Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences

There were similarly impressive early gains in the efficiency of steam turbines and electricity consumption in aluminum electrolysis.

after millennia of dependence on just three basic sources of energy—combustion of fuels (biomass or fossil), animate metabolism (human and animal muscles), and conversion of indirect solar flows (water and wind)—everything changed in the course of a single decade.

A second remarkable saltation took place during the 1930s and 1940s with the introduction of gas turbines, nuclear fission, electronic computing, semiconductors, key plastics, insecticides, and herbicides

about 60 GJ/t in 1950, just over 30 GJ/t by 1975, and about 20 GJ/t by the year 2000

For most of its inhabitants, the modern world is full of black boxes, devices whose internal workings remain—to different degrees—a mystery to their users. Electricity can be thought of as a ubiquitous and ultimate black box system: although many people have a fairly good understanding of what goes in (combustion of fossil fuel in a large thermal p