In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicts it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature. This attitude is manifest in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1819), which originated the cliché of a mad scientist reviving a patchwork creature with electrical power.
As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light, such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as th ey piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem The Sons of Martha. Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne or the Tom Swift books. The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.
With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing, an event that usually signals disaster. The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb’s song "Wichita Lineman" (1968), are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures
Reference:
- http://en.wikipedia.org
