by Jane Brox
unlike our lighting systems, with their cables, cords, and electrical contacts, you could carry ... through the entire apartment, accompanied always by the clatter of the tube in its casing and the glass globe on its metal ring—a clinking that is part of the dark music of the surf which slumbers in the laborious toil of the century.... Now the nineteenth century is empty. It lies there like a large, dead, cold seashell. I pick it up and hold it up to my ear. What do I hear?...The rattling noise of the anthracite that is emptied from the coal scuttle into the furnace;...the clatter of the tube in its casing, the clink of the glass globe on its metal ring when the lamp is carried from one room to another.
Soon most would forget how to light a lamp and how to husband the flame. They would become a little afraid of it, and it was its obviousness that seemed dangerous: its smell, substance, and centuries of meaning. How could a simple flame hold a plea against electricity? Aggressive, unhindered electricity: "Let's Kill the Moonlight!" proclaimed the Italian futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, for he saw the natural world as irrelevant, canceled by the speed and brilliance of the modern. Giacomo Balla, in his 1909 oil painting Arc Lamp, seems to have done just that. Artificial light dominates everything; even the iron base of the streetlamp has relinquished its solidity. It's just a ghost, clouded by the sizzle of energy—circular, radiant, pulsing, full of hot color—flaring out from the arc. The light's sharp power and verve strike at soft, billowing, susceptible night. There is hardly any room left for the dark, which is trying to hold its own in small quarters at the corners of the painting. That's more than can be said for the pale crescent moon, helplessly obscured in the background—illuminated, but not radiant, captured, as it is, by human light.
11. Gleaming Things
THIS MUCH HAS ALWAYS been true: electricity can't be stored. It must be generated as needed and consumed within moments of its generation. The supply must continually adjust itself to fluctuating demand, and a power plant must have sufficient capacity to meet all its customers' needs at any given moment of the day. Maintaining this balance was especially fraught during the first tenuous decades of electrical expansion. Edward Hungerford, writing about the gas and electric plants of New York City in 1910, described how the smallest change in the skies could create a sudden spike in usage:
In days of old, watchers were stationed upon the high housetops of mediaeval cities, to give warning of the coming of an unexpected foe. In these days there are watchers upon the high housetops of the modern city. They go there whenever the barometer begins to spell uncertainty. With powerful glasses they skim the distant corners of the horizon. A distant black cloud—a seemingly harmless thing in the far-away sky, but a thing of magnificent potentialities close at hand—is seen. Its approach is closely noted.... The watcher of the skies gives quick warning over the telephone. The drone of lazy midday ceases instantly. [In the power house] men come out of their drowsy cat-naps. They rush to their positions, fresh fuel goes upon a hundred banked boilers[, and]...the 'chief operator,' who is king of the situation, orders additional engines and generators into service.... When the black clouds finally rest above the town and the myriad hands are reaching for desklights, the strain has been already met. The light ... burns as steadily and as brightly as it burned five minutes before, when less than one-fifth the quantity was the demand.
In Hungerford's time, it was also true that electric plants created black clouds of their own, for not all energy generation could be as clean as Niagara. Power plants in places far from any viable waterpower source often relied on coal-fired furnaces to heat water, which produced the steam that commonly rotated the turbines of the generators. And the predominance of alternating current meant that in a city like New York, the hundreds of small local plants that once pocked the city were now consolidated into a few huge generating stations. By 1910 the New York Edison Company plant at Thirty-eighth Street and First Avenue, which replaced four hundred small electric power plants in Manhattan, took up two city blocks and furnished almost 90 percent of the electricity for Manhattan and the Bronx. It ran 152 boilers, which consumed more than half a million tons of coal in the course of one year. The grime and soot the plant produced was a constant source of irritation to neighboring homes and businesses, not only noxious to breathe but also damaging to furniture and draperies. The company, repeatedly fined by the health department for coal smoke violations and cinder nuisances, had watchers of its own. The New York Times reported that during an ongoing investigation, "when it was found Health Department men were trying to photograph the smoke stacks, 'scouts' were put on the company's roof who ordered the feeding of coal stopped whenever photographers appeared."
Whatever the fuel source, electric companies have always sought to cultivate a consistent demand for power, since a plant is most efficient and profitable when its output is constant. In the early twentieth century, they courted industrial and commercial customers, who not only used large amounts of electricity at predictable times but also were usually located in concentrated areas, which meant there'd be minimal investment in lines. They particularly sought customers whose demands might complement the municipal drain on electricity from trolleys and street lighting, both of which used a good deal of power early in the morning and later in the day.
Electric companies—still called "light companies" in the early decades of the twentieth century—were private corporations, and since access to electricity was not yet considered the right of every citizen, they felt no obligation to deliver power to individual homes. Electric light in homes, they believed, would exacerbate strains on their systems, since people would turn on their lamps during the peak-demand hours of dusk. It hadn't yet occurred to them to promote the sale of washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, and irons, which would have increased daytime electric use in homes. At least in the early years of the century, they had little faith that householders would be interested in such things. So by 1912, more than three decades after Edison's Menlo Park demonstrations, only 16 percent of American homes were connected to central station power, and most of those were in wealthy and upper-middle-class districts.
