Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914

By Graeme Gooday

This is an innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. Gooday shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain. The rapid take-up of electrical light and domestic appliances on both sides of the Atlantic had a wide-ranging effect on consumer habits and the division of labour within the home. Electricity was viewed by non-experts as potential threat to domestic order and welfare. This broadly interdisciplinary study relates to a website developed by the author on the history of electricity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822981701

Graeme Gooday

Jean Anderson, winner of six best-cookbook awards and a member of the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, is the author of more than a dozen cookbooks, most recently Crisps, Cobblers, Custards & Creams. After many years working in the New York City publishing world, she came home to North Carolina, bought an old house, and filled it with cookbooks and pottery.

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DOMESTICATING ELECTRICITY: TECHNOLOGY, UNCERTAINTY AND GENDER, 1880-1914

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Series Editor: Bernard Lightman

Titles in This Series

1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820-1858

James Elwick

2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science

Rebekah Higgitt

3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain

Jessica Ratcliff

4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences

Victoria Carroll

5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875-1877

Nigel Richardson

Forthcoming Titles

James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age

David Phillip Miller

Domesticating Electricity

Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880-1914

By

Graeme Gooday

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2016, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Cataloging-in-Publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-8170-1   Hardback: 978-1-85196-975-3

ISBN 10: 0-8229-8170-X

Contents

Dedication

To my late great-great aunt Emily Thomason, for her cautiously wise words: 'Don't touch that there electricity - it's dangerous it is!'

Acknowledgements

In developing the themes and arguments of this book I am indebted to colleagues and PhD students in the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds who heard most of the chapters of this book presented in draft form and gave me invaluable feedback. Particular thanks should be recorded for Greg Radick who suggested to me the tide of the book 'Domesticating Electricity' and to Geoffrey Cantor and Jon Topham for the many insights about periodical literature that I gained from working with them on the project 'Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical'. Other members of the SciPEr project Sally Shuttleworth, Gowan Dawson and Richard Noakes also gave invaluable advice and inspiration.

Especial thanks are due to my collaborator Sophie Forgan for introducing me to Mrs J. E. H. Gordon's promotion of 'decorative electricity' and helping me appreciate the significance of her work. I am also greatly indebted to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, especially its Directors Sasha Roseneil and Ruth Holliday, who both gave me valuable opportunities to present my researches to them and to help me refine my understanding of the significance of gender. Many thanks are due to Helen Valier and Sam Alberti who both helped me to develop my insights on the nature of the relationship between gender, science and technology.

Chapters in this book were presented at Imperial College, London and the Universities of Aarhus, Leicester and Manchester and Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds; at the HSS conference in Minneapolis in 2005, at the BSHS conferences in York (2003), Liverpool (2004), Leeds (2005) and Canterbury (2006). The friendly reception given to my work at these meetings was a great inspiration and I have used many critical suggestions from the audiences at those talks to refine the claims in this book.

I am indebted to the Department of Philosophy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with the research leave in 2005-6 to undertake the bulk of the writing for this book. Also my thanks go to the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life in Minneapolis and the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Institution for the visiting fellowships in summer 2006 that allowed me to explore the American dimensions of my project in the context of their very kind hospitality and generous assistance in aiding my researches. I am especially indebted to Elizabeth Ihrig at the Bakken and Alison Oswald at the National Museum of American history for their superlative guidance in assisting my studies of their unique collections.

A number of other archivists provided invaluable assistance in my preparations for writing this book: Anne Barrett at Imperial College Archives; Anne Locker and Asha Marvin at the Archives of the Institute of Engineering and Technology; Chris Sheppard at Special Collections in the University of Leeds Library and Robin Harcourt William at Hatfield House Archives.

