Elixir by Brian Fagan (245)

Fagan, Brian.  Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Unlike other authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.  In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely associated with ritual, often considered sacred.  Fagan’s interested in the human relationship with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.

Fagan describes three phases of the human relationship with water.  In the first stage, water is an unreliable, often scarce, and highly valued resource.  This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of water.  In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity, little considered and treated as if it were superabundant.  In the emerging stage, water is a finite resource we need to conserve.

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Most of the book is covers the first stage.  He discusses the historic relationship and management of water from around the world.  Some of these were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans.  Others are lesser known, like the highly ritualistic and religious Balinese system that is still operating.  Some we know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.

Because of this approach, Elixir is also a work of cultural and physical geography.  The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their environment.

The commodity stage is covered much more briefly.  To be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.  It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more difficult and remote sources of water.  Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant water.  Fagan points to arid and semiarid regions of Africa and Asia as locations poised on exhausting their water.  This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest, where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for more than a century.

For the stage we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.  Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have sustainable water supplies.

When it comes to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology and human ingenuity.  Even so, he implies that we should look to our past.

In the early stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it, immensely.  It is time to place a high value on water again, even without religious aspects.  Also, in the past water management was a very local affair, and surprisingly democratic.  Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies, they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the community.  Even in empires with powerful central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Harris, Robert. Canals and Their Architecture. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.

Water has always been an important part of human life. Drinking water is a necessity, but that is only the beginning of our uses of it. Water is also an element in agriculture, industry, transportation and commerce.

It is water’s role in transportation and commerce that Robert Harris focused on in Canals and Their Architecture. At times, artificial or modified waterways have been major means of transporting products in bulk.

Harris mentions canals from continental Europe and North America, especially the United States, but his book is mainly about the canals of Britain. This is an appropriate focus because the canal boom in Britain both fed and was fed by the Industrial Revolution that started there.

The boom began with the Duke of Bridgewater’s famous canal, construction of which began in 1760. The duke owned coalmines and wanted a cheaper way get coal to the mills and factories in Manchester. The canal was by no means an easy or inexpensive project, but it was greatly successful and the wealth put into it was regains many times over.

Bridgewater recognized the talents of millwright James Brindley, who went on to become the most prominent canal engineer of his day. Harris discussed the works of several British engineers who were successors of Brindley including Thomas Telford, John Rennie, and William Edwards.

As the title of the book suggests, it is organized mainly by the types of structures found on canals. In addition to the canal cut, Harris wrote about bridges and auqueducts, locks , tunnels, boats, buildings and unique ways of handling elevation changes on a canal route. Early canals followed the contours of the land to avoid the use of expensive and complex equipment and, where needed, were crossed by utilitarian bridges of wood or brick. As canals became straighter, and more lucrative, they added locks and other mechanisms for raising and lowering boats. The materials became more varied and complex, including stone and iron. Spectacular aqueducts carried canals over low lands. Tunnels were well-made features of canals early on because the technology for building them was readily adapted from mining.

The older canals are impressive in that so much was done with manpower and simple tools. As canals aided other industries, the improvements those industries spawned, especially in iron construction and railroads, returned to canals and the way they were made. The construction of modern canals is the work of enormous equipment.



Canals and Their Architecture includes many illustrations and photographs. These are very helpful for the laymen to see the types of structures discussed in the text, though even an engineer familiar with the terms will likely appreciate the images.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Water by Marq de Villiers

The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Over the course of the 19^th Century, the United States transformed from a frontier nation dependent on trade with former colonizing nations to a leading manufacturer and exporter of goods. Charles R. Morris describes how America accomplished this change in The Dawn of Innovation.

The forces that led to the development of an American system of manufacturing were practical and cultural. There were labor shortages, especially for skilled labor. Americans in every field were interested in mechanizing work to get it done with the people and skills available. Americans were also largely middle class, at least in their way of thinking. They had to have the means to cross the Atlantic, and once here wage pressure and the availability of resources quickly made many people middle class. The middle class valued improvement and economic independence. In the U.S. they were free from the limiting class structures of Europe.

The middle class were also consumers. They were interested in the goods and lifestyle associated with wealth, but at prices they could afford. And there were a lot more of them that the handful of rich people who were the consumers of traditional luxury goods. Americans wanted to produce, market and distribute goods on a mass scale that was hard for Europeans of the time to even imagine.

The cloth-making industry was one of the first to bring together the aspects of modern manufacturing: specialization, organization of work flow, mechanization and automation. American cloth makers took—sometimes stole—these things from the British. A leap that the Americans made, but not the British, was to apply these same concepts to all kinds of production.

The organization of work was especially helpful in the U.S., where the skilled workers needed for precision machine making were few. Morris uses the arms industry as an example of American leadership in the transformation from craft piecework to an organized workflow with uniform standards.

Morris also undertakes some myth busting. Eli Whitney is associated with first rifles—really the first manufactured goods—to have interchangeable parts, which is a hallmark of modern manufacturing. Whitney and others promised interchangeability to win contracts with the Army, but he never achieved it; it took him a while to even become a good gun maker. It took decades of work by others to achieve interchangeable parts. This was both a matter of organizing work and developing more precise machining equipment.

Morris shows how innovations accumulated over time to create American manufacturing leadership. He shows how the culture and natural environment were incubators for such development.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 2012.

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.