Even in homes wired for electricity, those who wanted to use electric appliances faced a host of obstacles. Household wiring was unregulated and rudimentary, sufficient for little more than lighting alone. The styles and types of plugs varied from manufacturer to manufacturer, and people could plug in smaller appliances only if they had the correct outlets for them. If a family purchased a stove, which required insulated wires, or a refrigerator, which ran on higher-than-normal wattage, they usually had to upgrade the wiring in their home. As late as 1926, one commentator observed: "Electrical articles are the only ones which cannot be taken home and put to use by the purchaser, when, where, and as he pleases!"
The quality and design of many early appliances was poor as well. One man, recalling his mother's first iron, noted: "It was a Dover iron. And even though it had a plain, unplated iron soleplate and a nickel-plated shell, we thought it looked pretty swell.... The new iron did a wonderful job. But the attached cord, which ran directly inside the shell to the terminals, kept burning off because of the heat at that point." There were no safety standards and few guarantees. When appliances broke down, as they often did, there was no system of service for repair. What was a householder left with? Often no more than a "so-called instruction booklet which never in eight years has helped us in a single emergency.... Does the motor stop, the engine refuse to start, is there a mysterious 'spark,' 'smoke,' unexplained 'knock'—we can pore through the booklet in vain for help."
Even so, the marvel and mystery of it all was very much alive, however unrealistic and unattainable. Manufacturers continued to demonstrate electricity's promise at world exhibitions and in model electric homes outfitted with clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, stoves, and refrigerators. Books such as Electricity in Every-Day Life and Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning, Etc., Being a Manual of Electricity in the Service of the Home gave readers a brief hist
ory of electricity and explained how it would inevitably revolutionize their lives. One author exclaimed, "Fancy cooking cutlets and frying pancakes with captured lighting!" Such books promoted electricity not only as a timesaver for women but also as a replacement for domestic help, which had become scarce as workers increasingly chose more lucrative and independent work in factories over domestic employment. One advocate of appliances proclaimed: "There is no household operation capable of being mechanically performed, of which, through the motor, electricity cannot become the drudge and willing slave."
Magazine articles declared that the electric life would bring unimaginable ease. In 1904 Scientific American published "Electricity in the Household," which described an electric iron, griddle, toaster, and cereal boiler, along with a chafing dish, about which the author claimed: "A traveler will find this stove particularly useful. It can be carried in the overcoat pocket." He also described a sewing machine, the speed of which "can be very delicately regulated.... The operator can assume any easy, comfortable position as the only duty required is to steer the cloth under the needle." In the accompanying photograph, a woman dressed, it seems, for a social occasion, is half turned away from her work. Her legs are crossed casually to the side, and she's guiding material toward the needle with her left hand while her other is free and draped over the chair back. She could be chatting with a friend. The author asserts, "Even an invalid can safely operate a machine thus driven."
In these early decades of the twentieth century, electric light bulbs were sold as both a brilliant mystery and a mystery attached to the past. The earliest print ads for them had been straightforward, simply stating their wattage and size. They would often be accompanied by a line drawing of the bulb, base, and filament. But particularly after the development of the brighter, more efficient, and longer-lasting tungsten filament in 1911, the ads became more elaborate. General Electric, still by far the largest manufacturer of light bulbs and lamps, launched a new trademark: Mazda, named after Ahura Mazda, the Persian god of light. Some of the ads for Mazda bulbs featured a reclining woman, draped in flowing robes, who held a light bulb aloft in her outstretched hand and gazed at the lifted brilliance. The bulb itself glowed without any connection to wires and sockets. Not even the filament was obvious, as if to suggest that the new was not so different from the old after all, for nothing in the ads hinted at the way light was now tethered to a growing industrial grid.
Electric lines eventually made their way into middle-class urban and suburban neighborhoods, spurred by Samuel Insull's adoption of the demand meter in Chicago. The meter encouraged use because it allowed power companies to charge lower rates to customers who consumed more than the minimum amount of electricity. Insull, as president of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, had foreseen increased domestic demand for electricity and actively sought out suburban customers, offering cheap wiring for their homes. Historian Harold Platt notes that Insull "went after every kind of customer from the biggest to the smallest. Maybe the smallest was the household and the housewife. In one famous campaign, he brought in 10,000 GE irons and gave them away free, so to speak, to anyone who would sign up for service."
When electricity finally arrived at their doors, families usually bought smaller appliances first, though not entirely because they were less expensive and easier to bring into their homes than larger ones. A refrigerator wasn't all that essential in a time when corner stores flourished—women shopped almost daily—and milkmen came to the door. As well, the advent of refrigerators spurred icebox manufacturers to improve their goods, and icemen stepped up their home delivery service. As for stoves, gas had already revolutionized cooking for city women. They didn't have to load fuel or tend a flame, and each individual burner operated at the turn of a switch, so they could use one burner at a time rather than heat up the entire stove for a can of soup or a tin of beans. Tin cans had come into their own by then, though there were no standards there either. As Christine Frederick observed, "A tin can is literally a dark, sealed mystery until it is opened."
