ABSTRACT
Primitive savages know how to start a fire by friction. They must have discovered the process tens of thousands of years ago. Yet as lately as the middle of the eighteenth century scientists were still debating whether or not heat was a material element (an “indestructible substance”), though they were already experimenting with the steam engine. So a principle may be put in practice long before it is understood or defined. Therefore it is not strange if the obvious fact that a high production system works on a long circuit of energy has not been perceived and the general laws governing its creation and maintenance have not been formulated. Even the definition of energy stood in the way of understanding the conditions of its extended use by human beings for their own benefit. The definition is confined to measure by its effects; and no practicable design for mechanical apparatus can be conceived except in accordance with such measure. Nevertheless, it obscures the major problem of the utilization of energy throughout a production system; because man himself enters into the energy circuit he uses, and thus introduces a factor which does not answer to measure. As man has a triple function in the circuit, his intervention is triply confusing. Part of the energy is converted and transmitted literally by his physical body, in measurable quantity, as when a man pushes a wheelbarrow; but in the long circuit, or high energy system, this part is small compared to the quantity converted and used through inanimate materials. Another function of man in the energy circuit uses an extremely variable and practically non-measurable quantity of energy, in the intellectual effort of invention or discovery 281of devices to tap the universal energy; the returns from this are incommensurable with any possible estimate of the energy applied. Then the third function of man in his energy circuit comes into play, to cause even more confusion of thought on the subject. What man does in his third relationship to the energy circuit is to route the energy he has tapped and brought under control. The man pushing a wheelbarrow routes it by the same action, his mind sending the command directly through his muscles along with the force applied. There is an imponderable, but it cannot be separated from the ponderable direct force. When energy is routed on the long circuit, it is done by actions in which the force expended is not merely incommensurable to the result, but does not enter into the specific physical sequence of transmission at all.
