Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

“We’ve been over this a dozen times, Donald,” Alf Richards answered. “You know what the problem is. The closest sizable copper deposit is at Phalaborwa, three hundred miles to the north. Eventually we’ll establish a mining operation there and cope with the transport problems, which are daunting. But it will take awhile. We just can’t do everything at once.”

“Let me ask a naive question,” said Millie Fox. “It may even be a stupid question. But I’m not one of you brilliant engineers, so I’ll risk it. Aren’t there other metals you can use?”

I personally thought that was a very sensible question. In fact, Ruffin treated it with respect.

“You know, Millie,” he said, “gold and silver happen to be good conductors of electricity. But they’re really too soft to stand up to use in motors and transmission lines. More important, sources are extremely limited, which is one of the reason these materials have always been so expensive. The same is true of the other so-called rare metals. We need something that’s sturdy and plentiful.

“Of course,” he continued, encouraged by Millie’s interest, “iron fits that bill, and it will, in fact, conduct electricity. Folks used to use steel wire for the telegraph system that transmitted Morse Code dits and dahs. But it isn’t suitable for transmitting large quantities of electric power. For that we need copper, or as an alternative, aluminum, which has electrical conductivity about two thirds that of copper. The catch is that the best way to obtain aluminum from its ore is by electrolysis, and this requires lots of electric power, which is what we don’t have in the first place. So—cutting to the chase—copper is the only practical way to go.”

After a few moments of grim silence, Ruffin spoke again: “Guys, we’re not here just to grouse and sulk. We have a suggestion. You may remember that when Pieter Klemm first gave us a report on the area’s mineral resources, he told us about a small copper deposit at Nkanda, just forty miles inland. Well, I’ve taken the liberty of having a few of our mining engineers check it out, and they tell me that there is, in fact, some decent ore there. Not a large amount. Certainly not enough to provide the many miles of wire needed for an electrical distribution system. But something that we can start with. Enough to let us build some experimental equipment, not just dream about it.” Ruffin made boxlike gestures with his hands as if he were assembling a piece of machinery in the air in front of him.

“Maybe we can manufacture a few small generators driven by coal-burning steam turbines and use them to recharge some of the batteries we salvaged from the ship. That would put us back in business with the radio equipment that was saved. And just think how great it would be if we could bring some of our computers back to life. Also, we could plan to install generators in key locations such as hospital emergency rooms. Even without a distribution system, a lot can be accomplished. And without taking a large number of people away from the activities of your master plan.”

Alf Richards pursed his lips, dubious but thoughtful. Ruffin sensed an opportunity and pursued it.

“Just spare a few people to mine and smelt a small amount of copper,” he said. “And a few more to set up a wire-drawing operation. And, finally, tell your Scavengers to bring in some scrap copper wire. You won’t regret it, I guarantee.”

Then, after a pause: “Come on, Alf. You can’t make your way back to the modern world without putting electrical engineers in the front ranks. When you think of it, electricity is humankind’s most godlike exploit. In fact, maybe it’s the main reason the deities decided to send that comet our way. They looked down, saw us lighting up the night and bouncing radio signals off of artificial satellites; they must have thought to themselves, ‘Hey, enough is enough. Let’s cut these upstarts down to size.’ “

For the third time in as many days I found myself drifting into that fanciful world in which tales of past engineering achievements emerged as a key element of our own odyssey. First it had been iron and steel; then machine tools; and now, most marvelous of all, electricity. Damn it, Ruffin is right, I thought. You can’t help but agree with the guy, unpleasant as he may be: the mastery of electricity is indeed humankind’s most godlike exploit. And it is the means by which we can most decisively leap over centuries into the modern world. While Richards grudgingly negotiated the terms of a deal with the Electric Light Brigade, I started to jot down my personal thoughts in the margins of my minutes.

Later in the day, after the meeting was over, I went off by myself, intent on recording the ideas that had suddenly flooded into my mind. I skipped dinner, telling Sarah that I had some important work to catch up on. Seated with my back against a board I had half buried in the sand, looking out over Lake Mzingai, I scribbled away, carried off into a world of my own fancy. As night descended, I lit the candle that I carried with me whenever on secretarial duty, and the flickering light was an persistent reminder of how electricity had become central to our lives.

People have been fooling around with “static electricity” for a long time, at least since the ancient Greeks rubbed amber with fur and found that it attracted light objects such as feathers and lint. In fact, the Greek word for amber is elektron. But static, sparks, even lightning—these phenomena were the stuff of wonder and speculation, not dreamed of as a force for human well-being. Until…

For me, the story begins in 1800, when Count Alessandro Volta made his electric pile, or what we today would call a battery. As the story goes, when Volta put a coin on top of his tongue, and a coin of a different metal under his tongue, his sense of taste led him to believe that something was “flowing” from one coin to the other. So he experimented with stacks of alternating discs of two different metals—zinc and copper, or silver and lead—with moist cardboard in between each slice. Then he ran a brass wire from one end of such a stack to the other and discovered that “something”—a current of electricity—ran through the wire.

Today, we know that electricity consists of the flow of electrons, and that metals, which characteristically have free-floating electrons in their outer shells, are good conductors of such flow. We also know that if we place zinc, with its thirty electrons, next to copper, with its twenty-nine electrons, then the electrons in the zinc “want” to move toward the copper, to equalize the situation, and thus they establish a flow of current. Such chemical generation of electricity is the basis of our batteries. But batteries are necessarily small. The large-scale generation of power depends upon other natural phenomena.

The next chapter in this remarkable saga features Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish physicist, who in 1820 gave a lecture that will live forever in the annals of science and technology. The topic was electricity, and for purposes of demonstration the professor had set up a circuit powered by a Voltaic battery. On his laboratory table, close to the electric wire, there happened to be a compass, an ordinary compass like those long used on ships to indicate the direction of the North-South magnetic field. Oersted noticed that each time he flipped a switch to start the flow of electric current, the compass needle quivered. Strange. Electricity in a wire was affecting magnetism in the surrounding air. Amazing. It seems that a flowing electric current creates around itself a magnetic force.

Well, then, if electricity can make magnetism, can magnetism make electricity? For awhile this question proved mystifying. People tried putting magnets over wires, under wires, surrounding wires, but nothing seemed to happen. The great Michael Faraday solved the problem in 1831. He demonstrated that by moving a magnet near a wire, or moving a wire near a magnet, an electric current can be created.