To begin with we are introduced to Eileen Murphy, the author of a 1934 pamphlet. Mrs Murphy was anxious not to be thought of as ‘a rabid opponent of electricity’, because it certainly had its place in factories & workshops & in the production of neon lighting for decorative purposes, BUT
I dislike any attempt to stampede the housewife by extravagant promises into buying electricity for household purposes in which it has not been proved to be either economical, healthy or efficient.
So come on ladies, cling to your dolly tub, mangle & posser, your broom & feather duster, flat iron & coal-fired kitchen range until you can be reassured on these points.
In fact England had been slow to electrify, despite the pioneering work of Davey & Faraday; America & Germany had embraced the new technology, & the industries that go with it, as early as 1870, leaving Britain struggling to catch up.
A story which sounds all too familiar, one partial explanation for which is the English class system & the idea of the gentleman as one who can, in the words of Sir Thomas Smith in 1565, ‘live idly & without manual labour’ who would not welcome anything which helped the lower orders share, & therefore devalue, this privilege.
Thus the sons of the northern industrial pioneers of the early C19th moved south, after their gentleman’s education at public school & Oxbridge, discovered a love of Nature & did not deign to add to their fortune by bothering about the manufacture of ever more toys, trinkets or devices to delight, or ease the back-breaking, health-destroying labour of the masses. Their wealth would trickle down through payments for personal services, not trickle up to augment their fortunes through the garnering of the pennies of the common man & woman as consumers of the cheap & cheerful.
For, as the Marchioness of Londonderry warned at the end of WWI, the introduction of industrial methods into the conditions of domestic service was ‘liable to react in a disastrous manner on the whole foundation of home life.’
Well, it has been a struggle, but the lure of all those gadgets & gizmos & labour-saving devices proved too great, so that now none of us could live our lives without electricity.
Electricity may be clean & safe at the consumer end, but it has always been anything but clean & safe along the whole of the chain of production & supply. Most of us don’t like to bother our heads about all that – just keep it out of our sight, please.
It is no surprise that some are using the problems with the Japanese reactors to claim that we should abandon the idea of building new nuclear power stations in this country. Argument – end of.
It is of course disappointing that the continued uncertainty about the outcome in Japan is leading only to increased anxiety, particularly for those living close to the problem, exposed to higher than usual levels of radiation, &, especially, for the families of the brave engineers who are wrestling to bring things under control.
There have been some very useful programmes on the radio about this – for example Material World - which helped to put the issues in perspective. For example, the fact that astronauts are exposed to (1000) times the levels considered safe for the rest of us.
Lessons will be learned – as they have already, leading to changes in design since the first nuclear power stations were built. They will be safer, just as modern domestic or industrial boilers rarely explode.
And I do not mean to sound flippant, but if the worst comes to the worst in the current emergency the number of lives ended or foreshortened by the nuclear accident will be only a small fraction of those lost to coal, or indeed the earthquake & tsunami which started this tragedy.
One fact which has not been given much publicity. Three of the four nuclear facilities in the vicinity are operating as normal, having survived the shaking, & are providing the electricity so badly needed to help care for the sick & injured & keep life going in an approximation of the normal.
In stark contrast to what might have been the case had Japan been relying on off-shore wind or tide generation, which no amount of clever design can make immune to an earthquake, let alone a tsunami.
The Times ran a fairly disgraceful story about ‘the first victim’ of the leak – a dejected middle-aged cabbage farmer who committed suicide because he foresaw the loss of his livelihood. More a case of the first victim of the precautionary principle which dictated an immediate ban on the sale of all broad-leaved green vegetables grown within a wide area around the leak.
To be fair, The Times did carry a comment piece by David Aaronovitch making this point.
But last Saturday, as prime page three news, under the headline Way clear for pylons to blot landscape, & alongside a reproduction of Constable’s Dedham Vale, doctored to include no fewer than 8 pylons, (which, done properly to scale, would probably have to be the size of dinky toys) Ben Webster, Environment Correspondent, conveyed the alarming news that electricity from new power plants, whether nuclear or green, will have, somehow, to be carried across some very beautiful landscapes if we are to make any use of it where we live.
Earlier last week they ran a special advice supplement for young people, about how to choose the GCSEs, A levels & university courses which would lead to a satisfying career; not one of these involved maths, science or engineering. What’s the point of those to the gentlefolk of the twenty-first century?
Well those Chinese, Asian (& Arab) chappies seem quite interested, don’t they – I hear they’re taking up a lot of our university places. Paying high fees, too.
The sad fact is that electricity, unlike radio waves or microwaved digital signals, cannot just be propelled though the air from a distant transmitter. And, as with water, an unacceptably large amount leaks away during transmission. Unlike water, we have not yet developed efficient ways of storing it in large amounts for use during times of shortage & an awful lot of it is wasted during or after use, producing heat we do not need, or locked up in rubbish sent to landfill.
Nevertheless, over the last century and a half, a mere fleabite on the skin of time, we have made huge strides in efficiency & the mitigation of harm from electricity. We learn by trial & error, our brains are not big enough to work it all out in advance.
We do not have to go back to a time when we had only man, woman & horsepower to rely on; the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stone. The Oil Age will not end because we run out of oil. The Electric Age will end when we discover a new form of reliable, reproducible & distributable energy.
Until then, pessimistic nostalgic Greens & optimistic can-do Climate Change Deniers should make common cause, chipping away at thoughtless & unnecessarily extravagant usage while applying our skill, ingenuity & imagination to narrowing the margins of difference in the equation between energy inputs & outputs.
