What Is The Use Of Energy In Alfred Crosby's Children Of The Sun

Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy is a history lesson on how people have used energy throughout the ages. In this case, we have to remember that what we usually consider “energy” is not what we are talking about. In this book “energy” is the power to do work. For most of humanity 's history, our main source of energy was muscle, both of human and animal. The fuel for that muscle was food, at the beginning people usually ate plants. Then, ultimately, plants get their energy from the sun. This means that any energy that humans have come from the sun in one way or another. This is how Crosby got his name for the book Children of the Sun. The main point of this book is to explain the history of the prime movers and how they turned into new ways of obtaining energy. According to Crosby “ physicist have paired the concept[of prime movers] down to mean any machine (using that word broadly) that converts natural energy into work.”(p. 4) For example, one of the

However, his biggest problem is he does not talk much about the impact on the environment or the bad impact some of these things had on humans. He speaks about slavery many times also as if it was just another way man found to keep energy together. He also does not explain how the factory workers in england were treated unfairly. It also does not show how this climb of energy was very unbalanced. Surprisingly enough 40 to 50 percent of humans still use wood as their primary source of fuel. The northern hemisphere is the more advanced part of the world and though Crosby does explain the origin of all these advances he does not explain that it does not stretch to many other parts of the world. The book accurately describes the history of energy; however, it does not explain the history of the world and how these advances changed the lives of so many around the