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Coal and Oil in the American Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Extract
On the occasion of Thomas Edison's death, in 1931, President Hoover issued a proclamation in which he noted that it had proved impossible to adopt the suggestion to shut down all power plants even for one minute in Edison's memory, but the President concluded that “this demonstration of the country's dependence upon electrical current for life and health is in itself a monument to Mr. Edison's genius.” The ubiquity and indispensability of electricity is, of course, a commonplace. From the standpoint of this paper and its topic, however, it may be emphasized that approximately two thirds of the electrical energy used currently in the country is generated in steam plants and hence derived largely from coal and, in smaller measure, from oil and natural gas.
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1947
References
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