Power and Prediction

1 A Parable of Three Entrepreneurs

Electricity changed our society. It changed the way we live, providing inexpensive and safe light with the flick of a switch and reducing the burden of housework through consumer goods like refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. It also changed the way we work, powering factories and elevators. What did it take to do all of this? Time.

The ubiquity of electricity makes it difficult to imagine that, at the turn of the twentieth century, two decades after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it was pretty much nowhere. In 1879, Edison famously demonstrated the electric light bulb and, just a few years later, turned on Pearl Street Station in Manhattan and lit the streets. Yet twenty years ...