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So what fueled the Industrial Revolution? Greed? Political upheaval? Good old fashioned capitalism? We could even be clever and say that it was innovation that fueled the Industrial Revolution. But one thing it could not have done without is fuel. Most say it was coal and it probably was. England, after all, was an island made of coal. But everywhere people recognized that there were no free lunches. They would have to come up with some other way of doing more work to produce more results besides adding more horses and more people. What no one realized was how much the lunch would actually cost.

It’s important to recognize that, for the overwhelming bulk of human history, energy was generated by people and animals. If you wanted to pick up a rock, you bent over and picked it up. True, enormous changes happened as a result of innovations like the horse drawn plow when it came to doing more work. But production always topped out and the point where the farmer and horse had done as much as they could together.  Engines were fueled by natural power. What you might call artificial energy, mostly produced by burning fossil fuels, is a very very recent innovation.

It seemed relatively easy to find, relatively cheap and it seemed inexhaustible. But once we got a taste of what this kind of energy could get for us, everyone began to see that the only way to get more was to become more efficient. But, just as, centuries earlier, machines were limited by the amount of energy a man or a horse could generate, the efficiency of machinery during the industrial revolution was limited by our understanding of what energy was and how it could be manipulated.

Watt and Boulton's Steam Engine

Cosmetics containing radium before we found a better way to use it.

We could spend a lot of time on the steam engine and, frankly, it deserves it. But the processes used to make this, and other, machines more efficient is what gave rise to, not just better efficiency, but better science. This is the topic of the video “Can We Have Unlimited Power? A History of Energy.” You can watch it at http://ctcproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=19667&xtid=43343

It takes you from coal power to nuclear power. Particularily interesting is the chicken and egg nature of innovation. Electricity, for example, was discovered long before anyone knew what to do with it. After all, it's not like there was an electric razor waiting around for someplace to plug it in. And imagine what people did with radio activity.

Many people are still convinced that we can continue to grow by increasing efficiency, even if we have finally come to realize that fossil fuels are not inexhaustible. But there is a growing belief that, if Industrialization is to continue to grow, it has to be based on a revolution just as significant as the first Industrial Revolution. They call it the Third Industrial Revolution.