Additionally, do we have documents on the public perception of electricity?

You probably remember the rollout of broadband internet service in the 1990s; home electricity service grew along similar lines, with houses and factories connecting as the service became available in their area, and as they could afford to install wiring and subscribe to the service.

The first electric generating stations were small, and provided light and power for a small area right around the generation facility. Because Edison’s direct-current technology lost a lot of power with distance, the industry remained small and focused on individual factories or groups of houses, and on street lighting. But by 1900, the superiority of Westinghouse’s alternating-current technology had been widely demonstrated, and small generating stations began to be built even in suburbs and outlying districts of cities. A 1904 map of Chicago’s electrical facilities shows two generating stations, and about 20 substations that received high-voltage power and then distributed it at lower voltages to nearby areas. All but two facilities are within three miles of the Loop business district. Some 17,000 customers were connected to the system at that time.

Suburbs and smaller cities began to get service as well, typically jump-started by a long-term contract to power municipal streetlights and/or streetcar lines. The previous generation’s experience with monopolistic behavior and price-fixing by gas lighting companies and street railways had been one of the factors leading to the Progressive Era, and as a result it was not uncommon for municipalities to decide to create their own electric utilities, especially when the water power generating the electricity was controlled or constructed by government. Many survive to the present day: Los Angeles and Austin are probably the largest.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Chicago’s Samuel Insull and other entrepreneurs saw the promise of the industry, and the economies of scale that could result from consolidating (as in New York’s Consolidated Edison) the small companies, building huge generating works, and encouraging home electrification and appliance use in a cycle that led to lower rates and even more electrification. Harold Platt’s book Electric City tells the story of Insull and Chicago electrification.

Providing electricity to any home desiring it in a dense city was pretty obviously a moneymaker for the utilities, but the calculation changed in areas of lower density. Typically municipalities would require universal service as a condition of allowing the wires to be strung over streets and alleys, but rural areas couldn’t count on that. Farms sometimes had small generators of their own, but mostly went unserved until the New Deal Rural Electrification Administration made low-cost loans to rural electric cooperatives, allowing wires to be strung across the rural landscape.

A comprehensive overview of the era is in David Nye’s book Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology.