By Jesse Berst

We are reinventing electricity -- how we make it, how we use it, how we deliver it. The

Perhaps the best way to understand the impact of this second revolution is to examine the first one.

Life before electricity 1.0

Try to imagine life before Electricity 1.0. It was dark, dirty, disconnected and full of drudgery and pain.

It was dark without the electric lights that make our evenings so enjoyable now. For most of the people on the planet, nighttime was illuminated only by candles or oil lamps. (Richer people sometimes had kerosene or gas lamps.) Reading at night required huddling by a flame. Moving from room to room required slow careful steps while shielding the candle or lamp.

 Life was unhygienic without the electric water pumps that make indoor plumbing easier to accomplish. It was full of drudgery without the washing machines and dryers and dishwashers we employ today. It was disconnected, as well, without the telegraph and telephone that electricity 1.0 made practical. And full of pain too, without the high-speed drills that make dentistry more palatable, not to mention the laser scalpels and robotic arms that are increasingly employed today.

Middle-class Americans in the mid-1800s -- just prior to Electricity 1.0 -- lived much like middle-class Romans at the time of Christ. They used much the same technology -- candles, lamps, horses. Leisure time belonged only to those with servants or slaves.

The day the world changed

And then the world changed, at 3 p.m. on September 4, 1882. That's when Thomas Edison flicked a switch in lower Manhattan and illuminated 106 lamps in the Wall Street offices of J.P. Morgan. Morgan saw the light, and had Edison install electricity in his new Madison Avenue mansion. (And then, after several years of funding Edison’s innovation, the tycoon snatched the inventor’s company away and merged it with another entity to form General Electric. Morgan at this point controlled three-fourths of the nation’s fledgling electricity business. Edison, for his part, received a mere $750,000 for his efforts.)

Edison's invention (pun intended) electrified the world. Within two decades, it had spread to public buildings around the world and into many homes. Electricity brought about the greatest lifestyle transformation in the history of the world. Within a few decades, the well-to-do were living in conditions far superior to the nobility of old. Within a few decades more, that comfortable lifestyle had spread to the middle class.