The first thing you should know about the history of energy in the United States is that, about 150 years ago, the horses got absolutely ripped.
“In the mid-19th century, you have a massive expansion of the horse body. They become 50 percent more powerful,” Robert Suits, a historian at the University of Chicago, told me.
This matters to the history of energy because, back then, horses were a primary form of transportation. (As Jason Torchinsky has written, horses were the world’s first semiautonomous vehicle.) It matters because of how the change happened at all—a massive program of selective breeding that was not possible, Suits said, until railroads existed to ferry promising horses over long distances.
And it matters, finally, because you must understand how yoked horses are to figure out how much energy the U.S. economy used to use. In the 1810s, the average American horse ate 25,000 to 30,000 calories a day, Suits said. By 1900, each ate 35,000 to 40,000 calories a day. That translates to far more hay and oats.
That tidbit is one of many things I learned from an astonishing new research project from Suits and his colleagues. It’s a history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019. It was published today.
This type of chart is called a Sankey diagram, which shows the relative size of flows in and out of a system. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it’s being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating).
You can find a full interactive version of their chart online. Honestly, I’ve featured this chart here in the hopes that you’ll go to their website and play around with it. There is … a lot going on in it. As far as I’m aware, this is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. energy history in one place. “You could write a book from that Sankey alone,” Apratim Sahay, an energy consultant based in Boston, told me.
So click around! Look at what’s happening in the year you were born versus what’s happening now. Look at what the energy system was like 100 years before you were born. It will help you think more keenly about climate change.