Electricity is a bit over 100 years old, about the same age as Station Jim, in the grand scheme of things.
We started with electric lights and the telegraph.
Next came fractional horsepower motors. This is one.
Before electricity and factories, horsepower looked like, well, horses and factories.
But then small motors like this came along. Motors that didn't drive whole factories, but cleverly miniaturised to drive single appliances. And with electrification - electricity to the home - and that was in around 1915, along came washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners... a Cambrian Explosion of all kinds of appliances.
By 1920, there were a HALF MILLION fractional horsepower motors powering small appliances in the United States.
The lesson I take from this is that you can make things world-changing by making them less powerful.
Matt Webb, Web Directions South 2014 (Sydney, Australia), October 2014