It was about 6:30 in the evening when the electricity went off, just beginning to get dark enough to turn on a few lights.

I know the time because my wife and I were settling down in our family room to watch the evening news with Brian Williams when the TV 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 at least buying a battery powered Coleman camp light and a battery operated radio so we could sit there in a dimly lit room and listen to the only station I was able to tune in, a station that provided no information as to why we were without electricity or any clue as to when we might expect it back.

As we found out later, a car had crashed into a telephone pole, snapped the pole 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. Oh, electricity has been around for a long time as even Ben Franklin knew but it was only 125 years ago that the Edison Electricity Company 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 the house we had moved to in Bergenfield in 1925 used electricity for little more than lighting. 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, the gas stove was ignited with a match, mom made toast by placing the bread in a wire contraption over an open flame and heated her iron on a hot plate. She washed the clothes by hand in a basement tub and 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 and by the time of the New York World Fair in 1938 – an event I remember attending as a high school student – one of the most popular features was a Westinghouse 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. As I said, not really that long ago. Ask your own grandparents. Today, of course, we take them for granted. That is until somebody pulls the plug.