Michael Giberson Here’s wishing a happy 150th birthday to the oil industry! On August 27, 1859, Edwin Drake and his steam engine succeeded, after weeks of work, in drilling a successful oil well. Actually, more like “chipping” than “drilling.” Alex Madrigal has the story and several old stereograph images: A western Pennsylvania river valley seems …
150th Anniversary of Edwin Drake’s First Oil Well in Pennsylvania Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today’s Nikola Tesla’s 153rd birthday, as you can see celebrated in the Google page logo today (Hat tip: D.O.U.G., thanks!). If we owe our modern electricity-enabled civilization to any one scientist, it’s Tesla — alternating current, induction motors, transformers, you name it. Tesla rocks. And for you 80s music fans, Tesla’s birthday post …
Michael Giberson From Platts Power Line blog, a discussion of the 1958 law banning of futures trading in onions and suggestions that Congress should contemplate the lessons from that experience before it gets too exciting about clamping down on speculation in energy commodities. The ban on onion futures trading, introduced by freshman congressman Gerald Ford …
Michael Giberson I know we have a few economic historians among our readers. You may be interested in Alexis Madrigal’s blog, Inventing Green, which he describes as research notes for his forthcoming book on the development of energy technology and institutions (previously mentioned here in an earlier post). Recently he wrote: The deeper I get …
What Are the Best Books on the Economic History of Energy Technology and Development? Read More »
Michael Giberson There is by now a fairly established body of economic history work that challenges what might be called the mainstream view of the origins of state regulation of electric utilities and offers as an alternative a nakedly public choice view that state regulation was all about creation of monopoly rents. The mainstream view …
Michael Giberson From Inventing Green, where WIRED writer Alexis Madrigal is blogging his research notes for a forthcoming book The History of Our Future, a discussion of how bicycling may have given the internal combustion engine an early leg up in its competition against steam and electric-powered automobiles (and eventually made the roads unsafe for …
Lynne Kiesling Price Fishback is one of the best economic historians of the U.S. in the early 20th century, and he’s written a three-part series of posts on the current comparisons to the Great Depression at Freakonomics. Part 1, How Does the Current Crisis Compare to the Great Depression?, puts our current unemployment and GDP …
Price Fishback on the Great Depression and Today Read More »
Michael Giberson Richard Munson’s book From Edison to Enron provides a pretty engaging run through the history of the electric power business in the United States. The title actually understates the scope just a bit on each end, with Munson touching briefly on developments before Thomas Edison gets involved and discussing developments after Enron’s 2001 …
Michael Giberson I don’t know about the rest of you university energy economists, but life in the classroom got a little tougher for me this Spring. Last Fall energy economics was on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every week, nearly every day. Anytime I wandered into class a minute or two early, I …
Oil Shocker: Energy Economist Bids to Get Back on the Front Page Read More »
Michael Giberson Occasionally we hear from readers curious about the blog name, “knowledge problem.” Edmund Phelps explains the knowledge problem in an excellent essay that appeared in the Financial Times. (Registration may be required for FT.com; the essay is also posted in full at the FT‘s Capitalism blog.) Joseph Schumpeter’s early theory proposed that a …
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