Thanks to Bernie Light man as the series editor for Pickering and Chatto who nursed this volume to fruition, as well as the anonymous referees he commissioned to offer invaluable critical advice to help me make radical improvements to a redrafted version of this book. And there is little I can say to sufficiently praise the staff at Pickering and Chatto, especially Paul Lee, Julie Wilson and Mark Pollard whose patience and indulgence beyond the call of duty made this volume come to press with the least stress that could have been imagined. In preparing this book for publication I received invaluable assistance from four energetic and dependable PhD students at the University of Leeds: Berris Charnley, Richard Gunn, Annie Jamieson and Jamie Stark.

I could not have finished this work without the friendship and moral support of Bill and Christine Astore, Andrew Gibson and Natalie King, Christine MacLeod, Abigail Harrison Moore, Hannah Hunt, James Sumner, Julie Anderson, Nalayini Thambar, Peter Bowler, Frank James, Jeff Hughes, Aileen Fyfe, Rebekkah Higgitt, Christopher Renwick and Efstathios Arapostathis. Heartfelt thanks go to my family for too many good things to enumerate - not least the early years of domestic electricity in Rwanda and East Anglia. Finally what can I offer but unending gratitude to the incomparable Karen Sayer for introducing me to gas-lit pubs and the electric chicken.

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction

This book is about the cultural problems of early attempts to bring electricity into the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is thus a study of the domestication of electricity in two distinct but inter-related senses. First it concerns why and indeed whether householders decided to allow electricity into their homes, specifically to illuminate their houses with incandescent lamps. This is the issue of domestication construed as a matter of discretionary appropriation and incorporation of a new technology into the order of household life. In a closely related way this book is also about the extent to which electricity was interpreted as sufficiently tamed to be safely, reliably and comfortably introduced to the home. That is the issue of domestication qua technocratic control over the enigmatic natural agency of electricity. In this regard the uncertain identity and risks of electricity as well as the controversially glaring appearance and indeterminate prospects of its associated lighting technologies were serious problems. Accordingly I study the efforts by both ‘electricians’ (as both electrical physicists and engineers were non-disparagingly described during the late nineteenth century) and other male and female allies to deal with these problems, whether successfully or otherwise.

While the geographical focus is on Britain, comparative reference is made to the USA both to avoid national parochialism and to highlight the international dialogue and common cultures in the early domestication of electricity, as well as some key transatlantic contrasts. Put more broadly this book asks why, if electrical consumption has (still) not come to monopolize the cultures of transport, cooking, heating and traction in those two countries, how far and why did electricity ever accomplish unique predominance for domestic lighting and power? To raise this question in a provocative manner, I suspend the assumption that electrification was historically inevitable – an assumption which in any case cannot be supported either by empirical evidence or by counterfactual suggestions that the modern world is inconceivable without electrification. Simply to assume that electricity offered a ‘natural’ or ‘progressive’ solution to past cultures’ needs for power and light is not just anachronistic but question-beggingly presumes the necessary association of electricity with ‘modernization’ in ways that this book seeks challenge. I maintain that the historian must recover not only the particular contingences that led consumers to adopt electricity when and where they did, but also why they rejected it in other contexts. Chief among the factors I appeal to in order to explain the selective take up of electricity are the romantic and even atavistic cultures of magic, mystery, utopia, aristocratic patronage and even traditional marital partnership – very far from the tidily aseptic and dispassionate monolith of modernity.

Overall my argument is that the domestication of electricity was only (partly) achieved with extraordinary effort towards four specific accomplishments that helped to represent electricity as a serious alternative to the long-running technology of domestic gas. First a widespread cultural fear of electricity’s apparent threat to body and home had to be overcome; second, effective technocratic management of the hazards of electricity had to be offered to the householder; third, plausible utopian visions of electricity as the key to future cultural harmony and contentment had to be constructed and promulgated to the public and fourth, the aesthetic revulsion to the electric light of many, especially female house managers, had to be countered with an effective campaign to show how the use of ‘decorative’ shaded lighting could render the incandescent lamp fit for the domestic domain.