Women knew what they wanted, and as Insull had foreseen, most purchased an electric iron first. The ads for them always showed a contented, well-dressed housewife effortlessly running an iron over her family's clothes. This was a stark contrast to the old chore, for there was no greater symbol of household drudgery than the "sad-iron"—"sad" in its archaic sense, meaning "heavy" or "dense." Traditional irons, made of cast metal, usually weighed four or five pounds, though some weighed as much as ten. The heavier the iron—and the more a woman pressed down on it—the more efficiently it worked. On ironing day, a woman would heat four, five, or six irons on her gas or wood stove. Before using one of the hot irons, she'd wipe the bottom clean, rub it with beeswax, and try it on an old piece of cloth to make sure it wasn't so hot that it would scorch the cloth. Then she'd press it onto a Sunday shirt, all the while taking care not to transfer any soot to the clean shirt and not to burn herself or the cloth. Once off the heat, the iron would cool down quickly, and in no time at all she'd have to return it to the stove and replace it with a hot one, which she would clean, wax, test ... Given the mountains of wrinkled cotton clothes and linens to be ironed, the job would take all day. And all the while, the woman would be standing next to the hot stove, even in high summer. One electric iron replaced every sad-iron in the household, and not only did it save time, but it was also far cleaner and more predictable, since the iron kept a constant temperature.
After irons, women most frequently purchased vacuum cleaners. Electricity was sometimes called "white coal," part of its allure being that all the attendant work and grime of production existed somewhere out of sight, so that people could believe the claim that "electricity, the unseen and the unknown, is absolutely clean." While electricity didn't produce the household smoke and residue of gaslight or kerosene lamps, what dirt there was now lay exposed by the increased candlepower of the tungsten filament, and dirt seen was dirt that had to be dealt with.
Woman has been a dirt eraser for so many ages with no relief in sight and no hope of anything better than beginning again at the moment of finishing.... [The vacuum cleaner] has a gigantic value in lifting the woman from her long and seemingly doomed relationship with dirt in the wrong place.... The machine that removes it, sucks it right out of the house altogether ... and is used in the average home about two hours a week. The old broom had at least a half day record. About the same intelligence is needed in the operation of each, although the cleaner requires far more thought and care to keep it in fitness and can be as successfully handled in a dinner or calling costume as with apron and cap.
It was a boon to all but the broom makers, who were taken to task by one advocate of sweeping as he made a desperate pitch for tradition: "They have let go, unchallenged, that sweeping is drudgery until the present generation thinks and talks of sweeping as menial labor, unpleasant and to be performed with reluctance. What a misconception! The medical profession in numerous instances advises women to take up housework, especially sweeping, to offset their ills. Sweeping is exercise of a highly beneficial nature." He was a voice crying in the new wilderness.
In this new wilderness, nothing was more complicated than time. But time—though no less an obsession than cleanliness—being abstract and malleable, couldn't be confronted in a straightforward way. Within more affluent homes in the first decades of the twentieth century, women were often thought to have too much time on their hands. Ladies' Home Journal declared: "As a matter of fact, what a certain type of woman needs today more than anything else is some task that 'would tie her down.' Our whole social fabric would be the better for it. Too many women are dangerously idle." But these same women felt pressure to make the most of time. The domestic science movement had taken hold, and its proponents advocated efficiency in household chores, the same way Frederick Taylor, writing in 1911, advocated it for factories: "We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient or ill-directed movements ... leave nothing visible
or tangible behind them."
Electric appliances could help women be more efficient with housework and brought with them a dream of liberation. But advocates of domestic science believed that efficient work in and of itself was a kind of liberation: "The cry of the home honored woman to be released from the dish pan, the tub and the kitchen range is answered. It is now a matter of how far she will go on the new road and what amount of culture she can and will take on in the performance of the common task. From a musical standpoint she can move as far as time, tune and rhythm can be made to play upon her daily routine. Artistically we find every effort being brought to bear upon the home to give it the atmosphere it deserves."
Yes, electric appliances saved time. Washing clothes in the age-old way had taken an entire day, traditionally "Blue Monday." With an electric washer, a woman could clean clothes at odd times throughout the week—a load here, a load there—in between other tasks. But for some women, the arrival of electricity ushered in more work than before. The availability of electric appliances put more pressure on women who had relied on domestic help or services to accomplish these tasks themselves. And although the labor of washing had disappeared, so had the community of it. Women who'd previously washed and hung their clothes in the backyard could gossip with hired help or neighbors as they did so. Electric washers and dryers confined them, often alone, to the house. The new efficiency also created new expectations. Ladies' Home Journal observed: "Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after the dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for a daily immersion. If our consciences don't prick us over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking."