Fuel for the future

Fantasies about new food sources to meet human ambitions appeared more than a hundred years ago. Will these visions of the past give energy to our future?

In the story "Let There Be Light" science fiction writer Robert Heinlein presented a source of energy that will feed his further stories and stories from the series "History of the Future". The story, first published in the journal Super Science Stories in May 1940, described screens that process the energy of the sun and provide (almost) free and inexhaustible energy for future chapters of its alternative history. The technology was simple, robust and reliable. “They can be connected in series to get the right voltage; in parallel, to get the desired current; the energy is completely free, with the exception of the installation cost, ”one of the inventors was surprised, studying the potential of a new technology to reverse the social order of the future.

Solar screens were enameled panels, absorbing sunlight and turning it into electricity with almost 100% efficiency, or working in the opposite direction, turning electricity into light. As in most stories from the “History of the Future”, readers were offered a fusion of technology and culture. Solar screens did not appear out of nowhere - they fit into the American history of inventions, emphasizing the struggle of ingenious singles with corporations - in the imagination of the masses they were descendants of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The story carried Heinlein's easily recognizable attitude against corporations, emphasizing the responsibility of a person for his own future.


Installation of the first successful solar panel and solar array (array), October 4, 1955

Solar screens were needed by Heinlein in order for his future to work; that is, to solve the problem of technological prosperity in the world with a decreasing amount of resources This problem was not new even in the 1940s, and now it is becoming more and more serious. The issue of nutrition for the future has never been so urgent. Will it be wind or wave power? Will fuel cells, solar panels, or the “holy grail” of nuclear fusion be the answer to our problems? Or do we drive ourselves into oblivion? If we want to better understand how to talk about the energy of the future, we need to accept how old the story is from such reasoning (it comes from the early Victorian period), and that this story contains both fabrications like those written by Heinlein and technical debates about the characteristics and requirements of different modes of energy production and consumption (and sometimes a mixture of these two topics).

Heinlein's story is a good example. The technology described in “Let There Be Light” has its counterpart in the real world. How the electrical properties of selenium change under the influence of light was noticed by Willowy Smith telegraph engineer in 1873, and a few years later William Grylls Adams and Richard Evans Day managed to get an electric current shining on the selenium grid. But back in 1833, inventor Charles Fritts installed an array of solar cells consisting of selenium, covered with a thin layer of gold, on the roof in New York. Heinlein's imagination and his vision of the future were repelled by these technologies. Interestingly, a file with materials from the Heinlein archives relating to this story contains a clipping from a 1954 newspaper describing a solar battery just invented by Bell’s laboratory. The article was called: "A solar-sand battery produces energy." Did Heinlein decide that his fictional technology preceded this real one?

Heinlein's Victorian forerunners of solar screens worked on the principle that physicist William Grove described in the 1840s as a "correlation of physical forces." Grove argued that:

Heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical properties and movement are all interconnected or interdependent. None of them, considered theoretically, cannot be called the main or immediate cause of the others, but each of them can produce or turn into the other - heat can indirectly or directly turn into electricity, electricity can produce heat; so with all others.

This is exactly what the solar screens did. Explaining the correlation, Grove offered his experimental demonstration in which light produced electricity, based on the experiments of physicist Edmond Becquerel , conducted several years earlier.

The Grove gas battery (the predecessor of modern fuel cells) gave another example of such a correlation. Describing his invention in 1842, he called it "the perfect embodiment of the correlation of natural forces." Interestingly, a gas battery generated electricity based on a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, instead of the usual liquid electrolytes. Although Grove himself never considered his battery a real power source capable of operating on a large scale, he was convinced that electricity would become the fuel of the future. "If instead of zinc and acids, which are rather expensive, and still need to be produced, we could collect the electricity produced by burning coal, wood, fat or other raw materials in atmospheric air, we would immediately have a real possibility of commercial use for electricity "He wrote. The problem of using electricity as a fuel for the future was practical, not theoretical - and he didn’t have to worry about it: “It seems to be an excessive concern to develop means by which our 10th generation descendants will heat their homes or power their vehicles” .

And yet, fantasies about the future, fed by cheap and inexhaustible electricity, were often encountered in the Victorian period. In his (anti) utopian description of the underground civilization "The Coming Race" (1871), Edward Bulwer-Lytton clearly described that the technologies of the Vril-I race were powered by electricity. Vril-I lived in a world in which electricity (or lied, as they called it) fed everything around. Electricity served as food for their cars, controlled the weather, helped to grow crops. It was also the source of their telepathic capabilities. Such theories worked well for the readers of Bulwer-Lytton precisely because they reflected the futuristic assumptions of the real Victorian world. Predictions that electricity will soon replace steam as a universal source of economic energy were expressed everywhere. Grove shared this optimism, although he cooled down particularly hot fantasies about the very early onset of such an era. When the British Association of Advanced Scientific Research gathered in Grove Swansea’s hometown in 1848, guests were invited to his friend’s luxurious manor in Penlerger to look at the boat that was dissected across the lake, powered by a nitric acid battery.

Although our concerns about the energy of the future are now mainly related to climate change intruding into our lives, Victorians were more worried about the future energy belonging to the Empire: the energy of the future that fell into the wrong hands, and the consequences of this were favorite themes scientific novels "Feng de Sekl" . In his story "The Air Criminals" (1895) [The Outlaws of the Air], George Griffin imagined two hostile groups of anarchists (utopians and nihilists) fighting fiercely at sea and in the air using electric gunboats and airplanes with electric weapons. In the book The Angel of the Revolution (1893), Griffin imagined revolutionary anarchists with access to a new source of energy, capable of controlling the air, and terrorizing European countries. In both stories, the social organization of the future depends on whose hands the necessary energy is in. Understanding that control of the energy of the future will be a necessary condition for maintaining (or overthrowing) the social order, made stories about how this energy falls into the wrong hands, at the same time frightening and exciting.

These fictional stories were picked up by inventors and entrepreneurs. Indeed, prediction is part of the process of the invention. Much of Tesla's reputation at the peak of his career depended on his ability to carry out his plans for generating and transmitting energy. In the 1890s, trying to get a contract with George Westinghouse for the supply of electricity for the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 (this is practically providing energy for the future) and developing a system for generating hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, Tesla fantasized about turning the planet into a device for transmitting electricity . “I firmly believe that in practice it is possible to change the electrostatic state of the Earth with the help of powerful machines, and thus transmit clear signals or perhaps energy,” he argued.

Similar reasoning rushed between facts and fiction. In the story “Some Possibilities of Electricity” [Some Possibilities of Electricity (1892)], William Crookes, on the basis of recent advances in physics, talked about the transformative possibilities of electrical energy. He portrayed a world where electricity helped grow crops and control the weather (did he read Bulwer-Lytton?), And in which “the ideal way to light a room would be to create a powerful, rapidly changing electrostatic field in which you can move and locate electronic anywhere. a lamp, and light it without any metallic contact. ” Inventors from everywhere drew inspiration from scientific novels, the authors of which built a fictional future based on the latest scientific achievements. And this interaction continues today.

X-rays and radioactivity also promised future energy. Shortly after Wilhelm X-rays discovered the rays in 1895, Edison registered a patent for an X-ray-powered lamp. Frederick Soddy, a radioactivity researcher in 1909, was surprised that "in ordinary, everyday matter, enormous reserves of energy are languishing, from the use of which at present for vital purposes only ignorance holds us back." Hacking the secret of radioactivity would mean that the “struggle for existence” that characterized the modern culture would be perceived in the future simply as a memory of the “transitory phase”. Such reasoning served as the basis for the adventure stories “The Radium Casket” (The Radium Casket (1926)) and its continuation “The Radium Island” [Radium Island (1936)] by Lawrence Born, in which noble Englishmen fought against foreign hordes for control of the fuel of the future.

Understanding what the future will be, still depends on the interaction of facts and fiction. Not only because today the links between contemporary debates and their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors are clearly visible - although they are often forgotten in modern discussions about the future. It turns out, however, that making up a future can be an effective way of understanding it and getting to know it. When commentators and businessmen argue about the worlds of the future, in which energy will be generated using solar panels, fuel cells, wind farms or nuclear fusion, their options for the future make sense to us mainly because they seem familiar to us. And they seem familiar to us because we already know fictional versions of the future that work the same way - and, although it may not seem so obvious to us, because in our culture it is customary to think that way about the future.