Thus I place more explanatory weight than hitherto customary in electrical historiography on the sets of alliances that helped to accomplish these four facets of domestication. These included not just the familiar and less familiar entrepreneurs of electric lighting: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Robert Hammond, St George Lane Fox and numerous other technician-popularizers. There were also three electrical engineering couples: Alice and James Gordon; Maud and Edward Lancaster and Constance and Charles Peel who worked within a significant gendered division of labour to communicate the taming of electricity to both male and female audiences. A further important loose grouping to which I refer is the technophile aristocracy notably Lord Salisbury, Lord Thurlow and Lady Randolph Churchill, all of whom showed strong political, financial and domestic support for the innovation of electric lighting in ways under-recorded by previous historians. Finally I draw attention to the support for the domestication of electricity made by selectively sympathetic press reports not just from the electrical engineering journals, but from such bastions of the Establishment as the London Times and the Anglo-American Review of Reviews founded by its radical Congregationalist editor William Stead in 1890. Notwithstanding the partisan scaremongering of the Journal of Gas Lighting, liberal reporting of reputed electrical accidents by a wide range of newspapers and the gossipy sharing of anxieties about electricity among servants, these advocates of electrical life persuaded at least some of the wealthier and more adventurous citizens to domesticate electricity. And it is through the promotional work of such advocates that we will get occasional glimpses of the household consumers deliberating on whether and when to domesticate electricity.

Uncertainty

The first major theme in the book is that both laity and experts – crudely demarcated in such terms and thus easily over dichotomized – encountered electricity with a considerable degree of uncertainty, as reflected in contemporary representations of electricity as both mysterious and hazardous. Not even the expertise of authorities was unequivocally sufficient to meet public demands to explain what the mysterious agency of electricity actually was and whether it was safe. Such points of uncertainty were the starting point of my first book The Morals of Measurement in which I argued that physicists and engineers used measurement devices to cope with what they could otherwise not characterize by quantifica-tion.¹ As I argued in the final chapter of that work, this uncertainty posed a particular problem, however, to designers of domestic supply meters who had to cope with consumers’ bafflement at the immaterial nature of electricity and the improbability of being able to measure the intangible consumption of electricity in any trustworthy way.

In this book I take this theme of uncertainty further and pursue as key issues what ‘authorities’ in electricity did not know but were expected by the laity to know (the nature of electricity or the exact nature of its hazards). I suggest that experts’ strategy for dealing with uncertainty was that, finding the informed public both dissatisfied that they did not know what they ‘ought’ to and bored by their technical didactic writings, electrical specialists offered alternative narratives of futurism and luxury as substitutes or diversions from their problematic absence of certain knowledge.

Domestication

Recent techno-cultural scholarship has developed an alternative to somewhat deterministic analyses of the putative ‘impact’ of new technology arriving in the home. The literature on the ‘domestication of technology’ presents a more plausible and interesting account of artefacts as needing to be ‘tamed’ by householders to assimilate them to appropriate performance in the home and this process of domestication is characteristically prolonged, fallible and reversible.² Domestication is not only treated materially but also symbolically: an innovation will only gain a permanent footing in the home if its role is made meaningful and unthreatening to the household economy of values. Chapter 1 of this book draws upon and historicizes this important new approach to analyse early attempts to promote the introduction of electricity into the home. Treating domestication at a metaphorical level I address the related, and very public, problems confronting experts’ attempts to tame electricity theoretically by producing contemporary ontologies and to tame it practically by new species of technologies. As indicated above, neither was easily accomplished, or indeed accomplished to the satisfaction of both consumer and expert. In the face of much authoritative nescience and not knowing themselves what electricity was, householders sought assurances about how it could be managed within the home so as to accomplish safety and possibly even elegance of illumination. They were thus offered rhetorical and technological solutions to problems of bodily contact with potentially dangerous wires and with aesthetic discomfort under the clinical gaze of the electric lamp.

The need to show the taming of electricity by technology helps explain, I suggest, why busy electrical specialists in the 1880s and 1890s diverted attention away from immediate problems with domesticating electricity towards the future promise of technological mastery in coming electrical utopias. At the same time, however, they faced stiff competition from rival gas interests who were equally determined to establish gas lighting as the principal domestic medium of illumination, heating and cooking. Thus electrical engineers in the 1880s sought polemically to highlight the health hazards of gas lighting to undermine the prospects of the obvious alternative to electricity. The mere fact that such roles in culture-moulding had passed by the early twentieth century from technical specialists to emerging sub-communities of popularizers and lay-experts should not distract us from observing that self-serving prophecies of complete electrification by the former group were not borne out in practice. By comparison with Anne Clendinning’s study of the highly effective role of women ‘demons’ (gas demonstrators) in promoting fin de siècle domestic gas consumption,³ I will explain why electric cooking and heating were not by any means as ‘universal-ized’ as electric lighting.

Electricity

The third overarching theme of the book is an examination of what was meant by the term ‘electricity’ in the pre-1914 period when its potential arrival in the home prompted a growth in specialist literature more spectacular than that evinced by the advent of telegraphy and telephony before 1880. Underlying the question persistently posed by ‘What is electricity?’ were (at least) four different understandings of the nature and significance of electricity: the physical nature of electricity as presumptively discoverable to science (by analogy with the chemical composition of coal gas); the quasi-magical status of electricity as a mysterious craft mastered only by the cognoscenti; the motive power attributed to electricity (as compared to the power of fire, steam or animal energy) and the transformative power of electricity as a socio-historical phenomenon (analogous to railways and empire). Rather than acquiescing in these actors’ categories, I deconstruct these reifications of electricity to show that there was a persistent disagreement on some of the basic premises of the cultural debates involved in the ‘what is electricity?’ question.

It was, for example, not only ether-obsessed Maxwellians such as Oliver Lodge who tried to argue that there really was no such thing as electricity to be discovered, no matter that it was somehow commodified, supplied and charged just like domestic gas supply.⁴ While theatrical demonstrations of electricity as a species of magic helped attract audiences and show how it could be tamed, it had to be represented as a mundanely safe product to be consumed without fear of risk in the home within the viable limits of householder’s own expertise. While many early representations of ‘electromagnetism’ interpreted the motive power involved as that of the familiar magnet harnessed to the equally familiar steam engine, this representation seemed unable to capture the sheer distinctive novelty of the power on display at numerous public electrical exhibitions. Finally, the notion of electricity as an agent of socio-political transformation was often anthropomorphized by the electrical industry into a human form (often as a female goddess, servant, fairy or muse, sometimes as male baby, imp or wizard), thus naturalizing the expectation of electricity’s rise to maturity and domination (a notion still popular in French culture as la fée électricité).⁵ Although appealing to some – perhaps more men than women – many female homemakers resisted this progressive-romantic iconography of electricity, preferring gas as the transformative agent of modernity.

Gender

The final main theme concerns the complementarity and symbiosis of men’s and women’s expertise in accomplishing the domestication of electricity, just as Anne Clendinning has shown similar gendered patterns in the contemporaneous domestication of gas cookery.⁶ Traditional accounts of the coming of electricity to the home focus their explanatory endeavour almost entirely on the role of male technicians as if they naturally held the sole agency in social transformation. Thus, for example, Hughes focuses on the system building activities of such engineer-entrepreneurs as Edison or Westinghouse, mentioning but a handful of seemingly marginal females, such as Hertha Ayrton, and does not comment on the female-centred iconography of the electrical lighting publicity that he illustrates.⁷ Whereas Schivelbusch and Marvin include some reference to women as household consumers, both emphasize their relative lack of expertise or understanding of electricity; both illustrate but do not analyse the visual depiction of electricity as female rather than male.⁸ My approach will be to bring out what is hidden in these accounts: the great reliance of male electrical promoters on female expertise to transform a mere technological possibility into an actual household experience. It was not just that women were by tradition major decision makers about household matters: they had considerable discretion about whether to accept or reject the overtures of the electrifiers.

Much of the early cultural anxiety about electricity centred on the female body, specifically threats to its physical safety and aesthetic appearance; this was the case notwithstanding the other purported health benefits of electric light and the raw empirical fact that before 1904 only men had been killed in electrical accidents. Such anxiety threatened the whole electrical enterprise, with many households resiliently maintaining gas lighting, cooking and heating well into the twentieth century as trusted ‘safe’ technologies in spite of the gas accidents reported almost weekly in the press. Given the gender-specific nature of authority in Victorian Britain, women’s expertise and authority were required to overcome the concerns of female householders in domestic contexts in which men’s ‘authority’ typically was either irrelevant or of limited weight. Not coincidentally, it was typically the spouses of electrical engineers who took on this role – whether voluntarily or otherwise – Alice Gordon, Maud Lancaster and Constance (Dorothy) Peel.⁹ As we shall see, all of these women played a substantial social and technical role in showing how well electricity could be domesticated. Nevertheless, this crucial role was not publicly acknowledged by the male-dominated electrical industry which later wrote such women out of their historical accounts of the purported inevitability of the success of electric lighting, just as much as they overlooked the hundreds of theatrical dancers who sported potentially hazardous electric jewellery to ‘prove’ that bodily security could be attained even in close proximity to electric lighting. Instead, the industry’s standard approach was to personify electricity as if it had its own momentum to enter into the domestic domain, albeit with significantly ambiguous gendering of this anthropomorphized identity.

To articulate the basic argument of the book, I divide it into three sections corresponding to the general issues of how domestication and electricity were understood by contemporaries; how electricity posed concerns of safety and danger; and, lastly, how the gendering of electrical culture – both socially and iconographically – played a crucial role in the partial domestication of electric lighting. Chapter 1 contrasts the ‘domestication’ approach with historiographies of both ‘electrification’ and ‘modernization’, illustrating how the allegorical themes of taming and training lightning had a high profile in the history of popular promotion of electric illumination. Chapter 2 looks at the many meanings of electricity from the perspective of the history of science communication, raising some important concerns about what exactly was undergoing domestication and how communicating the understanding of this process was fraught with problems linked to the contested identity of electricity.

Chapter 3 looks at a much publicized case study of an accidental fatality linked to electricity in December 1881: the death of Lord Salisbury’s garden labourer William Dimmock. By looking at how interpretations of his death multiplied with an ever shift ing identity of the victim and causes of his demise, we can understand how fears of electricity were widely propagated in the 1880s and later. Chapter 4 then considers how the reputation of electricity as ‘safe’ was constructed by technocratic measures such as fuses and special insurance regulations for wiring, as well as the deployment of female dancers clad in electric jewellery to demonstrate that electric lighting on the body need not cause corporeal harm let alone death – unlike the paraffin and gas lamps that preceded them in the theatre. Chapter 5 continues by showing how much discussion of the domestication of electricity came to rest on engineer’s projections of an electrical future that appeared to make the domestication of electricity both inevitable and indeed the very epitome of progress – the domain of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Chapter 6 looks at the process of aestheticizing electricity, showing how a significant negative response from women to the apparent glare of electric light provoked something of a crisis for promoters of electric lighting that was in part solved by Alice Gordon’s book Decorative Electricity (1891) which showed well-to-do ladies how to transform their homes into elegant apotheoses of indirect and romantically installed illumination. Chapter 7 concludes by showing how the entire process of the domestication of electric lighting was accompanied by a gendered iconography of electricity in both male and female forms, as if the problem of the unknown identity of electricity could be resolved by anthropo-morphization of this mysterious agency into familiar cultural figures that were distinctively either male or female. I conclude with some thoughts on the limited success of the domestication project in the face of competition from gas lighting, and what this tells us both about the history of electricity in the home, and the important historiographical concept of domestication.

