Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  Electric light was now but one of many things that made life easier and also seemed to define what it meant to be modern. These things were inextricably linked to the imagination reaching for the future—much like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, in the unquiet darkness, stretched toward the single green beacon in the bay who, as young Jimmy Gatz, sought to remake himself: "Rise from bed: 6.00 A.M.; Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling: 6:15–6:30; Study electricity etc.: 7:15–8:15."

  Electric light, however, also brought its own particular changes into homes. Although gaslight had fixed the flame at specific points throughout each room, mantle gas lamps, like kerosene lamps, still provided a living warmth around which people could gather: "When the gas was turned on in the evening, the whole room was bathed in a soft yellow light," remembered one Englishwoman. "Round Aunt Ada's gas mantle was a gas shade made of long crystal glass drops that caught the light and danced like a thousand tiny stars." When gaslight and kerosene lamps disappeared, so did the last vestige of a central fire in the home. Electric light was everywhere, yet concentrated nowhere; everyone sat in the halo of his or her own lamp. The flameless light also brought with it myriad possibilities never before imaginable, since it could be placed where an open flame could not. For instance, one guide to electricity in the home suggested: "In the parlor an illuminated painted vase, lighted from within, may vie in attractiveness with the pictures on the walls, whose colors are almost as readily appreciated by incandescent as by day light, while opalescent globes of varied shade tone the brightness everywhere into subdued harmony.... On the veranda the lamps shine heedless of the wind. A very pretty effect can also be produced in conservatories, by suspended lamps of different colors half hidden in the foliage."

  Yet electricity did provide a new hearth: the radio, which was also among the most popular electric appliances. The family gathered around voices that broke the membrane between home and the world—voices coming from everywhere, bringing them music, news, weather, farm reports, and preachers. "When they say 'The Radio' they don't mean a cabinet, an electrical phenomenon, or a man in a studio," writer E. B. White said of his community; "they refer to a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes. It is a mighty attractive idol. After all, the church merely holds out the remote promise of salvation: the radio tells you if it's going to rain tomorrow."

  By 1920 electric service reached 35 percent of urban and suburban homes. The advent of electric trolleys and the automobile had spurred the move of many middle-class families from the cities to newly built neighborhoods on the outskirts, which had electric service included. Meanwhile, many poor city neighborhoods, home to immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and rural people who'd moved to the city, remained relentlessly in the dark. They had about as much expectation that electric light would come to them soon as an Aleutian Islander did. The social surveys of the time—such as those from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Massachusetts—which took stock of the deteriorating conditions in crowded city neighborhoods, investigated the lack of natural light, the poor sewage and water systems, and the questionable cleanliness of the milk supply. The surveys didn't mention the dearth of electricity, for not even social scientists yet imagined that access to electricity might be the right of every citizen.

  For many immigrant and black city dwellers, the electric life could be quite proximate: poor neighborhoods could exist in the midst of some of the wealthiest sections of a city. In Washington, D.C., they were hidden in plain sight:

  Walk around the outside of this block and you will see nothing peculiar about it. There are two imposing apartment buildings, the former residence of a senator, a handsome club house, several stylish boarding establishments and a number of three and four story, wholesome private houses. Your attention would have to be directed specifically to the four narrow wagon ways which run inward irregularly from the four sides of the square. A visitor from another city would take these to be passageways merely for the removal of refuse from back yards. But walk a hundred feet down one of these obscure byways and you find yourself on the borders of a new and strange community ... little wooden or brick houses whose rear doors point toward the rear entrances and separate yards of palatial residences.

  David Hajdu, the biographer of jazz composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, describes the Homewood section of Pittsburgh where Strayhorn grew up: "The whites generally occupied the residences on the main streets—good-sized and well-equipped two-story row houses—and the black families those in the alleys behind them—low-hanging, unpainted shelters with no electricity."

