New-fangled technology can trigger terror

Before electric lights were available, we created artificial light with fires, and beeswax or tallow candles, and oil lamps and gas streetlamps. In the 1860s, kerosene largely replaced whale oil for lighting. Then, starting in the 1880s, incandescent electric lights were introduced on a large scale.

Electric lights were more convenient, easier to maintain, and less of a fire hazard than gas or kerosene lamps. That seems like an uncontroversial statement. In 1880, it wasn’t. Electric lights were a luxury for the rich. Electric rates were (adjusted for inflation) around $5 per kilowatt-hour. Running a 60-watt incandescent bulb year-round would have cost $2,600/year, in today’s dollars. For comparison, running a comparable 9-watt LED light bulb year-round, today, in La Conner, would cost about $10/year.

In addition to being expensive, electric lights were “new,” and were therefore terrifying to significant portions of the general public. That’s probably been true of every major technology since fire. Electric lights weren’t immediately and universally accepted. In 1887, King Kalakaua, who was noted for his interest in science, had electric lights installed in the Hawaiian royal palace. The White House would not install electric lights for another four years – and even then, President Harrison’s family was afraid of being shocked by the switches and would leave them on all night.

Furthermore, the gas lamp industry didn’t go without a fight. An 1882 London Times article states: “it is quite certain that [electric lighting] has greatly stimulated inventive talent in the direction of improved gas burners,” describing two gas-lamp innovations that would produce “a brilliant incandescent glow of high illuminating power.”

And, the lamplighters didn’t like electric lights either. When the town of Verviers, Belgium, changed to electric lights, their lamplighters smashed the electric lamps to protest the loss of their jobs.

Eventually, people got used to incandescent electric lights. Streetlights went in a different direction, with sodium-vapor and mercury-vapor lamps becoming more common than ­incandescents.

And then, for decades, lighting technology stalled. Light-emitting diodes were invented in 1927, but they were a scientific curiosity. The materials required to make red and green LEDs were understood by the mid-1960s, but it took until 1993 for a practical blue LED to be ­developed – a process that required some very advanced physics and equipment that simply hadn’t been available decades earlier. To get white light, you have to combine red, green and blue light, so, until the blue LED was available, it wasn’t possible to develop a LED light for indoor or streetlighting applications.

The first commercially available LED bulbs, in the early 2000s, cost about $100 each. Now, after 20 years of mass production, they’re down to about $2. For comparison, in 1890, a 60-watt light bulb cost about $34 in today’s dollars.

We’re in a transition, in the energy industry, to a very broad range of new technologies … not just in lighting, but in electric generation, energy storage, grid management, heat management and transportation. These new technologies have been proven, and they’re going through the same cost-reduction and improvement process that every successful technology goes through. Like light bulbs in the 1890s, the better technologies will win.

Ignoring these systems, or disparaging them, won’t make them go away … it’ll just give the market opportunities they represent to other countries.