We don’t often think of what it takes to power our modern world. We will turn our lights on and off, we will research tips for hiring the right electrician, we will do our best to make sure our light installation goes the right way but we won’t think of how we ended up where we are now. In some ways, this makes sense. Everyone is busy and there are few people who have time to question how we got to where we are now. History is a tiring business, after all and, at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much use in studying something that seems so essential to society. But, in reality, there can be nothing more useful. Understanding where we came from is a great way to see road signs to where we are headed and there’s nothing more valuable than a potential glimpse into the future. It can even help with the comparatively simple task of researching those tips for hiring the right electrician. It all depends on how you look at it. So how did we get where we are now? What created the electrical world we live in now?
Illustrating the world as it was before
Those of us who live in modern society with our electrical contractors and our electrical services can hardly imagine the world as it was before. This is understandable, but to truly understand why we’ve got the electrical world we’ve got now, to truly understand the world that has allowed us to research those tips for hiring the right electricians and basically have the entire internet, we need to understand and know the world as it was before all of that. We can’t experience it directly of course but we can look back at history to get an accurate picture of what our ancestors lived through and what we might live through if we don’t take good care of our society. Let’s head back centuries. Any century before around the eighteenth century will do. For clarity’s sake, let’s go back to the Renaissance as a good example. A place about far away from our modern, flowing world as you might be able to get. What were nights like in a typical Venetian Renaissance city? How were they different the nights we have now? Well, despite the lanterns and bright colors, they were dark. More than anything they were dark. Once the sun went down, that was it. You had the scant light provided to you by the city and nothing else.
The way the world changed
Really, you could say this about any city or town in history before the end of the eighteenth century. The invention and implementation of electricity in social systems is such a huge invention it’s hard to overstate. In fact, it might be one of the most important, if not the most important, invention in human history outside of the printing press and the modern flush toilet. Power, sanitation and the spread of information allowed our world to flourish whereas before we merely survived. It was electricity that allowed us to have factories, cities, cars, and eventually the internet where we could look up those tips for hiring the right electrician. In a scant few decades after the invention of electricity, the entire world looked different.
So where do we go from here
The question of the future of power is an interesting and exciting one but it doesn’t have much of a clear answer yet. We get all of our electricity today from fossil fuels or most of it, anyway. This has helped power our world but it’s also contributed to the degradation of the environment. It threw the world into a spiraling forward motion but, as of yet, it’s still relatively uncontrolled. Green energy is, of course, one of the most promising answers but it still remains in a vague state. We don’t know which green energies will have the most payoff and more money needs to be invested within them to make them more and more viable. But, with enough effort, patience and time, the dream of powering the world cleanly will come true.