People had to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity
Lightbulbs powered by electricity were a convincing app, and so was the electricity-powered washing machine and similar labor-saving appliances:<p><a href="https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce" rel="nofollow">https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...</a><p>Notably, electrification of rural areas lagged well behind that of cities and towns until the Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935:<p><a href="https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-electrification-act/" rel="nofollow">https://livingnewdeal.org/a-light-went-on-new-deal-rural-ele...</a><p>> "The REA continued into the postwar era and helped the percentage of electrified farms in the United States rise from 11 percent [1935] to almost 97 percent by 1960.  The New Deal had helped rural America achieve near-total electrification."<p>This is comparable to the situation with high-speed internet in the US at present:<p>> "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a New Deal agency established in 1934, estimates that today a quarter of rural Americans and a third on tribal lands do not have access to broadband internet, defined as download speeds of at least 25 megabytes a second. Fewer than 2 percent of urban dwellers have this same problem."<p>This is what you get if you privatize and deregulate basic infrastructure services: huge holes in coverage and overpriced monopolistic control of the rest of it.