50 years ago, alternative energy was the hot thing to be working on.

So, what happened?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

As you have heard and probably experienced, the price of oil has gone up significantly since late February when the U.S. attacked Iran.

When oil has a crazy kind of rise, it makes other sources of energy look more attractive.

We've had these inflection points before in U.S. history.

Back in the 1970s, oil prices skyrocketed.

So people started to innovate.

People were trying everything they could.

Cyrus Modi studies the history of science, technology, and innovation at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

They were putting money into wind, solar, regular nuclear fission, biofuels, fuel cells,

kind of you name it.

Modi says there was lots of research being done by oil companies, but also any company that

could try to gin up some energy using whatever it had,

went for it.

So aerospace companies were getting into it.

So Grumman, for instance, got into wind power.

Some of the satellite companies got into solar power because they already had some

expertise in that.

Modi says even the potato brand, or Ida, maker of tater tots,

was trying to figure out how it could get into geothermal energy,

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