Was Scarcity the Mother of Invention? How Engineers Used Worries over Resource Exhaustion to Promote Specific Technological Fixes

Throughout the western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, observers worried that various resources were running out. Observers worried about the exhaustion of timber, coal, copper, and iron ore, among other resources. These resource anxieties often spilled over into broad national debates. For example, W. Stanley Jevon's 1859 book, _The Coal Question_, spurred a vigorous debate over the possibility that British coal would be exhausted. In the United States, the 1909 report of the National Conservation Commission and the so-called Paley Commission Report of 1952 illustrate moments when fears of resources running out peaked in the public discourse of the United States. Clearly, fears over resources exhaustion have stalked the modern world over the past two centuries.

Yet historians have paid surprisingly little attention to past worries over resources running out. This is partly due to the fact that the resources in question often did not run out, but rather became overabundant. For example, widespread fears about a looming copper famine in the late nineteenth century gave way to a copper glut by the 1920s. A similar dynamic happened with high-grade iron ore, which was feared to be running out in the United States in the 1940s but could not be sold due to low demand by the 1970s. How can historians make sense out of these past resource anxieties? This paper argues that fears of resource exhaustion, while not imagined, were often used by engineers to promote specific technologies intended to fix the problem. Thus, resource anxieties were part of a widespread use of the technological fix common to modern life. The paper draws on archival research from mineral engineers and recent literature in envirotechnical history.