Low-Energy Fridays: 250 Years of American Energy

This weekend, the United States of America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And if you’re like me, that can only mean one thing: You’ve been spending most of your free time contemplating how much America’s energy profile has changed since 1776.

Of course, the America of 1776 was much smaller than the America of today. The total population of the 13 colonies in 1780 was around 2.8 million—less than the current population of Chicago. Most of those people were rural farmers. The largest city at the time, Philadelphia, had a population of between 30,000 and 40,000, all of whom would fit inside the Chicago White Sox stadium.

Beyond the smaller population and lack of urbanization, America at the time of the Declaration’s signing was truly low energy. In fact, the energy profile of 18th century America was fundamentally similar to that of medieval Europe or ancient Rome. The vast majority of the energy we rely on today was absent from daily life. Benjamin Franklin may have established that lightning was electricity, but there was no way to harness electricity as a power source. Oil was an annoying thing you might step in if it bubbled out of the ground. Nuclear energy wasn’t even conceivable.

Instead, Americans had to rely on different energy sources. A big one was burning wood, most commonly to cook or to stay warm. You could also make some use of wind to power ships, and a combination of wind and water were used in things like mills. But the main alternative to today’s energy sources was muscle: both human and animal. There were no tractors; if they were lucky, farmers could use a mule. If you wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t along a body of water, you either had to walk or ride a horse (or maybe the mule). Dishes, laundry, sweeping, and more all had to be done by hand.

This low-energy reality continues to shape the country’s geography down to the present day. Prior to the development of motorized transport, anything bulky was much easier to transport over water (where you could take advantage of wind or currents) than over land. As a result, many major cities were—and still are—located beside bodies of water.

Communication was also limited. Information could travel only as fast as a horse or ship could carry it. You couldn’t hop on your phone to stream video from the World Cup or use Google to verify the statistics cited in this article. On the plus side, there weren’t any Zoom meetings.

To the extent that energy was available, it was also incredibly expensive. Consider artificial lighting. Back in 1800, it would have cost the average worker the equivalent of about 10 hours of labor to purchase enough candles to generate one lumen-hour of light. Today, the average worker makes enough to pay for an equivalent amount of higher quality electric light in just one second.

When we consider how little access to energy the founding generation had, their accomplishments seem that much more remarkable. Even more remarkable have been the energy transformations that came out of the system they founded. From electric lighting to Spindletop to splitting the atom, many of the major jumps forward in energy technology originated in America, which remains an energy leader to this day.

And that’s not a coincidence. America’s open system, which allows and encourages innovation and market competition and prizes the advancement of useful knowledge, has provided fertile ground for the energy advancements of the last 250 years. Perhaps Americans in the year 2276 will look back at the America of 2026 and wonder how we could have gotten by without the energy advancements of the coming centuries.