{"id":13807,"date":"2025-11-22T22:16:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T03:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13807"},"modified":"2025-11-22T22:20:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T03:20:54","slug":"electricity-and-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13807","title":{"rendered":"Electricity and history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this morning, still in bed, I was thinking about how electricity entered people&#8217;s lives in the past century or so.<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I personally knew older people who spent their childhood in a world without electricity.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When electricity finally arrived, it was at first in the form of electric lights.<\/li>\n<li>Not much later, simple machines appeared. Maybe a vacuum cleaner. Maybe a coffee grinder. Something with a simple electric motor and some trivial mechanical construction.<\/li>\n<li>Next came the radio. Suddenly, electricity introduced a whole new dimension: you were never alone anymore. If you had a radio set and a power source, you could listen to the world.<\/li>\n<li>Then there were refrigerators, revolutionizing kitchens. Leftovers were no longer waste or slop for farm animals: they could be consumed a day or two later, kept fresh in the fridge.<\/li>\n<li>Not long after, another miracle began to pop up in homes: television sets.<\/li>\n<li>Sometime along the way, electric stoves, ventilators, and ultimately, air conditioning also appeared in many homes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One could almost construct a timeline along these lines. This is what was on my mind earlier in the morning as I was waking up.<\/p>\n<p>And then, a few hours later, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/photo\/?fbid=1257751183057897&amp;set=a.553781086788247\">a post showed up<\/a> in my feed on Facebook, courtesy of the City of Ottawa Archives, accompanied by an image of some exhibition grounds celebrating World Television Day back in 1955.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/photo\/?fbid=1257751183057897&amp;set=a.553781086788247\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-13808\" src=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"540\" height=\"540\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955.jpg 1080w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-96x96.jpg 96w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-24x24.jpg 24w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-36x36.jpg 36w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-48x48.jpg 48w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ottawa-TV-day-1955-64x64.jpg 64w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 540px) 100vw, 540px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s almost as though Facebook read my mind.<\/p>\n<p>No, I do not believe that they did (otherwise I&#8217;d be busy constructing my first official tinfoil hat) but it is still an uncanny coincidence. I could not have possibly come up with a better illustration to accompany my morning thoughts on this subject.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13807' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this morning, still in bed, I was thinking about how electricity entered people&#8217;s lives in the past century or so. My wife and I personally knew older people who spent their childhood in a world without electricity. When electricity finally arrived, it was at first in the form of electric lights. Not much later, <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13807' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,44,35,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-local-ottawa","category-personal","category-technology","category-25-id","category-44-id","category-35-id","category-12-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13807"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13812,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13807\/revisions\/13812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}