controlled it. Touch it, and you die.

Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.

But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.