Technological innovation, industrial production and its commercial application has never been a unidirectional process.In this lecture we will be looking at the electric street car in late nineteenth century AmericaThe diffusion of electric streetcar was rapid but it was not without opposition. In America’s largest cities, urban residents waged a brief but vigorous campaign against the most common form of the electric streetcar, the trolley powered by overhead electric wires.

What was striking about the electric streetcar was that perhaps no other modern innovation has diffused as rapidly as the electrical streetcar.

• Between 1888 and 1898, Americans mechanized urban street transportation, converting thousands of miles of horse-drawn street railroads to the new electric trolleys.   
   
• Dissemination of technological innovation is not a simple, straight forward process. For example, electric lighting faced determined competition from gas and reached only a minority or urban homes well into the twentieth century.