neville chamberlain fell. so these two books come if you're particularly interested in reading them back to back our great look at the early stages of world war ii and i highly recommend them. >> for more information on this another summer reading reading list, visit visit visit data work. >> maggie koerth-baker of basic energy and u.s. out next on booktv. ..

>> he was literally building a mansion on the hill. he made a decision to go on a fishing trip with a salesman from the edison electric company. at the time comes he had never seen a lightbulb. he actually owned the gaslighting facility in appleton, wisconsin. he came back from that fishing trip the proud owner to license and use this technology. it ended up being the beginning of the end of him as a successful businessman. i like this story because it really goes against the

narrative that i think most of us learned when we were in junior high and high school. where thomas edison invents the electric light bulb in 1879 and everything comes together vertically. like electricity solves the problem, everyone just adopted it immediately. the reality is a lot messier than that. the reality is that the incandescent lightbulb was not invented in 1879. it was invented in 1804 by each element named humphrey davies. he became the first prson to run an electric current, heating the wire up to the point where it began to glow and produce light. he is better known as a chemist, but he is also the guy who created the incandescent light. between humphrey davies and thomas edison, you have so many years of tinkering around with this technology that was never quite ready for technology. even by the time that h.j. rogers came around in 1882,

electricity was not a sure thing. it is important to know because we are in the middle of these energy crises. we have climate change bearing down on us and limited amounts of fossil fuels. we have infrastructure that has not been updated in 30 years. all of those things are going to require technology to solve our problems. at the same time, we like to tell ourselves stories about technology that don't match up with reality. we like to talk about times where one guy had one idea and it completely changed the world. that is really not what success normally looks like. if that is all we know, we are doing ourselves a great disservice. if you don't understand that the electric grid that you have today is not a perfect thing or an ideal system and it has a lot of flaws that damaged and put us at risk, even beyond renewable generations, you don't understand what our energy problems are and you will not understand what the solutions are either. that is when the reasons i wrote

my book, maggie koerth-baker. i want to tell the stories that tell people how this technology that we base our lives around works and how it will be about what we can do to you about this over the next few years. actually have to start in the state of wisconsin. in 1882, thomas election was putting together the first lecture driven the entire city. at the same time, h.j. rogers was working on his electric grid and came very close to actually beating edison to the punch. he opened his grid in august 1882, two weeks later in september, h.j. rogers did so as well. it was the first hydroelectric power plant in the entire world. more importantly, appleton, wisconsin, was the first place but somebody other than thomas edison, without edison's team of geniuses working around him, trying to apply this technology in the real world, and he failed

miserably. when you understand why h.j. rogers failed, you have an understanding of power grid works today and why there are some problems with it. h.j. rogers problem was a first technological problem. he had no idea what he was doing with the technology he had purchased. there were no such thing as things as electric linemen. there was no such things as electrical engineers. that was a job that thomas edison's staff invented. none of them had come west with the generator that maggie koerth-baker -- h.j. rogers brought. the grid is actually a lot harder to manage than we realize. i want to talk about the electric grid as being part of a lazy river at water park. it is a circuit of wires that

connect consumers to the power plant. you have to have that complete loop, or you will get blackouts. the grid has to operate in a specific parameters. electricity has to move at a constant speed, which is analogous to what engineers call frequency, and it has to move along at a constant depth, which is voltage. how you maintain that deb and voltage is by maintaining a perfect balance between electric supply and electric demand that gets out of whack by a fraction of a percent, we could get a blackout. h.j. rogers did not notice. he made some mistakes because of that. i told you that he owned the paper mill in appleton, wisconsin. this was powered by a water wheel. he thought he could save some money by having the same waterwheel that powered his paper meal also powered his electric generator. the problem is that the paper

mill had a lot of demand for its services. the electric generator had one customer, which was h.j. rogers himself. the generator was producing way more electricity than the little grid needed, and throughout h.j. rogers' mountain, electric light bulbs with burnout pop, pop, pop, and everyone every one of them cost the equivalent of $36. that quickly became an expensive mistake. even if h.j. rogers had been technically competent, and there were people who are technically competent to set up some of these early grades, there is a good chance he still would have failed. that is because of a business problem. in 1882, there were exactly one things that you could do with electricity. that was like a lightbulb. but you could not recoup the electricity costs of burning out at all. this was a huge problem.

