Henry Adams (1838-1918) was a historian and a member of the Adams family, which produced two presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. He appears to be the first professional historian to correlate historical periods in terms of the use of energy, and his work led him to outline a new law of human progress, which he called the “law of acceleration.”
His articulation of this law in his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams is unique (1904). The contemporary philosopher Eric Steinhart writes that Adams’ original text, written in an exaggerated version of the language and style of his time, is “almost completely unreadable in 2011” (1904b). Steinhart provides an edited and paraphrased version for contemporary readers. Nevertheless, The Education of Henry Adams ranked first on the Modern Library‘s 1998 list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books and was named the best book of the 20th century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that promotes classical education. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
With his law of acceleration, Adams argues that the progress of human societies represents a form of accelerating movement, and, as outlined in Newton’s first law of motion, this acceleration will continue unless it is acted upon by some other force. To illustrate this acceleration, Adams describes the growth of the coal-output in the 19th century: “The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in 1840” (1904; Martinez-Alier, 1987, p. 118). He suggests “the ratio of increase in the volume of coal-power may serve as dynamometer” (1904b, p. 2). In his life, he had “seen the coal-output of the United States grow from nothing to three hundred million tons or more” (1904b, p. 4). His law of acceleration describes this growth accelerating in a manner that is consistent with the maximum power principle.
Adams develops his view further in “A Rule of Phase Applied to History,” in Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919). There, he argues that the law of acceleration leads humanity through a process of development that increases the power of production and entails four phases that are each characterized by a different relation between technology and humanity—the religious, mechanical, electrical, and ethereal. Each phase becomes increasingly shorter: a 90,000 year religious phase; 300 year mechanical phase; 17 year electrical phase; 4 year ethereal phase. Adams speculated that a simple “law of squares,” much like Newton’s inverse square law, could determine the length of each new phase.
One can and should question the accuracy of Adams’ speculations. He did not devote a great deal of time to compiling empirical evidence to support his views or even to clearly articulating them. Stanley Jevons had given empirical data and projections of exponential growth (and its limits) for coal in England in 1856 in “The coal question.” However, Adams’ general idea that the phases of development will have decreasing lengths appears to be prescient. For example, consider the evolution of the modes of production in human history: we have evidence that humans existed as hunters and gatherers for approximately at least 1.8 million years; we used agriculture and the domestication of animals for 10,000-12,000 years; the first industrial revolution lasted approximately 110 years (it began in 1760 and the second industrial revolution began 1870); the second lasted approximately 77 years (the third industrial revolution began in 1947). The decreasing length of these phases provides compelling evidence that the rate of change is accelerating. Now we can see Adams’ law of acceleration as just scratching the surface of “The Great Acceleration” described by Will Steffen and his team in their article “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene” (Steffen et al., 2015).
Adams, H. 1904. A law of acceleration. In H. Adams (1919) The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Houghton Mifflin, ch. 34.
Adams, H. 1904b. A law of acceleration. Edited by Eric Steinhart. From H. Adams (1919) The Education of Henry Adams. New York: Houghton Mifflin, ch. 34. https://ericsteinhart.com/progress/adams-accelerate.pdf
Adams, H. 1919. The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., Ludwig, C., 2015. The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2(1) 81-98.