Electricity wasn’t always the mundane, ho-hum, flip-the-light-switch power that we go searching coffee shop walls for. It once held great mystery and excitement, at least for the geeks of the mid-19th century, like Clifford Pyncheon, a bed-ridden felon with an interest in metaphysics, in the passage below. After all, electricity had been associated with lightning and lightning was no good for anybody. This substance you couldn’t see and that you could only detect by the raising of the hair could make a dead frog’s legs jump as if it were alive (“It’s ALIVE!”).

In this passage, we see that old view of electricity — the demon, the angel — with the later, functional view of electricity. Clifford screams passionately! The old man just talks about the application, the telegraph, and its impacts on the social world of the day.

“Then there is electricity — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain instinct with intelligence! Or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

“If you mean the telegraph,” said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, “it is an excellent thing — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don’t get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers.”

The Pyncheon family, by way of making them more interesting to you, were real, and kin to  Thomas Pynchon, the master of the paranoid tech novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables,