“Edison’s task in inventing and establishing the first electric lighting plant in New York in September, 1882, was immense. It involved not only the construction of absolutely new forms of machinery and apparatus, but it also involved the problems of laying the necessary wires, of originating methods and apparatus for regulating and subdividing the current, and inducing people to agree to the installment of the little-tested invention, and of answering a thousand questions never faced before. The immensity of this burden cannot be grasped today when a generation of experience and familiarity with electric lighting has led us to accept everything pertaining to it as a matter of course. At the end of 1882, only 225 buildings in New York had been wired, including the offices of J. P. Morgan, who became one of Edison’s admirers and supporters. For three months the current was supplied free to those brave enough to allow their places to be threaded with the mysterious wires which, it was feared, might start fires or cause explosions at any moment.”
B.C. Forbes, Thomas Edison, Of America [Pensacola: A Beka Book] page 36
Just as electric lighting was a radically new concept in the late 1800’s, aging as a curable vitamin deficiency disease is a radically new concept today. The Anti-Aging Vitamins face a difficult path to public acceptance, as did many discoveries and inventions of the past. Today, nearly 140 years after Edison first began to install electric lighting in New York, none of us can imagine living life without electric lighting. It is hard for us to grasp the reluctancy of that generation to embrace that new concept. May we learn from history, and not repeat it.
