Electricity has been in homes just a little over a hundred years, it's birth was around the same as aviation and look how much aviation has advanced. Electricity has come a long way from it's humble beginning's in New York at Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station. The Pearl Street Station plant was opened in 1882, and supplied power to about 80 people in lower Manhattan. This plant could supply a limited amount of power to homes for lighting in about a one square mile radios. The Plants limitations was mainly due to the fact it produced DC current (Direct Current). The big change came with the invention of AC current (alternating current). In 1895 George Westinghouse opened the first AC producing power plant in Niagara Falls. Since this plant was producing AC current it could deliver power to homes two hundred miles away.
The popularity of Electricity grew slowly, many people were afraid of bringing electricity in to their homes. Many critics said that electricity would never catch on. How funny, they said the same thing about Aviation. In the early 1920's almost forty years after electricity had been introduced, only two percent of the energy produced in the US was for electricity. The demand for power increased much faster after the 1940's, now over forty percent of the energy produced in the US is used for electricity and that number is still climbing.
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