up until the 19th century, very few americans have any kind of experience dealing with businesses that required you to build this massive, expensive infrastructure before you could even get started. it was something that was affecting a lot of different industries at the time. not just electricity, but long-distance rail. in all of those industries, what you saw were companies failing over and over. h.j. rogers eventually went bankrupt. people who bought the electric utility all went bankrupt. so to the people who bought the electric utility from them. it was not until the 1920s that anybody was able to make owning an electric utility a profitable business. even then, it was only because electric utilities set out to actually create their own demand. they set out with this concerted effort to invent things that people could use electricity for. along the way, they created the electric toaster oven, they invented the electric curling iron, and they found a lot of different things to do with electric motors.

i'm sure some of you have seen history books, where you can see small towns having these great big networks of electric streetcars. a lot of those were actually owned by utility companies, trying to find something for people to do with electricity during the day. that worked to make electricity a proper business, but it only worked in cities and places where you could build one infrastructure and survey lot of people at the same time. it did not work in rural communities. for many years, rural america was not electrified. they did not have the same kind of modernity that the rest of the country did. it wasn't until the 1930s to the 1950s when the federal government spread the cost of building the infrastructure over the entire country, that you were really able to get everybody up to the same speed on the technological basis. i think there are a few important things that we need to learn about the history of electricity. the first thing is that the

electric grid that we have right now evolved. it was not designed. it often involved in the hands of people who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. it shows today. we don't have storage on our electric grid. i think that is a big surprise for a lot of people, because we have batteries all throughout our lives. but there are not batteries on the electric grid. that balance between supply and demand that still has to be maintained is something that has to be maintained mainly by people in grid control centers all over the united states. they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. they have to maintain that by a minute by minute basis all throughout the day. the second thing we need to learn is that technology can fail for a really long time. they can still end up becoming something that is completely a bitterness to the way we live. there are a lot of analogies between the history of the lightbulb and solar power.

solar power was invented in the 1940s. people have been pushing this is the energy solutions in the 1970s. they are still really expensive and not widely used, so we should just move on. if you look at the history of the lightbulb come you can see that the technology can fail on the technological basis for 80 years. and it can fail in a business case basis for another 40. it can still end up becoming something that we are completely dependent upon today. finally, we need to learn that big changes that just completely sweep the nation are not necessarily things that happen individual by individual. we don't have an electric grid system today because individual people decided they wanted to rid their house up for electricity. it is a lot more complicated than that. it was something that involved private investment, public investment, and how all of those things allowed people to make individual choices en masse. that is something that affects the way that we have to think about the future electricity

today. all of the things that i have been telling you about, you know, how the grid works and what some of its flaws are and where it came from, these are things that experts in energy already known. but they are not necessarily things that the general public knows or that even the people who have to make decisions about our electric infrastructure now. i think that is a big deal. i set up to write this book partly because of nepotism. my husband is in energy efficiency analysis. what he does is figure out how to make buildings that are as energy-efficient as possible for the least amount of money. after he got this job, he started talking to me about the stuff that he was learning and the stuff he was trying to explain to his clients. he kept talking about how there were these things that were completely basic information to him, to the point that he didn't think they were worth talking about. that his client had no idea about. it affected the decisions that they made. it affected mistakes that they made. i really wanted to try to bridge

the gap between the bubble of expertise and everybody else. i think that bubble of expertise is something that is really easy to get into. i know that because i have made that same mistake. i had a background in journalism. i wrote mostly for magazines and still i started working for boing-boing. i didn't realize i had got myself in a lot of trouble and until i started working for boing-boing. you might get an e-mail from somebody, but it is usually from a crazy person who writes in all capital letters and is very angry at you. boing-boing was the first time that i actually had conversations with leaders in the comics section. i started to actually see real-time responses to what i wrote and what people -- what questions people had and what they didn't understand. because of boing-boing, i got out of this bubble that kind of

trapped myself into. i started to learn about how i could better communicate science to people and what i was doing wrong is a science communicator. one of the things that i've learned was that there were words that i didn't realize were targeted were actually jargon. reading the boing-boing comments, i realized that most of my readers come educated people, people that are excited about science, did not know what certain terminology meant. they thought that it meant something that should not be questioned, and part of them but it was at old boys club, and few of them realized it was a complicated process that was all about scientists editing each other's work and figuring out ways to say this might not be correct information, but we have said that you are probably doing the signs correctly. you're probably not making mistakes in your methodology or ridiculous leaps of logic. even though we don't know

