Rates of adoption of electrical, media and ICT technology in the USA.

The graph is interesting. It suggests that it took 46 years after the introduction of electric lights in the 1870s for one-quarter of the American population to be wired, but only seven years for one quarter of the population to sign up for the World Wide Web after it was introduced a little more than two decades ago.

Of course, to hook up to the web via the existing telephone system using the existing computer infrastructure was perhaps easier than building the electrical network out to the population.