RedImperator wrote:Harry's watch worked until the fourth book. Mechanical and chemical devices seem to work fine, as do simple electrical devices. The magic field only seems to screw with electronics, which would knock out computers, radios, TVs, and the like. The steam locomotive that pulls the Hogwarts train in every year isn't effected at all.
There's also the general predjudice among the wizards against Muggles in general and Muggle technology in general. Most of them consider technology quaint at best and the clumsy, flailing workarounds of the degenerate sub-human non-wizard masses. The worst of them, like the Malfoys, consider wizards who use technology, even just for fun, as borderline race traitors.
There's also that whole thing that Hogwarts is supposed to be hidden. If there were electrical wires and things, don't you think it'd be kind of obvious exactly where they were located? No point in casting spells or putting magical force fields or whatever over the campus if you're using enough electricity to run a small country, and it's all focused on one spot out in the rolling hills of lovely England.
Besides, judging from the level of difficulty Mr. Weasley has understanding toasters, rubber ducks, turnstiles, etc., and the fact that he is fascinated with that sort of thing and devotes his life to the study of it, I would find it hard to believe there would be any wizards who'd be able to wire up that enormous school successfully. And they couldn't possibly get any muggles in there to do it--how would they explain the place? Or the inhabitants? Even during the summer, there's the greenhouse full of rather alarming things, and the stuff that lurks in the Forbidden Forest... Plus the ghosts are always there, at the school. So the school couldn't possibly bring any muggles in to do it.
