She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up

From The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr.

All historical models and analogies have their limits, of course, and information technology differs from electricity in many important ways. But beneath the technical differences, electricity and computing share deep similarities - similarities that are easy for us to overlook today. We see electricity as a "simple" utility, a standardized and unremarkable current that comes safely and predictably through outlets in our walls. The innumerable applications of electric power, from televisions and washing machines to machine tools and assembly lines, have become so commonplace that we no longer consider them to be elements of the underlying technology - they've take on separate, familiar lives of their own.

It wasn't always so. When electrification began, it was an untamed and unpredictable force that changed everything it touched. Its applications were as much a part of the technology as the dynamos, the power lines, and the current itself. As with today's computer systems, all companies had to figure out how to apply electricity to their own businesses, often making sweeping changes to their organizations and their processes. As the technology advanced, they had to struggle with old and often incompatible equipment - the "legacy systems," to use a modern computer term, that can lock businesses into the past and impede progress - and they had to adapt to customers' changing needs and expectations. Electrification, just like computerization, led to complex, far-reaching, and often bewildering changes for individual companies and entire industries - and, as households began to connect to the grid, for all of society.

I recall James Thurber having a humorous short story of the antics of his mother and grandmother (the story occurring in the early part of the 20th century) with a mortal fear of electricity leaking from empty light sockets and the hazard it posed to the occupants of the home. In fact it is from My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber. I heartily recommend the book. The passage is from the end of Chapter Three. I see that the fear extended beyond electricity and reflects the massive changes occurring in the technological environment of the time.

My mother, for instance, thought--or, rather, knew--that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. "Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!" she would say to us when we started off. Gasoline, oil, and water were much the same to her, a fact that made her life both confusing and perilous. Her greatest dread, however, was the Victrola--we had a very early one, back in the "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" days. She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison's dangerous experiments. The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it hang. She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.