When the utilities ignored these studies their true attitude became clear: not that rural electric service could not be profitable, but that it would not be as profitable as urban service. Or as surefire. Waiting two or three years for usage to build up was what industry called a “capital risk”; why take a risk for a profit when there existed, in the urban market, profit without risk? “It hardly seems fair that the farm wife had to wait for electricity so much longer than her counterpart in the city for she needed electricity much more,” an historian was to write. But fairness—or social
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