1938 - Energy

Energy

An oil strike in southeastern Kuwait February 23 begins to revolutionize the emirate's economy (Mikimoto's cultured pearls have ruined its pearl fishery, once its leading industry; see 1893). Kuwait Oil Co. will develop the giant petroleum reserve in the British protectorate under joint ownership of Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. and Gulf Oil.

Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco) strikes oil in Saudi Arabia in March (see 1933). Political events will delay exploitation of the vast deposits, and by 1950 Ibn Saud will have received no more than about $200,000, but by 1953 he will be getting roughly $2.5 million per week as his country becomes the world's leading petroleum producer.

Mexico nationalizes her petroleum industry March 18, revoking licenses granted to British and U.S. oil companies to operate in Mexico. Oil is a natural resource that belongs to all the Mexican people, the Cardenas government says; it expropriates properties valued at $450 million and proposes oil barter agreements with Germany, Italy, and other nations to exchange oil for manufactured goods imported up to now largely from Britain and the United States.

Commonwealth & Southern Corp. president Wendell L. Willkie begins negotiations in January to sell the company's assets to the Tennessee Valley Authority that he and others have charged with unfair competition (see 1939; Supreme Court decision, 1936).

Pickwick Landing Dam is completed on the Tennessee River February 8 a few miles south of Savannah, Tenn., and just north of the Mississippi state line (see Wheeler Dam, 1936). Built in 37 months by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at a cost of $45.7 million, it rises 113 feet, stretches 7,715 feet in length, has a generating capacity of 228,000 kilowatts, and has required the relocation of 506 Alabama families along with cemeteries and everything of value (see Kentucky Dam, 1944).

A special congressional committee convenes March 11 to hold hearings on allegations of corrupt practices by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), whose rates are half those of private utility companies (see lawsuits, 1937; Lilienthal, 1941).

General Electric introduces fluorescent lighting April 21 after nearly 3½ years of development at Nela Park in East Cleveland by a team headed by George Inman, 43, who will be granted a patent in October 1941 (German freelance inventor Edmund Germer, 36, will later receive a patent on his version of a fluorescent lamp, but GE will buy U.S. rights to Germer's patent in 1941, acquiring also his patent on a high-pressure mercury-vapor lamp). The fluorescent lamp is a glass tube with an electrode (a small, coiled tungsten filament with an oxide coating) at each end; the inside of the tube is coated with phosphors and it contains a drop of mercury plus a small amount of argon gas; as current is applied, the argon gas helps to vaporize the mercury, which becomes the medium through which an electric arc connects the two electrodes, enabling the mercury to produce ultraviolet light concentrated in one particular wavelength (2,537 Angstrom units). GE initially offers the lamps in three lengths—18, 24, and 36 inches—and three wattages (15, 20, and 30), but next year it will introduce a 40-watt, 48-inch lamp whose white light will be considered preferable to daylight for general indoor lighting. Inman's team has included inventor A. (Alfred) Eugene Lemmers, 30, whose Rapid Start Fluorescent Lamp will become the most widely used light of its kind. In addition to being far more energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs, the new fluorescent lamps are so bright that they will revolutionize office-building construction, making interior spaces as bright as offices with windows, although a windowed office will remain a coveted status symbol (see 1941).

Former utilities magnate Samuel Insull dies of a heart attack while waiting for the Métro at Paris July 16 at age 78; physicist André-Eugène Blondel at Paris November 15 at age 75, having not only pioneered use of the oscillograph and photometry for measuring the intensity of alternating current but also contributed to the development of induction motors and the coupling of AC generators.