Deciphering economic futures: Electricity, calculation, and the power economy, 1880–1930

Abstract

More than other energy industries, the electric power industry relied on calculating practices and codifications like load management to handle and develop their technical systems. Scholars have approached these practices largely from the point of view of the history of electricity. While it is true that these practices facilitated the expansion of the industry, this paper argues that electrical systems and the calculations around them were also used to “decipher” the new relations between power, economic change, and society that were emerging in the first decades of the 20th century. This paper asks how electricity took on the form of a mode of representation of economic life. Starting from the control of currents in early electrical systems via the calculation of voltage, current, and resistance, the paper shows how load management developed, and how the calculations around the large, interconnected power systems of the early 20th century were used as information on the “power economy.” In the medium of the power economy, engineers, economists, and politicians imagined the relation between the national and the world economy, between technical progress and the nascent macroeconomic object of “the economy.” Based on an analysis of the contributions to the World Power Conferences, the paper distinguishes two ways in which calculations around electricity became relevant for economic policy in the interwar years: as an indicator of economic growth and as the ground for a new economy.