Electricity
It is simply not possible to imagine the modern world without electricity. Most people spend the majority of the day interacting with it in some way. It is so central to our lives that virtually everything a person owns today was either manufactured with electricity or uses electricity to function. That is why it is hard to believe that human reliance on electricity began less than two centuries ago.
In the 1830s a multitude of experiments with electricity led to the first electric motors strong enough to actually perform work. By the 1830s, an electric motor was used to carry more than dozen people across a river in Prussia. Roughly during the same time in the United States, similar motors were used to run printing presses and operate machine tools. But these early motors, though impressive, were too expensive to be commercially successful. They were still mostly just curiosities. While it took decades of experimentation, eventually factories were equipped with powerful electric motors and the first electrified trolleys were put into service by the late 1880’s. By the 1890s, modern subways and elevated trains functioned in large cities in America and Europe.
Access to powerful engines and reliable transportation that did not emit noxious fumes in itself was major breakthrough for society. But the seemingly miraculous benefits of electricity did not end there. Electricity also made artificial light possible for the first time in human history. Before electricity, only natural forms of light such as the sun or fire illuminated the world.
Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison was not the inventor of the light bulb. Russian and Canadian inventors succeeded in creating light bulbs a few years prior. However, Edison’s incandescent light bulb, patented in 1879, was the first of its type to be adequately inexpensive and sufficiently long-lasting to be useful, though his power plants could only supply electrical current for roughly a mile, which limited the light bulb’s usefulness. This changed in the 1890s, when development of alternating current (AC) transformed electricity into the modern marvel we know today, able to electrify entire cities miles away from a power source, helping to make the world safer, more comfortable, and recognizably modern.