Historic Energy Events

By lilliejudge

  • First Natural Gas Well Drilled

    First Natural Gas Well Drilled
    In Fredonia, New York William Hart observed gas bubbles rising in a creek which inspired him to drill a well in to the ground in search of natural gas.

  • Coal Becomes Most Common Energy Source For Trains

    Coal Becomes Most Common Energy Source For Trains
    The first commercially built and practical train, Tom Thumb, was built in America and ran on coal.

  • Windmills Become Popular For Pumping Water

    Windmills Become Popular For Pumping Water
    This form of water-pumping through windmills was extremely useful for those settling out west and was very helpful in the process of creating railroads.

  • Birth of the Modern Oil Industry

    Birth of the Modern Oil Industry
    Salt that was trapped underneath the earth's surface gradually kept pushing the ground up until it errupted with "black gold" that took 9 days to control. This lead to the invention of the 'Christmas Tree' that is used to control the stream of the errupting oil.

  • First Commercial Scale Geothermal Electric Plants in the US

    First Commercial Scale Geothermal Electric Plants in the US
    A huge geothermal electric plant was built at The Geysers dry steam field, in northern California.

  • Solar One

    Solar One
    Built in Dagget, California is the first test of a large scale thermal solar tower. The tower consentrates the sun's energy to produce heat and run a generator.

  • Largest Nuclear Accident Ever

    Largest Nuclear Accident Ever
    An accident that was caused by a sudden surge of power in Chernobyl, Ukraine ruined the reactor and released excessive amounts of radioacctive material in to the environment.

  • EV1 Electric Car Is Made Available to the Public

    EV1 Electric Car Is Made Available to the Public
    Engineers have now started looking at different ways to give cars energy sinc we know that fossil fuels are a limited resource. They have now come up with an electric car that you can charge.

  • First Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Plant Goes Into Production

    First Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Plant Goes Into Production
    The first Commercial Cellulosic Plant is begining to be built in Wyoming. It is a small scale waste wood commercial facility, the first in the United States.

  • BP Oil Spill

    BP Oil Spill
    The BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana was the biggest oil spill in the history of the U.S. The spill ended up killing 11 crew memebers and seriously damaged the life of the sea environment.

  • Website used to create this timeline

    http://alternativeenergy.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000015