In many ways it is more correct to say that Samuel Insull, and not Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla or even George Westinghouse, made America’s grid. He normalized and rendered profitable the central stations without which we would have no grid at all, just a bunch of factories, municipal buildings, and homes with little electricity plants in their basements. He imagined electric light and power as products for the masses not the few; he made it seem natural that the electricity business could only work as a monopoly, and he ushered in an era in which one of the most powerful things one could do
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