d a theory of electricity appear that was sufficiently robust to serve as a guide for subsequent analysis and experimentation.
By the early twentieth century, in contrast, the major issues related to electricity--both theoretical, in explaining electrical phenomena, and practical, in developing electric devices for power transmission and application, communication, and so forth--had largely been solved. The period from about 1750 to 1925 was thus the age in which electricity came to be seriously studied, understood, and harnessed.
It was also a period in which the conditions of everyday life were changed more radically than they had been in the previous several thousand years--and more, in spite of the popular belief in continual progress, than they have changed in the two generations since. Moreover, much of this social change was concentrated in the few decades just before and after the turn of the twentieth century--in precisely the period, that is to say, that the knowledge of electrical phenomena was maturing, and giving rise to a broad range of electrical application.
This essay examines the history of the development of electricity, in theory and in practice, from the time of Benjamin Franklin through the first quarter of the twentieth century. Both the development of electrical theory and that of electrical applications well be considered. Indeed, we will find a complex interrelationship between the two. At each stage in the development of electrical theory, a major brake upon further progress was the limitation in the available means of providing an electrical potential or current, while progress in the development of applications (including the provision of electrical supply for further experimentation) was limited by the prevailing state of knowledge.
The primary emphasis of this study, however, is not on theoretical and practical developments in electricity per se, but rather on the social and psycholo...