I was rewatching the show Miss Fischer the other day. In the first episode, the maid Dorothy is so scared of this new-fangled electricity that she is terrified to pick up the telephone.
- Miss Fischer
- But don’t they [vacuum cleaners, washing machines] save you labor?
- Dorothy
- Yes, but at what cost, miss? My priest says it’s unnatural putting electricity through wires. Sooner or later, it will come in contact with the molten center of the earth and will blow up the whole world.
Dorothy is right about one thing. Electricity is dangerous. But it’s not dangerous in that way. It’s dangerous in much more mundane ways, ways that can be mitigated with boring things like codes, inspections, and licensing bureaus.
I can imagine a tweet from 1890:
I resigned from Westinghouse Electric Company today. I spent the last three years researching alternating current at both Thomas-Houston and Westinghouse. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to high-voltage arc lighting and gambling with our lives.
And…yeah. High-voltage overhead AC lines did kill people in New York. We had to figure out how to make them not do that, with policy choices and oversight. (Hopefully we can still do that kind of thing.)