Essay Example on Energy era before the industrial Revolution

In the early energy era before the industrial revolution which started approximately in the 18th century the human needs were moderated The main sources the civilization relied on sun for heating power of different animals for transportation and the wind for sails The labor of the human where it was not possible done by the human himself was done by the animals The machinery were simplistic and based on the force of wind and water As regarding the steam era the first ever made steam engine was dated somewhere far back in the ancient city of Alexandria and since then this type of engine was continuously developed being the most used engine for the 17th and 18th century The ones who contributed for the developing and increasing the steam engine until its top capacities for the first time were Thomas Newcomen and James Watt During the mid of 17th century they build an engine that worked using the coal extracted from the mines located in the England and Appalachia which at that moment could substitute the yield of a dozens of animals Since then these two scientist opened a many number of possibilities for the entire world 

However due to the implementation of the electric starter into the gas cars the electric cars were quickly excluded from the market Talking about revolutionary inventions of the era in the same century was discovered the pneumatic tire invented by John Dunlop and used in the first place for the bicycle It was more efficient due to the fact that the cycling became more comfortable on the dirt roads and cobblestone Starting with the 20th century due to the low costs of energy products and their mass production e g automobiles lightning equipment etc and the spread of the electricity the needs of the society increased and were in a continuously changing In order to sustain the demand the number of power plants became larger and larger The most used power plants were based on a massive consumption of coal and water hydroelectric plant For example in America during the Great Depression the electricity network extended so much that the electricity was brought even in the rural areas The demand during this period was very high and there was a demand for cheap cars This production lead to a massive consumption of fuel As a fact the energy consumption grew so fast that it was doubling every decade The cost for producing such energy were declining and the concern about the properly consumption of energy was not exist Therefore an auspicious environment existed at that time for the mass consumption of energy commodities In order to have a better understanding of the entire evolution process below it is presented a graph that describe the energy demand of the society during different eras Graph 

1 Main use of the energy source Wikipedia Energy use grew quickly doubling every 10 years The cost of energy production was declining steadily and the efficient use of energy was directly speaking not a concern By then end of the World War II a new source of energy was implemented the nuclear power The energy produced by such kind of plants is very cheap but comes with a big risk The risk is associated with the disaster produced by the malfunction of these plants During the history there were cases like Chernobyl or Fukushima that proves the disaster that can be done by the nuclear power However even if this source was discovered the gasoline still continue to grow being the most used energy source is America Speaking about America by 1970 s the cars at that time consumption was about a gallon approximately 2 liters for 13 5 miles where a gallon of gasoline cost less than a quarter