After concluding the laws and regulations for the privileges given to the foreign investors and Istanbul’s electrification, the Ottoman government made a call for bids to develop an urban-scale electrical plant in Istanbul in 1910. The Ministry of Public Works considered Austrian-Hungarian Ganz Company as the most suitable bidder among the eight tenders filed by foreign companies. A contract was signed on 1 November 1910, between the Minister of Public Works and the representatives of Ganz Company. Just one year later, the company established the Ottoman Electric Company with the financial and technical support of multinational banks and companies from France, Belgium, and Germany. Following the foundation of the power plant in Silahtara?a, building an electricity distribution network remained remittent due to many reasons mostly related with everlasting wars (the Balkan War, Great War and War of Independence): increasing prices of supply materials, limited transportation capability from abroad, lack of coal, and the tension between the Ottoman authorities and the multinational representatives of the electrical company. A systematic network of electricity for public use in the city started to function in the early 1920s and played a crucial symbolic role in the embodiment of the new Republican regime’s efforts to promote progress, industrialization and national identity. This paper relies on the records of the Prime Ministry Archives located in Istanbul and Ankara, Deutsche Bank Archives in Frankfurt, and State Archives in Brussels. It centers on the human and non-human actors of electrification infrastructure starting from the foundation of the Silahtara?a Power Plant until the nationalization of the electrical company in 1937. It deals with the question of how the electricity network of artifacts, knowledges, labor, and political ideologies had altered and reinforced existing hierarchies and inequalities in institutions, altering political regimes and daily practices. In the period under scrutiny, the utilization of electricity increased the flow of people and knowledge through public transportation and communication, generated new consumer desires based on electrical lighting and tools, and transformed the ways people experienced and sensed the city. However, as reliability and integration to electricity’s built environment increased, so did the vulnerability. Blackouts, fatal working accidents, and claims of corruption were quite undesirable but very frequent and evoked many debates among the multiple actors of the electrical network which ended up with the elimination of international companies and foreign investment from the electrical scene of Istanbul in 1937.