The Switch to coal
In the United States and Great Britain, coal was not widely utilized until more easily available energy resources, such as wood were on the point of exhaustion. The shift to fossil fuels and the corresponding rise in energy consumption is illustrated by the transformation of the shipping industry in the nineteenth century. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s ships had beer powered by wind and human power. The first river steamboats came into use around 1810-they first crossed the English Channel in 1821 and by 1839 had crossed the Atlantic. Technological developments, such as the introduction of iron and steel hulls (watertight bodies of ships) in the 1850s and 1860s, increased the effectiveness of sailing ships and the largest could still compete with the early, inefficient, and expensive steam-powered ships that operated from the 1840s. It was the development of the high-pressure steam boiler made from steel that transformed the situation. By the late 1860s, steamships could bring three times as much cargo from China to Europe in half the time taken by sailing ships. The amount of steam-powered shipping in the world rose from just 32,000 metric tons in 1831 to over three million metric tons by the mid-1870s, and then rose exponentially as sailing ships gradually died out and the steamship took over the world’s merchant and naval fleets. Britain built a chain of coaling stations across the globe to sustain the worldwide deployment of the Royal Navy. Not only had the amounts of shipping in the world increased dramatically, its energy demands had increased even more.
完整版题目和答案请付费后查阅
