We’ve been able to produce electricity using electromagnetic forces since Michael Faraday’s experiments in the 1830s and to produce it chemically, using something like a battery, since Alessandro Volta invented the electrochemical pile in 1800. Despite an intense interest in electricity and the machines one might devise to make it, it remained unclear well into the 1860s what electricity might be good for. Such that by 1870 though we could produce electricity and control it, we had nothing to do with it.