In other words, our inventions offer ways of fixing future energy technologies in the form of cultural expectations. Heinlein's future alternatives are exploring how different energy technologies can evolve, which gives energy futurologists space to think about what worlds with different fuel options of the future can become. As science fiction writer Cory Doctorow wrote in 2014: “There is nothing strange in a company ordering a story about people using technology to decide whether to engage in the development of this technology. It’s like an architect creating a virtual tour of the building. ” Creating future scenarios based on both fact and fiction is becoming an increasingly important part of managing the energy of the future. In this process, the boundaries between fictional and actual worlds of energy become flexible, and in rather interesting ways. The same as in the fiction of the Victorian era.

At the heart of the coherence of our ideas about the future and its energy and visions of the future of the Victorians are two elements. Like them, we believe that energy innovation will be the result of the work of individuals, not groups. And like their Victorian predecessors, our energy innovators consciously use fictional futures as the strategy for implementing their technologies.

Heinlein’s fictional Douglas-Martin solar screens were the invention of two independent engineers (one of whom was a woman), outside of corporations and exposed to threats from them. And even in the story from the “History of the Future”, where space travel was invented - “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1951) - D.Harriman, the protagonist and supporter of space travel, appears to be an independent outsider, despite his affiliation to the corporation. There is a temptation to reflect on the extent to which Ilon Musk tries to be like Harriman, whose introductory remark in the story sounded like: “We must believe!” And Edison served as a model for Harriman, who brought to perfection the showy image of an individualized individual who replaced the image of the head the corporation he really was.

Victorian innovation historians, such as Samuel Smiles , author of Helping Yourself (1859), have turned innovators into the embodiment of effective and disciplined self-improvement. Take, for example, James Watt. From Smiles' point of view, the steam engine was the result of the work not of a single genius, but of character. Watt succeeded in developing the engine that became the energy of the future, not because he was a genius, but simply because he continued to try. Or perhaps his genius was his stubbornness. There are other role models of individuals who shaped the future. Edison and his supporters touted his image as the Menlo Park Wizard (after the New Jersey lab founded by Edison in the 1870s), a man ahead of his time with unique ideas about how to pave the way to the energy of the future. Such a look at inventors as people who somehow already live in their future (another example is Leonardo da Vinci) reinforces our impression of them as strangers from another world.

What is important, changes in the sensation of how the energy of the future will be mined entails a change in the way the energy past is recorded. A good example is the Grove and fuel cells. Until recently, the Grove was an almost imperceptible figure in the history of Victorian science, and its gas battery was a forgotten technological wonder. However, his current recognition as the father of fuel cells and the reopening of the gas battery as the precursor of our hydrogen economy will mean the need to rewrite the Victorian energy technology. I want to present the future in which Grove will replace Watt as an icon of Victorian energy. An increasing number of fuel cell entrepreneurs are already starting this process, making it easier for their technology to go to the future, assigning it the right past.

Indeed, sometimes it seems that finding the right past for new energy technologies is the most important part of the search for their future. Changing Grove's story is one example. The position of Tesla in the future, created by Mask is another one. Tesla himself clearly understood that exciting stories about his ideas about future energy options were the most important part of their advertising. Inventing stories about options for the future of his inventions was part of their implementation. Musk also believes that exciting stories about the future are important for his projects: he understands that in order to get into the future, you need to tell stories about him (because the company and the car are called Tesla).

The recent launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that carried a car into space into Mars orbit is another example of Mask’s ability to combine fantasy and reality scenes to advertise his ideas. Seeing these images, I am sure that it was not one that I remembered the scene from the Star Trek: Voyager television series (1995-2001), in which the team met with a pick-up truck that had appeared in space. Mask's plans for the colonization of Mars also use images from science fiction, and Tesla's electric vehicle puts technology using clean energy into a vehicle designed to evoke associations with the future sci-fi. Mask knows how to offer feasible ways to achieve a fantastic future.

And he is not the only modern man bringing the future closer. , , , . – . , .

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