A Letter to Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 O.S. January 6, 1705 – – April 17, 1790)
Dear Ben,
In 1776, electricity was still a parlor trick wearing the costume of a scientific mystery.
You chased lightning with a kite and a key, which, in retrospect, feels exactly like the sort of thing humanity should not reward with historical immortality…and yet here we are.
To the colonial world, electricity was fascinating but largely impractical. A curious force. A spectacle. The sort of thing gentlemen philosophers discussed enthusiastically in candlelit rooms while everyone else returned home to chop wood, haul water, and pray the winter stores lasted until spring.
No homes glowed with electric light.
No factories hummed with motors.
No refrigerators quietly preserved food through summer heat.
No electrical grid stitched cities together with invisible currents.
In 1776, America ran almost entirely on muscle, fire, wind, and wood.
Human labor.
Animal labor.
Burning things.
That was the energy economy of the Revolution.
A horse, Ben, was more useful than all the electrical experiments in the colonies combined.
A strong back mattered more than voltage.
Heat came from fireplaces.
Light came from candles and oil lamps.
Transportation depended on sails, legs, and livestock.
The night itself remained dark in a way modern humans can scarcely comprehend anymore.
Darkness was not ambiance. It was geography.
And yet beneath that darkness, something extraordinary was quietly gathering.
You and your fellow experimenters glimpsed it first:
the possibility that lightning itself obeyed laws.
That nature contained hidden systems waiting to be understood rather than merely feared.
Your lightning rods alone represented a revolutionary leap.
Humanity had spent centuries viewing storms as divine fury or cosmic chaos. Then suddenly this eccentric printer from Philadelphia wandered onto rooftops essentially declaring, “Actually, perhaps we can negotiate with the sky.”
An audacious species, these humans.
Still, electricity remained mostly theoretical until the 19th century transformed curiosity into infrastructure. That was when America truly began bottling lightning.
The change arrived first through illumination.
City streets once lit by gas lamps and moonlight flickered alive with arc lighting in the late 1800s.
Then came Thomas Edison and the incandescent bulb,
followed by the Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882,
one of the first centralized power plants.
Electricity shifted from scientific marvel into commercial reality almost overnight.
And naturally, humans immediately turned it into a corporate knife fight.
Thus emerged the “War of the Currents,” one of history’s most gloriously dramatic engineering feuds.
Edison championed Direct Current (DC).
George Westinghouse backed Alternating Current (AC).
There were public demonstrations,
propaganda campaigns,
electrocutions of animals,
competing infrastructure visions,
and enough ego to power several small cities independently.
Eventually AC won because physics can be annoyingly decisive.
By the late 19th century, electricity had begun reshaping urban life itself.
Elevators enabled skyscrapers.
Electric trolleys transformed transportation.
Factories extended working hours beyond sunset.
Homes of the wealthy acquired electric lighting as status symbols, though many Americans still regarded the technology with understandable suspicion.
Imagine explaining invisible energy moving through wires to someone whose daily reality involved candles and horse manure.
The 20th century, however, was where electricity truly conquered America.
By 1900, electrification remained mostly urban luxury.
By 1960, it had become nearly universal necessity.
The transformation was astonishingly fast.
Refrigerators replaced iceboxes.
Washing machines devoured hours of domestic labor.
Radios connected households to national culture.
Air conditioning altered migration patterns and made entire regions more habitable.
Electric pumps delivered water effortlessly.
Farms modernized.
Factories accelerated.
Nightlife expanded.
Cities glowed.
Electricity did not merely power America.
It rewired civilization itself.
Perhaps nowhere was this more transformative than rural electrification during the New Deal.
Before the 1930s, much of rural America still lived by kerosene lamps and manual labor while cities surged ahead electrically. The Rural Electrification Act changed that, extending power lines across vast landscapes through cooperatives and public investment.
And suddenly, darkness retreated.
That may sound poetic, but it was also literal.
Electricity extended waking hours, reduced physical drudgery, preserved food, improved sanitation, expanded communication, and radically altered household labor, especially for women.
Entire rhythms of life changed once humans no longer depended entirely upon daylight and firewood.
Civilization became electrically fluent.
Now charge-forward to 2026, Ben, and electricity has become something so omnipresent that modern Americans barely notice it until it disappears for seven horrifying minutes and everyone begins checking routers like medieval peasants praying for rain.
Flip a switch. Light.
Charge a phone. Power.
Open a refrigerator. Cold.
Humanity now depends upon electrical systems so deeply that even brief outages can paralyze commerce, communication, transportation, healthcare, finance, and social stability itself. Electricity became the bloodstream of modern civilization.
And now the bloodstream is under strain.
The 21st century has launched another energy transformation, this time away from centralized fossil-fuel dominance toward a sprawling, decentralized network of renewables, batteries, smart grids, and digital infrastructure.
Coal declines.
Natural gas rose sharply.
Solar and wind exploded across landscapes.
Rooftop panels appeared in suburbs.
Electric vehicles entered garages.
Battery storage became essential.
The grid itself is evolving from a one-way delivery system into a complex web where homes can both consume and generate power simultaneously.
Beautiful in theory.
Complicated in practice.
Because modern electricity faces a new and ravenous appetite: artificial intelligence.
The irony would delight you, Ben. Humanity spent centuries learning how to generate immense electrical power…only to create machines requiring astonishing amounts of it simply to answer questions, generate images, stream videos, and teach people how to cook air-fryer salmon.
The age of AI has become the age of data centers.
And these data centers are hungry.
A single modern AI facility can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes. Some larger campuses require twenty times that amount.
Across America, electrical demand is now surging at rates unseen in decades largely because artificial intelligence, cloud computing, crypto infrastructure, and digital services consume extraordinary power continuously.
The internet, it turns out, is not weightless.
It has a heartbeat. A temperature. A carbon footprint.
By 2030, data centers may consume as much as 17% of all electricity generated in the United States.
Utilities are scrambling.
Infrastructure strains beneath rising demand.
Electrical grids built for older eras suddenly confront a future arriving much faster than anticipated.
Transmission lines need modernization.
Battery storage needs expansion.
Renewable integration remains uneven.
Costs rise.
Regulators panic politely in committee hearings.
And somewhere, deep inside massive warehouses humming with servers, millions of invisible calculations pulse through the dark like synthetic lightning.
Your kite experiment evolved into this.
…Remarkable trajectory, honestly.
Yet amid all the complexity, one truth remains constant across 250 years: electricity has always represented possibility.
It illuminated homes, powered hospitals, expanded education, modernized labor, connected continents, and accelerated nearly every technological leap of the modern age.
But like all transformative powers, it demands stewardship.
The question facing 2026 is not whether humanity can generate enough electricity.
It is whether civilization can do so sustainably, equitably, reliably, and wisely while feeding an increasingly digital world.
Ben, if you could witness modern America glowing from orbit at night, you would probably stand speechless for once in your life.
Entire coastlines illuminated.
Cities pulsing like constellations.
Invisible currents threading beneath streets, across mountains, through oceans, and into tiny handheld devices carrying more computational power than entire governments once possessed.
You chased lightning.
We built civilization around it.
With admiration, concern, and one very nervous electrical grid operator,
—The Radical Left 🪁🖤
And dear reader, perhaps this is the question electricity now asks of us: what happens when our hunger for power, digital, economic, computational, becomes limitless?
Can technological progress continue without overwhelming the very systems supporting it?
And as AI transforms society, should electricity itself now be considered not merely a utility, but a defining political and moral challenge of the century ahead?
Because after 250 years, humanity is still doing what Ben Franklin first dared to imagine:
Trying to capture the storm without becoming consumed by it.