In recent years, a new technological revolution has surged mainly driven by the overall application of new information technologies. As the industrial structure transformed as the industrial revolutions went on, more and more metals were used in the industries, and the consumption of different metals showed different trends. Results indicated that fossil fuels were the major energy sources which boosted up the past three industrial revolutions, whereas their consumption increased at a slowing pace as the economy was growing continually after the third industrial revolution, the consumption of fossil fuels decoupled gradually with the economic growth. Based on technological improvement, industrial transformation, and changes of energy and metal consumption in the United States, this paper identified the evolution characteristics of energy and metal demand driven by industrial revolutions, and analyzed the trends of energy and metal demand driven by the fourth industrial revolution which is happening currently. For each laborer killed directly, several were maimed, and several more found their lives shortened by coal dust, lead, and other poisons.Industrial revolutions have a profound impact on energy and metal demand. By the early 20th century, tens of thousands of workers were dying every year on the railroads, in factories, and especially in coal mines, including many boys and adolescents (see Primary Source Jokerville Coal Mine Explosion and Primary Source Breaker Boys at Work ). Many jobs consequently became exceedingly hazardous. The coal-powered economy brought to bear much more energy than existing technologies could easily control. Working people exerted less control over production than ever before American labor leaders increasingly decried the degradation of work as all sorts of time-honored trades and occupations became obsolete.
Fossil-fueled machines operated by unskilled or semi-skilled newcomers displaced skilled workers in many industries (with coal mining an ironic exception). In this and other ways, working-class Americans of all races suffered disproportionate burdens in the new mineral-intensive economy.
Most major American industries-steel mills, textile factories, and so forth-thereafter began to use immense amounts of coal, either directly in steam engines and furnaces, or indirectly via electricity produced in coal-burning generating stations. Where did the vast quantities of fossil fuel go? What changes did fossil fuels produce? Railroads and steamships burned vast quantities of coal, but they also hauled it to other consumers. More than 750,000 coal miners of every race and more than three dozen nationalities were digging and blasting upwards of 550 million tons of coal a year by the 1910s (a volume sufficient to cover the entire island of Manhattan with more than 21 feet of coal) (see Primary Source Coal Consumption (). Railroads and steamships burned vast quantities of coal, but they also hauled it to other consumers.īy the 1890s, the coal industry stretched from the Appalachian Mountains, across the Midwestern prairies, to the Cascades and Rockies, making the U.S. The growth potential of organic economies remained sharply constrained by the limited ability of people to tap into the sun's energy through farms, windmills, waterwheels, and the like. Food, fuel, shelter, motive power, clothing, and virtually every other necessity of life-Americans obtained all of these from plants, animals, falling rivers, and blowing winds.
Well into the 1800s, the American economy was almost exclusively an organic economy, one in which people met their needs by harvesting energy and materials from the earth's surface ecosystems. Aside from these disconnected tidbits, though, textbooks offer little insight into the profound historical significance of energy, nor do they provide a coherent interpretation of what the adoption of fossil fuels portended for the nation's economy and environment. into a fossil-fueled nation: a photo of child laborers outside a Pennsylvania coal mine, a statistic on rising coal production, perhaps a brief mention of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 (in which Colorado National Guardsmen killed 18 men, women, and children during a miners' strike in southern Colorado). Most textbooks provide at least a few glimpses of the transformation of the U.S.