Hey there,
I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but it seemed to me more relevant to economic history, than to economics.
My question is:
Are there any visible increases in efficiency of production during the industrial revolutions, if we consider the input measured in calories or joule? I know that it sounds a bit stupid, but I am wondering. As I understood it, most technologies increase productivity by allowing for the use of more complex sources of energy, such as coal. Other increases in efficiency came from organizational matters or fixed costs that did not grow proportionally with the scale of enterprises. But is efficiency also visible if we look at the relation between the input of natural resources and the output of manufactured goods?
It seems to me, that most existing industries have a high demand for finite resources, and that they are not much more efficient than manual labor, but rather able to use resources that supply more energy - but at the same time are also finite. In any case, it doesn't seem to me that the input really decreased for most industries. At least in absolute numbers it seems clear that most finite resources are used up much more quickly now. Are there any increases in efficiency that would offset the increased demand from industries and growing populations?
Is this idea completely wrong or do you think it could be true that efficiency did not so much increase, but rather the scale of enterprises increased, while the amount of labor decreased.
I am just wondering if the input really decreased, relative to the output, if we consider natural resources. This might be clearly obvious if we take nuclear energy or solar energy into consideration, but does this thought have any validity with respect to the late 19th century in UK or Central Europe?
If anything about this question is not acceptable for this subreddit, maybe you could let me know how I could increase my chances for an answer :)
Thanks ahead.
The process of technological advancement has of course been made possible by the utilization of energy resources like wind, water power, fossil fuels, and nuclear. But energy efficiency has always been just one consideration in how those sources could be used, there have usually been others.
Consider the Newcomen steam engine. A classic reciprocating steam engine could only get 18% energy efficiency. A human being is better, at 25%. The Newcomen steam engine, the first effective one, limped along at only about 1%. Why was it built to drain a coal mine? Looking only at efficiency, it seems obvious that a bucket-brigade of humans would be better. But at the time in the early 1700’s coal was shipped in baskets and crates. The process of mining left piles of coal dust and bits, or “fines” , piled up around the pithead, because those could not be transported. The Newcomen engine could burn that. Not efficiently: but it was available.
Likewise, consider the tub wheel. A very simple sort of hydraulic turbine, its efficiency is quite low compared to something like an overshot water wheel. However, a grist mill with a tub wheel had very few moving parts. If someone back in the hills of Appalachia wanted to put a small stream to work grinding their corn, building a mill with a tub wheel was far cheaper and easier than with an overshot wheel . And the stream's energy was available: it was going to go downhill whether a human put a mill in it or not.
For the overshot wheel, there were also considerations. More efficient than the tub wheel or the undershot wheel, the overshot wheel would have problems during floods- the turning wheel would tend to pile up water behind it. On rivers where flooding was a problem, in the later 18th c. the breast wheel was invented. It was more complicated to build than an overshot wheel, but it could run on more days of the year: and for anything like a stream or river, that’s rather critical, because summer droughts and winter freezes could keep a water mill from running anyway.
Then there’s the question of scale. Some things are too hard to do with just humans. The mine serviced by a Newcomen engine might in theory have been drained by a bucket brigade, but they would have had to fed and housed, whether they were working or not. There would have had to be a lot of architecture ( stairs? ladders? elevators?) constructed within the mine for them to work. Likewise, imagine a few hundred blacksmiths trying to forge a single heavy I-beam for a highway bridge. A fossil fuel powered steam hammer might have been less energy efficient than the blacksmiths, but it could do the job. And of course the arch of the steam hammer could not have been cast by hundreds of small foundries, or the steel itself made in thousands of small crucibles.
None of this is to say that energy efficiency has not been a consideration. The steam engine went through a process of constant re-design for almost two hundred years, and the modern steam turbines have a much greater efficiency- between 65% and 90%. That’s better than the Newcomen’s 1%. So, the short answer to your question would have to be, yes, over time we have been using more and more energy-efficient machines, sources of power. But, while we’re talking about efficiency of machines and humans: burning fossil fuel to generate the electricity needed to power the computer I am using to type this answer might be considered more wasteful than burning it to pump out a mine to keep coal miners from drowning. How efficient we have been in our choices of using energy is a more difficult question.