whether you are right or not. that is a hard thing to explain to people. it is a hard thing to remember to explain to people. and we don't do a good enough job right now is science communicators of remembering that there are things that we know that other people don't know. we have to get outside of our bubble. i think that the internet does an amazing job of forcing me to do that and forcing other writers to do that as well. the internet, in, in fact, that's an amazing job at mutating science. one of the things that i learned last summer while i was preparing to do a presentation at a convention of the science museums was some statistics about how americans understanding of science has changed over the last 30 years. there is a guy at northwestern named john miller whose entire specialty is studying public understanding of science and sociology. he has been doing this for 30 or 40 years. in 1988, he found that 10% of

americans understood science well enough to understand what they were reading in "the new york times" science section. the same survey in 2008. that number had actually gone up to 20% of americans. they could now understand "the new york times" science section. there is a possibility that that has to do with the "new york times" science section getting dumber, but i kind of like to think that it has to do with how we communicate science changing. thirty years ago, the only place you are going to read about a new paper was in the newspaper, which has a very specific tone to the way that they write. they have specific audiences that they are reaching out to. if we go online, we can find so many more different ways that people are talking about that same paper. it might be doing it seriously, they might be doing it as a joke or a video or an interactive discussion. each one of those things is a different way for somebody to get interested in science who might not have sought out that science to begin with if it were

just in the newspaper. it allows you to bring in new audiences and allows you to reach out to people in their own cultural language to try to talk to them about stuff that was really, you know, only one niche 30 years ago. i think that has helped them. i am incredibly proud to work on the internet as a science journalist. i think it makes my science writing better come and i think it really was an incredible part of making me able to write this book. that is what i wanted to talk to you guys about today. i'm extremely happy to talk about this and answer questions from the book itself to boing-boing and anything else. >> thank you very much, maggie koerth-baker. let's all give her a big hand. we have a microphone here, and we will pass it around. if you could just wait until you get the microphone before you ask your question.

>> hello, i just want to know, you have any idea about how to combat the antiscience campaign that is going on right now? to i do, actually, this is one of the things that i ran into in the course of writing this book. it was an incredible story that made me think about communicating these controversial topics in way that i had never thought about doing before. there is a nonprofit in the state of kansas that started doing these focus groups in 2008. they were talking to people in wichita and kansas city about what you thought about climate and energy. they kept running into the same thing over and over. they would have some guy that thought i'm a change was a socialist plot, but when he came around and asked him what he thought about energy, he changed up his tone. he owned a toyota prius, he was excited about wind power, and that is because he had other reasons to care about energy

than just climate change. there were different ways you could get the same conclusion. one of the things that i think would be really helpful in this discussion is trying to break down some of those walls of time on the side from you on that side, and we can talk to each other. i think there is a lot of opportunities for me to say, you know, i have seen the evidence that shows that climate change is actually happening. i am not going to tell you that it is not. i know you have other reasons to care about energy, so let's have a conversation about energy and talk about what things -- what compromises we can come to together and what things we can actually agree on. i think we need to do more of that. one of the things that has disappointed me a little about environmental writing online is that it can tend to be preaching to the choir i think we need to do a better job of making an effort to reach out to communities and individuals who might not be drawn in by the

same message that i am drawn in by. that is something i talked about in the book and something i think is a good way to get around anti-science methods, circumventing an entirely. >> thank you for explaining the lifecycle of an idea and how long it takes. you have convinced me that solar power and wind power is going to be fine, but it's just going to take a little longer. when he asked with practical question. my wife's family owns a beach cottage in a beach town. and the guys in the town say they are going to put wave energy up the shore and nobody will see it, we are going to put that energy into your town and bingo, it's electricity. however, this requires a wire to be brought from the wave generating machine to the town, which is going to go under somebody's house or somebody's

neighborhood. this seems so incredibly horrifying but the whole idea just isn't really getting off the ground. how does that kind of competitive energy get generated and turn into actual energy getting into houses? >> this is something i think is interesting. before i wrote this book, i did some research on him being unturned -- nimby-ism. i actually ended up running into some interesting research. in europe they have research about this. a lot of it ends up coming down to communities participating in these products rather than just having the project happen to them. i think in denmark, if you build a wind farm from you have to offer the community or the person's property you are building on a 20% stake in that wind farm.

