The Grid: Biography of an American Technology
Gerald Markowitz · Journal of American History · 2019
Julie A. Cohn has written what she describes as a biography of the electric power grid in the United States, “the largest interconnected machine in the world” (p. 1). The “grid” developed in the United States over the course of more than a century and consisted of “thousands of entities—large and small, economically interdependent and autonomous, investor owned and government owned” (p. 40). Yet, over time, these disparate elements “led to the construction of America's tightly coordinated machines of electrification” (p. 11). In fact, as the author explains, today's grid is made up of four networks, and that as late as 1939, there were “many small interconnected systems serv[ing] various regions of the country” (p. 129). Unlike in Europe, where centralized governments legislated the coordination necessary to achieve a unified system, the United States depended mostly on investor-owned companies that voluntarily adopted standard practices and equipment. Cohn focuses on the process of building the interconnections that produced the “grid” because other historians have tended to emphasize other aspects of the history of electrification—such as inventors, dams, environmental struggles, geography, and political battles. Unheralded but crucial parts of the story include the thousands of engineers, system operators, manufacturers, and academics (including the author's father, Nathan Cohn) who created and disseminated the knowledge and expertise that produced the electrical system the United States has today.