The moment of history during which the novel takes place is unlike any other. The advent of electricity changes not only the ways in which people interact with their surrounding world, but the very ways they perceive the world and themselves. The tragedy at the very beginning illustrates this change violently, with a worker graphically electrocuted to death above a busy street in Manhattan. The power of this historic change in human history is not without sacrifice. Nonetheless, the entire structure of society will change beneath this new light, this new power. Workdays will no longer be limited to daylight hours, for instance, and reliance upon a distant power source will dissociate people from the primal immediacy of the candle flame. For the first time, people are witnessing a “new kind of light. […] The men wrote as if they’d discovered a new color. And they had named it Edison” (32).

Additionally, many of the main characters begin to see themselves in a different light: “Paul felt not only that the lights were new, but that he was. A spark of the filament, and he had been revealed as something he never thought he might be” (10).