"Some technologies are truly revolutionary. ... But they take time to reshape the economic systems around us — much more time than you might expect. No discovery fits that description more aptly than electricity, barely comprehended at the beginning of the 19th century but harnessed and commodified by its end.
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Usable light bulbs had appeared in the late 1870s, courtesy of Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan. In 1881, Edison built electricity-generating stations in New York and London and he began selling electricity as a commodity within a year. The first electric motors were used to drive manufacturing machinery a year after that.
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Yet the history of electricity in manufacturing poses a puzzle. Poised to take off in the late 1800s, electricity flopped as a source of mechanical power with almost no impact at all on 19th-century manufacturing. By 1900, electric motors were providing less than 5 per cent of mechanical drive power in American factories. Despite the best efforts of Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, manufacturing was still in the age of steam.
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Productivity finally surged in US manufacturing only in the 1920s. The reason for the 30-year delay? The new electric motors only worked well when everything else changed too. Steam-powered factories had delivered power through awe-inspiring driveshafts, secondary shafts, belts, belt towers, and thousands of drip-oilers. The early efforts to introduce electricity merely replaced the single huge engine with a similarly large electric motor. Results were disappointing.
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As the economic historian Paul David has argued, electricity triumphed only when factories themselves were reconfigured. The driveshafts were replaced by wires, the huge steam engine by dozens of small motors. Factories spread out, there was natural light. Stripped of the driveshafts, the ceilings could be used to support pulleys and cranes. Workers had responsibility for their own machines; they needed better training and better pay. The electric motor was a wonderful invention, once we changed all the everyday details that surrounded it.
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David suggested in 1990 that what was true of electric motors might also prove true of computers: that we had yet to see the full economic benefits because we had yet to work out how to reshape our economy to take advantage of them."
Trechos retirados de "Tim Harford: what we get wrong about technology"
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