The order Gymn, of which the best realized example is the electric eel, recognize or paralyze their prey via high voltages generated from altered muscle cells called electrocutes. All animals transmit information along their phone membranes with voltage heartbeats called action potentials, whose capacities incorporate communication by the sensory system among neurons and muscles. In the 19th and early twentieth century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many individuals, even in the industrialized Western world.
The popular culture of the time accordingly often portrayed it as a strange, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, resuscitate the dead or otherwise twist the laws of nature. A few organisms, for example, sharks, are able to identify and react to changes in electric fields, an ability known as electrocution, while others, named electronic, are able to generate voltages themselves to fill in as a predatory or cautious weapon. An electric stun stimulates this framework, and causes muscles to contract.
Action potentials are also in charge of coordinating activities in certain plants. As the open familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution developed, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light, for example, the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 sonnet Sons of Martha. With electricity ceasing to be an oddity and turning into a need of everyday life in the later half of the twentieth century, it required particular attention by popular culture just when it stops flowing, an occasion that usually signals disaster.
Electrically controlled vehicles of each sort featured large in adventure stories, for example, those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books. The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including researchers, for example, Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly considered as having wizard-like powers. The general population who keep it streaming, for example, the nameless legend of Jimmy Webb's tune "Wichita Lineman" (1968), are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.