JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post 
The satirical sturgeon, the London Punch magazine, took many shots at innivation and invention over the years, mostly within the months and first year or two of the creation of whatever it was they were taking to the humor shed. Electricity was one such area, and there were many poems and cartoons and satirical slings thrown in its path. The "light bulb" as we know it didn't quite exist in 1879 (the year of our cartoon) though the history of electric lighting was already quite long by that point--just not very effective, and certainly not in even limited distribution. (The next big step would be in 1880 with Edison's vast improvement on the lightbulb.) Here's a good example of Punch's take on the electric light's future --and the pallor of fish and fish sellers in the new era of artificial light:
"The Electric Lamps in Billingsgate. They "throw a glare on the fish," and are unfavourable to the complexions of the fish-salesmen, who, under this uncompromising illuminating power, might be detected in blushing for the manoeuvres of the fish-ring, and the extortionate retail prices charged by the fishmongers."--Punch, February 8, 1879 [Source, Victorian London blog, here.]
"INSTEAD of there being the slightest chance that wonders will ever cease, we have strong reasons for thinking that wonders have only just begun. The last new marvel is a Company for lighting our streets, our shops, our houses, and even our bed-candlesticks with electric fluid, so that we may sit, and read or write by flashes of lightning, and go to sleep with a column of electric fluid doing duty for a rushlight in our room. The new lights that have sprung up within the last few years have been extinguishing and snuffing each other out in rapid succession. The first breath of science blew out the dips, which fell prostrate und the wan of discovery, and then came the metallic wicks, offering "metal more attractive" than the cotton, of whose existence ingenuity has at last cut the thread. Chemistry then took the candles in hand and superseded with the composite fashion the once popular "mould of form," until the public, having noted the presence of arsenic, stopped its nostrils and its patronage. The electric light now threatens to supersede all, and considering the universal use now made of electricity, we should not be surprised at the formation of a Company to fix a lightning conductor instead of the ordinary conductor to every omnibus."--Punch, Jul.-Dec. 1848
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