1 Understanding the Domestication of Electricity

It would be strange, indeed, if so readily controlled an agent as electricity, an Ariel before whom time and space seem to vanish, did not cross the threshold of our homes and enter into our household life. We find, in fact, that the adoption of electrical household appliances is daily becoming more widespread, here adding a utility, and there an ornament, until in the near future we may anticipate a period when its presence in the household will be indispensable.

A. E. Kennelly, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribner’s Magazine, 1890.¹

From the hot water for the morning cup of tea and the morning shave in one’s dressing gown, right on to the warming of one’s bed at night, electricity is ready to play its part in the home all through the day.

Anon., ‘Electricity as domestic genie’, Review of Reviews, 1905.²

This book is a study of the arrival of electricity in the late-nineteenth-century domestic sphere, arguably one of the most abiding technical-cultural transformations of the modern era. The ‘domestication’ of electricity is represented here as a haphazard, accident-prone and controversial business; the assimilation of electricity into the home was marked by mystery, conflicting interests, a marked gendering of roles and iconographic culture. In this chapter I explain how this approach to the subject both extends established historical approaches and adds new perspectives and explanations to this transformation. In so doing I offer some alternatives to familiar assumptions in the historiography of what is commonly known as ‘electrification’.

It is easy to interpret historians of electrification as narrating the unfolding technologization which followed relatively straightforwardly from the development of patents for incandescent electric light in 1878 and the evolution of the dynamo generator in preceding decades. Furthermore it can sometimes seem that presumptive natural endpoint of electrification is the comprehensive utilization of electricity. But, as we shall see, this teleology is not easily justifiable; for example, transport systems across the world have not become fully electrified and perhaps may never be subordinated to electrical systems. More tellingly still, the persistence of gas cookery and household heating to this very day starkly rebuts some long vaunted forecasts of an all-electric future, and of the all-electric house and kitchen in particular.³ Given the uncertainty in the future prospects of electrification, I suggest that it is historiographically more productive to suspend belief in the inevitability of electricity’s pre-eminence in all aspects of modern culture and consider which aspects of life have become dependent on electrical technologies and which have not. Accordingly, this volume studies the role of contingency rather than destiny in the history of domestic electrical technology. Adopting this strategy will make it easier to understand why some householders in the United Kingdom chose to keep their homes gas lit for up to six decades after Edison and Swan’s electrical incandescent lamps became publicly available circa 1881.⁴

A major purpose of this chapter, then, is to consider how we can understand the early history of domestic electrification while suspending the belief that electricity would inevitably displace older forms of illumination or cookery. To do this I show that the complex dynamics of domesticating electricity were two-fold in character. In a simple sense, domestication of electricity was the translation of electrical lighting and power supply from the public world into the private domain of the home. Yet this process involved more than just the geographical-technical feat of transferring the technologies of electrical lighting from street and factory into the household; it also involved gaining control over and taming the technologies of electric lighting and cookery so that they would adapt to the domestic order of life.⁵ The taming process involved mitigating the dangers, uncertain behaviour and aesthetic provocations of electricity, specifically of arc and incandescent lighting.

Apropos of this I show how much was made in the late-nineteenth-century press of the connections between electricity and lightning; a connection that brought uncomfortably to the fore the folklore of electricity as perilous and life-threatening, as well as being of mysterious provenance (or uncertified character) and uncomfortably dazzling. The various strategies of attempted house-training of electricity – processes that were fallible and thus also reversible – were crucial to overcoming concern about those threefold problems. In my conclusion I return to consider the extent to which this two-fold domestication thesis succeeds in capturing the dynamics of how electricity was appropriated into many (but not all) homes, despite the resilient challenges just mentioned.

