Yeah,

late 19th century.

And one of the reasons...

So it just made sense given the way electricity worked at that time, which was DC power.

I won't go into the weeds on it.

But One of the first great struggles with electricity was trying to figure out how to make it into a monopoly.

Because monopolies were all the rage in the early part of the 20th century, electricity was not a monopoly and could not be made into a monopoly because you can't store it.

Thank you.

Instead, the way most of us interact with electricity is when we get our monthly utility bill.

So you just get this thing in the mail, and it doesn't seem to relate to anything.

It's in some sort of unit that you have no idea what it actually means.

It doesn't seem to matter whatsoever what you turn on and what you turn off.

It's like going to the grocery store for the whole month and then just getting the bill at the end of the month.

Did you buy pomegranates, and were they really expensive? You don't even know, right? You don't know why your electricity bill goes up and down.

So it's illegible in every way.

Let's say you're on a coal system.