"I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it."

This was the response of Michael Farady to Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister of England you asked what possible use elctromagnetic induction might have.

And you thought this page was going to get away from politics.

In his science-fiction novel, The Rolling Stones, Robert A. Heinlein comments: Every technology goes through three stages: first a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final proper design therefrom.