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

It's New York City, 1882.

At night, this 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 Shoey. 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 works 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.

...