Making sources of energy: the case of coal (1900–1936)

Abstract

Recent contributions to a sociological analysis of energy and society focus mostly on its political, economic and technological organization. Yet contrary to other parts of nature, little social scientific attention has been paid to how politics, economics and technology have come to produce and stabilize the concept of energy in the first place and how different natural materials were transformed into “sources of energy.” Drawing from insights of the sociology of comparison, quantification and commensuration, “energy” in this paper is conceived as a “statistical object,” around which a public discourse develops in which comparisons between resources are drawn. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, this discourse has been more and more stabilized by the regular, public production and ever tighter net of elements of comparison, the creation of a highly abstract, potentially quantified point of comparison, and the definition of various criteria tying the compared entities together with more general models and narratives. This theoretical framework is put into practice by an explorative analysis of coal classification in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In this empirical analysis, three fields are identified where coals were “made the same”: engineering, economics and resource statistics. It is shown that the “calorific value” plays an important role for classification in all three fields and, furthermore, constitutes a measure that links coal to other fuels.

Keywords:

• energy systems
• sociology of quantification
• sociology of science
• energy concept
• social energetics
• science and technology studies

Acknowledgements

I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their highly valuable suggestions and encouraging comments.

Notes

1. See for instance Mirowski (1989, chap. 2), Feynman (2011, chap. 4–1) and Smith (1989, 7).

2. It is not by accident that Ernst Cassirer is usually not mentioned in the row of famous physicists or philosophers studying the “discovery” of energy in nineteenth century physics. Cassirers work on “Substance and Function” (1953) is not only one of the most understudied of his works (Blumenberg 1996, 164), it also puts the emergence of energetics into a broader, general process of the mathematization of the sciences. His main argument is more about the relation between mathematization and the emergence of a new type of concepts in the natural science – “functions” instead of “substances,” “relation-concepts” instead of “thing-concepts” (Cassirer 1953, 9). He considered the energy concept to be a symptom of this general trend, a case in point of a “functional” term: “In energy, we grasp the real because it is the effective. (…) The object is what it appears to be: a sum of actual and possible ways of acting” (Cassirer 1953, 188).

3. Mach held that energy is less of a new fact to be discovered than a new way of making sense of existing facts (Breger 1982, 70; Mach 1872).

4. In a similar sense in which scholars of the sociology of quantification stress the emergence of categories through counting (Hacking 1982).

5. On the second World Power Conference in Berlin in 1930, E. Haidegger proposes the compilation of “Energy Balances,” an endeavor inspired by double entry accounting and national trade balances. In his calculation of the “energy balances” of Western European countries, he points out that the inclusion of hydro power makes for a special case: “When compiling energy balances, hydro power requires a special treatment. The contribution of hydro power to a country’s annually produced kWh can easily be determined by taking the mean degree of utilization, 25%, as a basis” (Haidegger 1930, 20).

6. The minutes for earlier EC meetings are lost and could not be accessed through archival research in the WPC's headquarter in London.

7. Data on world coal production are published regularly in the League of Nation’s Statistical Yearbook since 1926, and for some countries even earlier in “The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign Countries” (1920). Although both production and resource statistics require a standardized classification system, resource statistics additionally face the problem of developing an international classification system of resources (proven, estimated, etc.) and a general lack of data in some world regions. Resource statistics, including coal, appear for the first time on a regular basis from 1936 onwards as Statistical Yearbook of the World Power Conference.

8. After presenting his new approach to coal classification, Parr (1928), for instance, gives over 10 pages of tables, with 4 pages dedicated to a recalculation of the rank of coals from a wide variety of countries.

9. The Gesellschaft für Wärmewirtschaft (Vienna) presents on the Fuel Conference a model that statistically determines the “pure coal substance” (Reinkohle) for Austrian coals (The World Power Conference 1928, 46–53).

10. This perspective is today reflected in a radical strand of resource economics holding that resources are infinite as literally anything can turn into a resource depending solely on its price (Fettweis 1979, 156f).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stiftung Mercator [PN 13-165].