This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

It's New York City, 1882. At night, the city is mostly dark, but it won't be for long.

Thomas Edison has already invented the phonograph, the automatic telegraph, and the first commercially

viable light bulb. He really could have stopped right there, but he was still young, only 35 years old.

And then he had the brilliant idea of doing something even more ambitious. He wanted to construct

to design the electrical system that would supply electricity for those bulbs.

That's Philip Shoei. He wrote The Grid. It's a history of how society uses and loses electricity.

The Edison illuminating company built a power station in Lower Manhattan,

right in the shadow of the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge. The first grid was small,

about one square mile, and it worked so well that soon all across the country,

these little self-contained electrical systems started popping up.

In the coming 10 and 20, 30 years, the grid got larger and larger.

As the grid grew, it made modern life possible. It powered electric lights, running water,

sewage pumps, elevators, and air conditioning. But the bigger the grid got, the more complicated it got,

and the more the possibility of failure crept in. Whenever we talk about large,

designed, human-made, complicated, electrified things, it sometimes takes four or five things

together going wrong. But if the system is complicated enough, then the chances of something bad

happening go up. Which brings us to New York City's blackout of 1977. It wasn't the first blackout,

or even the biggest, but it might have been the most infamous. That's producer Delaney Hall.

Oh yeah, this story, it's not about Thomas Edison. Though it begins with the electrical grid,

he started building back in 1882. A grid that got so big, it's been called the most massive

engineering project of the 20th century. This story is about what happens when you disconnect people

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