refreshingly un-Whiggish tone. System becomes the means to an end, instead of the end itself. Hunter’s previous volumes emphasized that American industrial­ ization was different from that of England: in the United States, direct use of waterpower persisted through most of the “century of the steam engine.” Similarly, the section on mining begins by remind­ ing us of the relative importance of wood over coal and iron in this country, so that “until after 1850 the mining industries were small in scale, output, and quantitatively at least, importance” (p. 379). Yet implicitly the early iron industry was qualitatively important, making wire rope, “already in wide use by 1860” (p. 446), available for mine hoisting as mine depths increased thereafter, especially in nonferrous metal mines. Problems of drilling, drainage, ventilation, and hauling of materials and miners...