Water as White Coal
The article tells the story of the rise and decline of the significance and visibility of “white coal” and hydroelectricity over the course of the twentieth century.
The article tells the story of the rise and decline of the significance and visibility of “white coal” and hydroelectricity over the course of the twentieth century.
The introduction of new energy carriers and of engines able to transform energy into mechanical work was a necessary, although not unique, condition of modern growth in Europe and subsequently in the rest of the world.
As agents of knowledge and appropriators of technology, exhibitions (and most notably museum exhibitions) have played an important role in the early twentieth century, when gas and electricity, the quintessential modern energy sources, aimed to oust wood, coal, and peat while simultaneously competing intensely with each other.
This essay explores connections between energy regime changes and nutrition, as well as the impact of such changes on nutritional knowledge and food policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This essay contests the traditional narrative of the gas revolution in the Netherlands. To illustrate the domestic roots of revolutionary change, the essay focuses on gas use in households.