In 1812 Frederick Winsor, a madcap entrepreneur, invented the general public utility. The thought behind his Gasoline Gentle and Coke firm, which might provide residents of London, was that as a substitute of every family shopping for its personal vitality—baggage of coal, bits of firewood—the stuff could be piped on to them from a central location. Extra clients, with differing patterns of demand, would enable energy vegetation for use extra effectively. It was a pure monopoly: scale would unfold the price of the gasworks, the pipes and so forth throughout massive numbers of shoppers, every spending lower than they’d individually to eat simply as a lot. The thought of “vitality as a service” unfold the world over.