I had often heard my mother-in-law’s stories of growing up on a farm in Alberta, Canada during and after the Great Depression. I learned only recently that her household had no electricity until 1950 (when she was 18 years old!). She and her brother did their homework and other evening chores by kerosene light, and laundry was done on a washboard that she still keeps as a memento of her childhood.
That made me think about one of PopEd’s elementary lessons, Energy Imagery, in which students imagine (and act out) how they would’ve completed daily tasks if they lived 200 years ago when no one had electricity. The activity is a great starting point for exploring how people have used energy through human history, and considering how our energy sources are changing and might look in the years ahead.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at different kinds of energy sources and go more in-depth on some of the changes in human energy use.
People’s Earliest Energy Sources: Fire, Water and Wind
According to archaeological evidence, it appears that early humans (Homo erectus) began harnessing fire about 2 million years ago for warmth, cooking, and protecting themselves from predators. Burning biomass – wood, straw and dried dung – was our major source of heat and light for many, many millennia. Even once agriculture started about 10,000 years ago, people relied on their own muscle power for work, and on animals for transportation and plowing fields. These are the most traditional energy sources.
The earliest source of mechanical power was the water wheel, used in ancient civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt and China) for irrigation. By the Middle Ages, water wheels had become sophisticated enough to grind grains into flour and saw timber for building houses. Mechanical wind power, dating back over 1,000 years, was used much the same way. Early wind pumps and windmills were used to mill flour, cut timber, pump water and drain lakes and marshes.
Fossil Fuels and the Industrial Revolution: How Coal Powered a New Era
Steam power emerged in the 1700s. Thomas Newcomen invented a steam engine in 1712 that was improved upon by James Watt in 1765, heralding the Industrial Revolution. Before long, steam powered ships, locomotives, factories, and farm machinery. Watt’s steam engines ran on coal, much of which was mined in the U.K. and in the Appalachian region of the U.S. The age of fossil fuels had begun.
There’s evidence of coal use from the earliest humans, but it wasn’t a major player in energy production. In addition to steam engines, coal was used in iron blast furnaces to make steel, and in homes for heating and cooking. Mining operations in the U.S. multiplied as coal deposits were discovered throughout the country. 
Flipping the Switch to Electricity
Thomas Edison ignited an energy revolution when he switched on the first electric power plant in New York City in 1880. In the years that followed, electricity would power more than just lights. All of our modern household conveniences (refrigerator, laundry machine, dishwasher, radio, television, computer, etc.) run on electricity.
Coal-powered plants became the dominant way to generate electricity starting in the 1880s. Around that same time, the first hydroelectric power plant went online in Appleton, Wisconsin.
In the years that followed, oil fields were discovered throughout the U.S. Oil processed into gasoline fueled the combustion engines that powered automobiles and airplanes beginning in the early 1900s.
Powering through the 20th Century
With seemingly unlimited fossil fuels, power plants grew larger and more numerous. Power lines crisscrossed the country, cars and trucks multiplied on roads, and home appliances changed the way we did household chores. The cost of producing energy with coal and oil was relatively cheap, and few people were concerned with energy efficiency or environmental impacts until the second half of the 20th century.
After World War II, nuclear power emerged as a viable and cleaner way to produce energy. Before long, nuclear plants went online throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union.
But then, several events in the 1970s and 1980s changed the public’s thinking about energy availability and safety. Oil producing countries in the Mid-East supplied a significant share of oil to Western countries, but cut the supply over geopolitical conflicts, leading to shortages and rationing. Meltdowns at nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania (Three Mile Island) and Ukraine (Chernobyl) shook people’s faith in the safety of nuclear power.
Renewable Energy and the Environment: The Shift Away from Fossil Fuels
As the global population grew and more countries industrialized, the environmental costs of fossil fuel use became apparent. Air pollution dirtied urban skies and began to take a toll on global health. In the late 1950s, scientist Charles Keeling began collecting data on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and tracking its increase. By the 1980s, many scientists were warning of global warming from CO2 emissions, primarily from fossil fuel combustion. Over the past 40 years, the urgency has grown to increase energy efficiency and transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources.
Home appliances and automobiles have become significantly more energy efficient than just decades ago, yet new energy consumers (data centers and AI) are requiring more power. Renewable energy represents a larger share of electricity generation than ever before, but still makes up just 13 percent of global energy use.
Energy for the World
Though some people fantasize about “living off the grid,” few would actually want to live day-to-day like my mother-in-law did in the 1930s and 1940s, with no home electricity. For hundreds of millions of people around the world, a lack of electricity is still a daily reality. One of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 7) is for universal access to “affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy” by 2030. Just five years from that goal, there are still 685 million people without energy access, including nearly half the population of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Living History on Energy Use
To enhance classroom activities like “Energy Imagery,” share videos produced to show how difficult and time-consuming daily chores take without modern energy sources. PBS ran popular “hands-on” history programs in 2002-2004 that are still available to stream. These include Colonial House, where a group of 21st century participants lived in coastal Maine as they would have in the Plymouth Colony of 1628. Frontier House turned modern-day people into pioneers in Montana of the 1880s. For both groups, much of their daytime hours were spent chopping wood for fuel for heat and cooking, in order to survive.
Another great source for energy education is the KEEP Program from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Their middle school lesson, Energy Use Then and Now includes primary source readings on how energy was used for daily activities in homes and schools for different time periods in Wisconsin’s history.
And for more on renewable energy and the environment, check out this blog series that provides a description of energy sources and their pros and cons.
Image credits: Water wheel (Graham Beards at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons); Woman gathering coal in West Virginia (Lewis Hine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons); First U.S. Oil Rig in Titusville, PA in 1900 (Mather, Public domain, via Library of Congress); Power lines (Tony Boon, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons); Children doing homework by candlelight (Lefaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)