I start by comparing early encounters with domestic electricity in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining the many accounts of electrification in US culture and the way in which they relate to the problems mentioned above. In focusing on the works of David Nye, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Thomas Hughes, Mary Ann Hellrigel and Linda Simon, I consider how far such accounts rely on the premise that electrification was integral to the process of modernization much discussed by such sociologists as Anthony Giddens. I thus give particular attention to the ways in which two major historians have adopted a historiography drawing upon themes cognate with modernization: Schivelbusch’s treatment of domestication as a corollary of industrialization and Hughes’s emphasis on the significance of system-building. Drawing on these accounts I examine how additional insights can be gained from the domestication of technology thesis as developed by Silverstone, Lie, Sørensen, Berker, Hartmann and others. I then consider how the domestication thesis can illuminate the case of the gaslight, the key precursor to the electric light in the home. Finally I conclude by explaining how issues of gender and class are crucial in understanding how the domestication thesis might be applied, extended and supplemented to illuminate the ways in which electric light and cookery did – or did not – become an integral part of domestic life up to the outbreak of the First World War.

To begin this survey, I first look at the transatlantic cultures of commercialized electricity, considering the American experience of domesticating electricity in comparison to the British experience.

Electrification: the US Experience

It is … fundamentally mistaken to think of ‘the home’ or ‘the factory’ or ‘the city’ as passive, solid objects that undergo an abstract transformation called ‘electrification.’ Rather, every institution is a terrain, a social space that incorporates electricity at certain historical juncture as part of its ongoing development. Electrification is a series of choices based only partly on technical considerations, and its meaning must be looked for in the many contexts in which Americans decided how to use it.

David Nye, Electrifying America: social meanings of a new technology,

1880–1940, 1990.6

The ‘cultural’ historiography of electrical technologization in the USA is epitomized in David Nye’s Electrifying America. He elegantly shows how the public arrival of electricity in the USA could be characterized an evolving symbiosis of technology and culture. On his account electrification was not an autonomous phenomenon that impacted upon a passive society, but rather was shaped by societal context while, in turn, electrical technologies of power and lighting were used in ways that reshaped that context. Avoiding simplistic notions of the ‘social’ Nye describes electrical technology as being typical in its variegated relationships: ‘someone makes it, someone owns it, some oppose it, many use it and all interpret it’. Moreover, the social meanings of the ‘it’ were open and multiple since different groups and individuals interpreted electricity in distinctive ways: electricity was not a reified thing but rather an ‘open-ended set of problems and possibilities’, a theme I shall return to in Chapter 2. In documenting the advent of electrical culture in the USA, Nye focuses somewhat less on the problems than on the creative possibilities of using electricity to enhance the lives of American citizens, placing particular emphasis on their particular choices between rival forms of electrical technology. Most significant for him are the cultural politics of electrical technology: the predominant choice was for cooking and cleaning technologies designed for individual households rather than that collectivism sharing of technical resources favoured by numerous feminist writers seeking a more woman-friendly home.⁷

By why did Americans choose to adopt electricity at all? Or rather how were they persuaded to adopt it? Nye plausibly presents Americans’ early cultural encounter with electricity as mediated mostly through the wonder and awe of electrical spectacle; it was through the sheer glamour of public exhibits of electrical lighting that Americans learned to love electricity. Not only did they see dazzling displays in the ‘Great White Way’ that was the electrically lit high street from the late 1870s, but from 1882 they could even admire smaller-scale displays such as electrically lit Christmas trees. And, having taken electricity to their hearts, they then took it into their private homes. Notwithstanding the occasional calamities that were precipitated by early ill-behaved electrical installations, the US householder apparently had no difficulty in judging electrical technologies as offering a superior option to gas lighting and heating that soiled walls, consumed oxygen and fouled air. On Nye’s account the decision to electrify the home was not difficult for Americans. The only challenges were its comparatively high cost and rather localized availability to the consumer; once these problems had been overcome by the advent of large-scale supply systems in the first decade of the twentieth century, by the close of the 1920s the vast majority of US households were not only wired for electric power, but also using it intensively too. Ironically, however, Nye also draws unheralded attention to the problematic contemporaneous limits of the process of electrification in the USA. While accepting electricity in their homes during the 1920s, on the city streets Americans generally rejected the electrical tramcar in favour of the decidedly non-electrical automobile that allowed them far greater individualization of both comfort and style. Although the rise of the automobile is the only exception that Nye reports to the hegemony of electricity, he does also note that the gas stove was long preferred to the electric range as the latter cooked slower and its hardware was less reliable.⁸ Clearly, then, there were limits to the extent to which Americans were willing to embrace the electrical life.

