What I call Epoch 4.1 is also called the Second Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuels still provided the energy, so it was still my Fourth Epoch, and we still live in it today. The so-called Second Industrial Revolution rode on the back of oil and electricity. Coal was primarily formed by early forests during the creation of a supercontinent, and oil was primarily formed by anoxic marine events during the reign of dinosaurs. Geological processes buried those life remains, and we are burning them all up a million times as fast as they were formed. The chief metal of the Industrial Revolution, iron, was also made available by life processes long before the formation of coal and oil. Our modern world rides on the back of ancient life processes.
The first commercial use of electricity was the telegraph, in the 1830s. The oil industry began in the next decade in Russia, and in 1859 the first commercial oil well was drilled in the USA. In the USA, oil was first used as a substitute for whale oil, as whales were quickly being hunted to extinction. Here I will first mention the long shadow that John D. Rockefeller cast on the world. Within a generation of drilling the first oil well, Rockefeller had a virtually monopoly on oil refining, and he became the world’s most dominant monopolist. We had our encounters with the Rockefellers and they were not pleasant. Rockefeller soon branched out into “philanthropy,” and humanity has paid dearly for the “philanthropy” of the rich, with their ill-gotten fortunes. Bill Gates has been a worthy successor, who modeled his “philanthropy” after Rockefeller’s.
England had the early lead in industrialization, but in the century beginning around 1845, the USA quickly overtook the UK to become history’s richest and most powerful nation. It was because the USA stole such a rich continent, with intact forest, soils, and prodigious coal and oil deposits. Wind and water power were competitive with coal in the UK and USA until about 1850.
The USA’s Civil War is the best contrast that I know of to compare Epochs. The South had an agrarian economy based on slave labor, while the North had an industrializing economy with “free” labor. The South never had a chance, as the North ground it down in a war of attrition, which presaged how industrial capacity (and especially the oil to fuel it) won the World Wars.
The first consumer use of electricity was for lighting. Thomas Edison’s teams improved it to a commercial level in 1879, while leading scientists called electric lighting “impossible” and “idiotic.” A generation later, leading scientists jeered and sneered at the “impossible,” human-powered flight, and the American scientific establishment ignored or ridiculed reports of the Wright brothers’ feat for five years. They actually had to go to France to become famous, first, before American scientists deigned to admit that what happened in their backyard was possible. The situation is actually worse regarding free energy today, as if the scientific profession has learned nothing over the past century.
While Edison’s lightbulb was a major breakthrough, the direct current that Edison used was not practicable for electrifying the world. His former employee, Nikola Tesla, invented the alternating-current technology that the world uses today. Although Tesla’s technology prevailed, the big winners were the robber barons, and when Tesla began advocating free energy, they pulled the rug from under him. Tesla died in obscurity and the American government seized his papers upon his death.
Oil was a vastly superior fuel to coal, and made the internal combustion engine feasible, which subsequently powered automobiles and airplanes. In 1911, Winston Churchill saw the light and converted the British Navy to oil from coal, and the Middle East’s fate was sealed. Everything that the West has done in that part of the world since then was all about the oil, which is history’s greatest material prize. Oil-rich nations that could not defend themselves from the West’s depredations have paid dearly, with many millions of lives ruined and shortened.