This period was the industrial revolution, in this period power-driven machines began to do work people had originally done. For example, in 1784, the first mechanical loom was created.
During the Post-industrial agriculture and modern industrial period the energy consumption increased exponentially. It is so because new methods were formulated to run machines through the energy input which shall ease the work requiring human efforts.
After the industrial revolution, various kind of engines such as steam, diesel and electric engines were developed which required lot of energy for functioning adequately. Since the post industrial phase to till today, every aspects of our life is governed by some form of energy input.
The chemical added to the E. coli made it stop it's full length production of mRNAs but instead short nucleotide transcript because the chemical targeted the elongation rate of the polymerase enzyme.