The article is dedicated to temporal ideas of Russian engineering community in the nineteenth century, their ideas about the future of electrical technology and its ability to transform the country and society. The article also covers the ways in which engineers treated time and worked with it within electrotechnical engineering education. The discussions among the engineering community covered concrete technical questions, and at the same time involved broader issues of social meanings of technology and had an apparent temporal perspective. The electrotechnical education, that was under transformation at the turn of the XXth century, conveyed to students the ideas about the status and perspectives of electrification. Laboratory became the new space of technical education where students elaborated various skills important for the new engineering profession – precision measurement, work with different devices, as well as practical corporeal skills. In the lab students also learned to work with time – to distribute, plan and control, these skills can be considered a prehistory of contemporary project management. Electrical engineer was becoming a new cultural hero who knew how to make a working machine, but besides this challenged himself to coordinate the development of technology with social development.