suddenly, nimby-ism disappears. i think that that is a really great idea. i have no idea what it would take to actually get something like that implemented in the united states, because it is really different from how we traditionally talk about infrastructure development. the idea that this interactive anticipatory infrastructure development is really, really different and you end up running into, i think, institutional inertia. we've never done things this way, thus we don't want to because change is scary. i think there is a lot of potential to solve those problems, but i think it's going to take us thinking about how we do things in a different way. >> hello. other than the horrible inefficiency, can you talk a little bit more about what is wrong with the grid in what we might do to heal that were fixed

on? >> yes, absolutely. one of the things that is wrong with the grid is this fact that we have to manually balance supply and demand minute by minute. if we had storage or if we had some of the technologies that make up what people talk about when they talk about smart grids, we could do a better job of keeping, you know, the stuff that we are completely dependent upon every minute of our lives more reliable. right now, we are at risk of a lot of different things that can cause great failures. texas actually learned this last winter. they had cold snaps that were not anticipated. they had demand for electricity rising, but they weren't expecting it to rise that much. then we had the cold, freezing pipes at the coal-fired power plants, so they had supply dropping off exactly when the demand was rising. what you get out of that his blackouts. that is something that the grid can circumvent a little bit and you can have a better chance of

getting around if there were storage on the grid. it is not really just about how we make the world safe for wind and solar and how we build a hippie utopia. it is about how we actually, you know, prepare ourselves for a 21st century. we have a lot of technology that has not changed since the 1970s. i can't think of anything else that i depend upon that much that is stuck in 1970s technology. that is one of the biggest things that i think is making this grid more stable. making it something that has less inherent, you know, the going around behind the scenes that has to happen to actually get it to work. it is not as stable as it looks right now, and i think that we could do a better job of that. >> what is the grid? >> it is a lot of different things. one of the things that they talk about with smart grids is a demand response.

right now, these guys that control supply and demand on the grid and keep it balanced, have only one way to control the demand side of that equation. that is by these customers who are called demand response customers. organizations that use a lot of electricity, like a factory. they are paid a premium to be on-call so the grid controllers can call him up in the middle of the day and say we have too much demand and not enough supply. you need to shut off your power for a little bit. you can kind of dial back the amount that they are using were shut off completely until we get the grid balance out so people don't have blackouts. one of the things we're talking about when you talk about smart grids is expanding that market out to smaller businesses and individuals are basically making it something we can all participate in. usually using smart appliances. appliances that communicate with the grid controllers or can sense changes on the electric grid and respond to those. you know, it is usually stuff that you don't actually have to

have drawing electricity all the time to get the benefits. your conditioner doesn't have to be on constantly to keep your house cool. you know, it can be offered public minutes and be back on again. the same thing for your refrigerator. there have been some really good studies of this. in the pacific northwest at pacific northwest national laboratory. they have done this in real-world test cases or when he set this up right when you give people the option of being able to opt in and out whenever they want, you know coming, in a control panel in the house than they can say i want to be on demand response today and not tomorrow -- when you do that, not only do they not notice that their appliances are going on and off at all, but they also never opt out. as long as they have the ability to do it, they don't necessarily do it. giving people that ability is really important. you have that issue of having to have purchased the tory interaction with infrastructure, rather than just having

infrastructure happen to you. that is when the big things that smart for the first year. there are a host of other different technologies, some of which actually affect consumers and others that you would never know had changed. but it is more than one thing. that is part of the confusion. >> [inaudible question] >> yes, absolutely. that is often part of making sure that you can produce -- if you want to be in electricity producer, that is about helping you be able to work with the grid in a reasonable way. right now, if you are in electricity producer and you're putting electricity into the grid, the grid controllers cannot see you. they know there is electricity on the grid, but they don't know where it's coming from and they don't have the ability to cut it off if we are to have too much on the grid. that is when the big things that smart meters are going to enable them to do. his honey be a good citizen of the grid rather than a squatter on the grid.

>> is there any feeling that electric cars might take off enough that they will affect the amount of electricity we need to produce in a faster way than they can build the network? >> i don't know that that is going to happen. in fact, electric cars could be storage on the electric grid. one of the problems with that idea is that people don't think they are going to get rolled out fast enough supply that storage that we want fast enough. the problem is that a particularly long time for the u.s. electric fleet or vehicle fleet turnover. i think it is a turnover of like years. we have had a ton of toyota prius we both be sold. we are more likely to not have that so quickly.

having that sort will actually help the grid. >> think you guys all for coming, i really appreciate it. thank you guys for coming. >> for more information, visit the author's website. maggiekb.com. >> were you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am reading the political heart good to have a book called -- i really do want to end this depression now. i just received, as a gift,