I feel like the English language is missing a word. What do you call something that is all at once,

an invention, a discovery, and neither of those two things? I'll give you an example. What word

would you use to describe the moment when we started to control fire? We didn't invent fire,

it existed already, and we didn't just discover it,

because we knew it existed. We just didn't command it. But at some point, some unknown human

somewhere turned fire into a tool, and it changed our species forever. Fire allowed us to migrate

into colder, less hospitable

climates, and create artificial heat. Fire allowed us to scare away predators, create light in the dark,

burn clearings, fire allowed us to cook, extracting far more energy from the same food, and

debatably, allowing us to fuel our large brains by allowing our guts to do less work.

Fire allowed us to change the world.

The same can be said about electricity. It existed. We knew about it for a long time without

understanding it at all, and at some point someone figured out how to use it.

Today, the world runs on electricity, and the combinations and

conversions of electricity and fire have completely revolutionized technology. If you took someone from

the 1500s and brought them into our modern era, they would think we were capable of magic.

We can fly. We can send near instantaneous messages across insane distances.

We can make light so bright, fire looks dark.

We can record video and audio, and you can hear my voice right now, even though I'm on the other side of the world and we've never met.

It's debatable who deserves credit for electricity. It's hard to draw a line. Some historians

will argue for the ancient Greeks or the ancient Persians or someone else entirely, but most

people will agree that the significant transition of electricity from

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