I know what the time was because my wife and I were settling down in our family room to watch the evening news when the television screen went blank and the house was plunged into an eerie silence. It wasn’t simply that there was no sound coming from the television set. The whole house had been muted and the background noise you don’t really hear until it’s not there – the hum of the refrigerator, the reassuring whisper of the forced air circulating from the basement furnace – was gone.

"It will probably be back on in a few minutes," I told my wife.

But it wasn’t and as the minutes became an hour I was glad that I had had the foresight to prepare for such an emergency by buying a battery-powered camp light and a battery-operated radio.

As we found out later, a car had crashed into a telephone pole, snapped it in two and caused a transformer to blow out. Frankly, I can’t understand why, in this modern age, we haven’t got rid of those poles and put our wires underground and out of harm’s way. But that’s a complaint for another day. That night, as the house grew colder and we waited for the lights to come back on, our thoughts turned to what it must have been like in those days before electricity.

Actually that wasn’t so long ago. It was only 125 years ago that the Edison Electricity Co. strung its first wires to its initial 59 customers in New York City. By 1935, when I was 13 years old, 90 percent of all urban dwellers and most people who lived in the nearby suburbs such as Bergen County had electricity in their homes, but only 10 percent of homes in rural America were electrified. In fact, my wife, who grew up in a small Wisconsin town, had relatives who lived on farms and were still beyond the reach of electrical wires until shortly before the beginning of World War II. It was too expensive, the utility companies originally argued, to string wires to isolated farmhouses and besides, they added, the farmers were too poor to pay for it anyway.

While I don’t personally remember ever being without electricity, I assume even the tenement in which I was born in New York City in 1922 had electric lights, I do recall the days when electricity was used to only light the house. The coal furnace produced steam heat that rose to the radiators without the aid of an electrical fan or thermostat to control the temperature; an ice box stood in the kitchen dripping water into a pan beneath it, and the gas stove was ignited with a match. Mom washed the clothes by hand in a basement tub. My sister and I took turns washing and drying the dishes in the kitchen sink.

It wasn’t that electrical appliances hadn’t been invented. The first electric toaster was patented in 1905. Refrigerators began to appear in the 1920s. Bendix introduced its first automatic washing machine in 1937. By the time of the World’s Fair in 1938 one of the most popular features was an exhibit in which "Mrs. Drudge," who had to do her chores by hand, competed against "Mrs. Modern," whose kitchen had all the latest electrical appliances. Mrs. Modern won, of course, but the problem was that in the 1930s the Great Depression still held the nation in its grip and Mrs. Modern’s appliances were a luxury that most people couldn’t afford.

Then in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and it wasn’t until the mid-1940s, when World War II ended, that electrical appliances – everything from refrigerators and washing machines to blenders and waffle makers – began to flood the market. Ask your own grandparents. Today, of course, we take them for granted. That is until somebody pulls the plug.