At the start of the twentieth century, electrification in the United States was limited mainly to large urban areas.[72] The pace of electrification slowed around the start of the Great Depression, but during the 1930s and 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt championed massive rural electrification programs, which aimed to bring the efficiency of electric machinery to America’s agricultural heartland.[73] By 1951 more than 95 percent of American homes had electricity, and by 1956 the national electrification effort was regarded as essentially complete.[74] In other parts of the world,
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