Windy Cities
Long before oil was discovered in the land now known as Iran, its inhabitants pioneered a far cleaner energy source. Around 700 A.D., Persians developed windmills to mill grain. After spreading both east and west, the technology served as one of Europe’s primary energy sources until the Industrial Revolution, even surviving the attacks of Cervantes’s delusional hero Don Quixote, who mistook them for giants. Now the fastest growing source of energy, wind power accounts for eight percent of power production in Cervantes’s homeland, Spain, and twenty percent in Denmark. Will windmills become giants once again? Quixotic as it sounds, we think so.

Totally Tubular
How many German physicists does it take to screw in a light bulb? We don’t know, but it took only one to set us on the path to energy-efficient lighting. Heinrich Geissler, trained as a glass blower, created a predecessor to the fluorescent bulb in 1856, almost a quarter century before Thomas Edison patented his own incandescent bulb. The Geissler tube contained electrically-excitable gas, just like today’s mercury vapor-filled fluorescent lights, which use two thirds less energy than incandescents. Why then did Edison’s invention catch on faster? At the time, fluorescent lights were expensive, huge, and emitted eerie colors – kind of like the last Pink Floyd concert we attended.

Pedal Pushers
Boomers might wax nostalgic for 1967, but 1819 was the real summer of love. That was the year German inventor Baron Karl Drais invented the Laufsmachine, a pedal-less predecessor to the modern bicycle, sparking an urban fad on par with scooters, Segways, and online dating. Drais’s “running machine” was exactly that: Riders sat on the frame and propelled themselves, not very elegantly, by pushing along the ground with their feet. (Crying “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!” was strictly optional.) Interestingly, it may have been climate change that brought about the Laufsmachine. The abnormally cool weather of 1816’s “Year Without A Summer” decimated grain production across northern Europe, causing humans and livestock to starve, and possibly inspiring Drais’ interest in horseless transportation. Unfortunately, bike lanes hadn’t yet been invented; the Laufsmachine caused an uproar when well-to-do young men in London began terrorizing pedestrians on their “dandy horses.” As a result, many municipalities banned the Laufsmachine, delaying the development of human-powered transport until 1862, when a French baby carriage maker named Pierre Lallement attached pedals to Drais’s invention and created the first bicycle. 

Liquid Assets
Before bars started serving it during happy hour, ethyl alcohol proved one of humanity’s most useful discoveries. For that, we can all toast eighth-century Persian alchemist Jabir Ibn Haiyan, inventor of the alembic: a simple chemical instrument consisting of two small glass chambers connected by a tube. Jabir probably wasn’t much of an environmentalist, or a drinker, but his device permitted the distillation of ethanol, a fuel source that today provides 40 percent of Brazil’s non-diesel gasoline and is generating plenty of bipartisan buzz stateside. The alembic also aided the development of pharmacology, by providing a solvent for medicines to be dissolved within, and is still used today by today’s chemists, some of whom believe ethyl alcohol, otherwise known as ethanol, might be just the right pick-me-up for the planet.