Electricity

Personally, I've always thought of electricity as pretty magical --which is to say that I don't really understand it, as I think I do water and steam. I'm still trying to overcome that liability, in this case in the context of electricity as a transformer of manufacturing and other aspects of daily life. The criterial innovation for electricity-as-power seems to have been the development of the generator, a sort of motor-in-reverse which produces electric current: water or steam (or, for that matter, an internal combustion engine) spins an armature in a magnetic field and generates a voltage, which can then be transported over conductors (copper wire, for example) and cut or boosted via a transformer. It's a bit more complicated: the differences between DC (Direct Current) and AC (Alternating Current) add some additional elements, and the distinction between current and voltage keeps eluding me.

But overlooking what I don't fully command, there are still things we can do with electric power. Here are some tidbits for integration:

It was the electric fan that gave thousands of American city dwellers their first experience with electricity as a source of power. Simple battery-operated fans appeared in the arly 1880s and by 1888 had evolved into the earliest of the electrical household appliances --a fan-and-motor unit that could be plugged into a lighting circuit. [and by 1900, there were 98,577 fans in American homes (census report)](Hunter and Bryant 1991 pg 202)

Electric lighting was the Wonder of Age around 1880...

and here's where we could consider Edison, and the whole question of inventors in technological history

1887-1888 Sprague's Richmond trolley system ==> interurban systems

...which were very important in the spurt of urban growth in the years around the turn of the century.

Westinghouse contract for lighting the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition; and Niagara generating system

...and the story of the evolution of electric power systems and transition to electricity in many industries