In 1812 Frederick Winsor, a madcap entrepreneur, invented the general public utility. The thought behind his Fuel Gentle and Coke firm, which might provide residents of London, was that as a substitute of every family shopping for its personal vitality—luggage of coal, bits of firewood—the stuff can be piped on to them from a central location. Extra clients, with differing patterns of demand, would permit 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 giant numbers of consumers, every spending lower than they might individually to eat simply as a lot. The thought of “vitality as a service” unfold internationally.