Overall, however, the multifaceted process of electrifying America apparently prompted only a few householders to pose serious opposition to the domestic arrival of electricity, whether through ambivalence or overt rejection.⁹ Nye certainly reports fears and anxieties about electrical lighting and power, but these were not representative of any broader social phenomenon urging caution. While recording some fears of electricity as if it was a dangerously ‘wild’ force of nature, he instead locates this specifically in the first decade of electric lighting. The 1880s saw both the superstitions of the Irish navvies who warily laid Edison’s cables in the streets of New York and the prognostications of eccentric ‘scattered critics’ who forecast apocalyptic consequences of meddling with the natural force of electricity. Nye sees these otherwise fleeting, transient concerns soon being overwhelmed by positive experiences of electricity. These included not only the awe-inspiringly spectacular illumination of the international exhibitions and high streets,¹⁰ but also the widespread use of electrotherapy by Americans to harness this ‘natural force’ in attempts to re-harmonize their bodily balance of forces.¹¹ Nye thus astutely considers the question ‘what was electricity’ as symptomatic of the huge cultural interest in the mysterious identity of this new phenomenon,¹² rather than as symptomatic of any doubts or anxieties about its nature and potentially harmful properties.¹³ Overall, his concern is how America was electrified, rather than considering in detail the testimony of those who had doubts about whether to electrify.¹⁴

Linda Simon’s study, Dark Light: electricity and anxiety fr om the telegraph to the X-ray, probes further than Nye into some of the doubts and worries that modulated Americans’ decisions about whether to participate in the public and private cultures of electricity. Unlike Nye, Simon draws attention to the accident-prone nature of early electrical technologies, gesturing both to the anxiety this induced among its potential consumers and to the long-term entrenchment thereby engendered in the more familiar medium of gas. Her subtitle derives from an article in the US Appleton’s Journal in 1881, ‘Electricity as a Factor in Happiness’, which examined the ‘anxious and hopeful attention’ focused on electricity when incandescent lamps first became available for daily usage. Anxiety was reportedly induced not only by the well-known unreliability of telegraphs and phonographs: electric lights flickered and extinguished haphazardly or were too dull, all being ‘more or less disagreeable’ in colour. Rather, opinions were so widely varied about the likely cost and working range of electric lighting systems that the public did not know which expert to trust. This left the American public unclear whether to treat electricity as harbinger of utopian peace or wreaker of gross disturbance to nature and society alike.¹⁵

Such doubts persisted for some years after this first phase, with numerous accidental conflagrations and fatalities. Alarm over the prudence of electrical life accompanied the very public debates in the period 1889–90 over the efficacy of judicial execution by the electric chair in New York State. As I discuss in Chapter 3, this episode not only reinforced lay suspicions of the deadly possibilities of bodily contact with electricity, but also revealed the acrimonious rivalry between the direct current lobby led by Edison and the alternating current interest led by Westinghouse, whose technology Edison had – with cunning desperation – recruited for the electric chair. As Mark Essig has told us, this anxiety over the implications associated with the electric chair fed off a prior concern: news of the deaths of dozens of workmen from accidental contact with the city’s ubiquitous overhead electric lines, graphically recorded in the local press. Yet no historian of US electrification has yet explained how the populace, faced with such repeated instances of death by electricity, whether judicial or accidental, chose nevertheless to bring electricity into their homes. Against this apparent passion for electricity the long term rejection of the electrical automobile takes some considerable explanation.

While I do not offer answers to this question, I raise the problem to illustrate that even in the