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Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800-2000. By Christopher J. Castaneda. Twayne's Evolution of Modern Business Series. (New York: Twayne Publishers, c. 1999. Pp. xx, 250. $33.00, ISBN 0-8057-9830-7.)
Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. By Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien. Luther Hartwell Hodges Series on Business, Society, and the State. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xx], 305. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4835-2; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2523-9.)
In the late nineteenth century manufactured gas illuminated streets, stores, and residences in larger U.S. cities, while natural gas remained an unwanted by-product of crude oil production that was allowed to escape into the atmosphere. As electricity began to supplant gas for lighting in the 1880s, gas companies competed for heating and cooking markets. By the end of the 1920s reckless competition, the discovery of massive southwestern natural gas fields, and technological advancements in long-distance pipeline construction led to consolidations and mergers of gas and electric firms into large public utility holding companies. A lengthy Federal Trade Commission investigation and the antibusiness sentiment of the Great Depression years prompted Congress to enact regulatory measures like the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which, as described by Christopher Castaneda in his new book, "mandated [the] abolition of massive public utility holding companies," replacing them with "single, locally managed, integrated systems; it also required utilities to separate their natural gas and electric operations" (pp. 109-- 10).
World War II spurred natural gas demand, and federally financed "war emergency pipelines" for...