  Not only were such neighborhoods dimly lit, but the work many of the women did to make ends meet, such as taking in laundry, was ancient. Clotheslines and washtubs filled the yards. Charles Weller, who documented alley life in the capital in the early twentieth century, described a woman "ironing beside a smoking lamp without a chimney in the front room ... laying the white, clean-smelling garments into covered baskets for delivery." When Weller approached another woman, he observed that "the perspiring woman was too busy at her wash-tub to waste any time in conversation. She was indignant^] 'Yes,' she said, 'you folks makes us pay so much rent that we have to scrub our fingers off doing your washing and your scrubbing to earn the money; and we're glad if we can get enough extra to have ash cake and smoked herring for our little ones to eat.'"

  Actress and blues singer Ethel Waters, raised in a red-light district of Philadelphia, remembered that "each day was a scuffle, a racking struggle to keep alive. When people are in that situation the problems of a child must seem very unimportant. All that counts is eating and keeping a roof over your head.... None of us felt we were underprivileged or victims of society. The families we knew were doing no better than we were, so the daily struggle seemed universal." Still for her, the idea of light, abundant light—be it flame or electric—and its beauty in the night, meant something beyond articulation, no less so than for Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Those with an abundance of it seemed to be living the good life. According to Waters, "The prettiest sight in that whole neighborhood came at dusk when the lights were turned on in the sporting houses. I'd stand on the street and look in with awe at the rich, highly polished furniture and the beautiful women sitting at the windows wearing low-cut evening gowns or kimonos."

  12. Alone in the Dark

  They are pronounced overhauls ... the swift, simple, and inevitably supine gestures of dressing and of undressing, which, as is less true of any other garment, are those of harnessing and of unharnessing the shoulders of a tired and hard-used animal.

  They are round as stovepipes in the legs, (though some wives, told to, crease them).

  In the strapping across the kidneys they again resemble work harness, and in their crossed straps and tin buttons.

  —JAMES AGEE,

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

  WITH THEIR LACK of electricity, people living in densely packed poor city neighborhoods could claim close kinship to rural Americans, who, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, also had little expectation that electricity would soon come to them. Electrification of the countryside was an expensive, labor-intensive proposition. Rural lines had to be sturdier than urban ones to withstand the open miles, the winds, the ice and sleet. They could be difficult to string because the lay of the land and the kinds of soil—clay, sandy, stony—varied widely along the routes. Trees had to be trimmed away from the lines. And, since rural lines guaranteed at most only one, two, or three customers per mile—and cautious, parsimonious farmers at that—in contrast to the dozens of customers per mile in cities, electric companies reasoned that rural electrification wouldn't be worth pursuing until all other markets had been fully developed and exploited. If then.

  It's not that electricity on the farm hadn't been imagined. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, in Europe especially, scientists had experimented with electric plows, harrows, threshers, pumps, and milking machines. They had constructed
electric fences, smudge pots, sheep shears, and prods for balky horses. Electricity, they imagined, would keep down frost, fertilize the soil, milk cows, and destroy weeds. Electric lights would extend harvest days, increase germination, incubate eggs, encourage hens to lay in winter, and keep chicks warm in spring. Electrified rain would spur growth. A farmer one day, it was said, "will be a highly skilled electrician, who from a central switchboard at his farm will direct the germination and growth of cabbages, carrots, potatoes and other crops." And an electrified rural world must have seemed all the more probable after Tesla's motors and transformers created the first long-distance power lines between Niagara and Buffalo. As early as 1895, an article in the Country Gentleman predicted that "not improbably the barefoot boy now driving home the cows, when arrived at man's estate, [will] be gaily turning the sod on a Montgomery County farm by a three-share electric plow, with all the power of Niagara Falls behind him."

  Yet to turn to the American countryside in 1920 was to part ways with progress. At the time, there were about 6.5 million farms in the United States. Fewer than 100,000 of them were connected to central stations, and most of those were located in small northeastern states near cities, or on the West Coast, where irrigation spurred the development of electric lines. And farmers who were connected to high lines could pay twice as much as city dwellers for service. The lack of electricity only exacerbated the diminishing power of the countryside. Young men and women had been steadily leaving the farms during the past century; by 1920 the depopulation of the countryside reached a point where, for the first time in history, the number of those living on farms and in towns with a population of less than 2,500 was smaller than the urban and suburban population of the United States, which stood at 54 percent. Those actually living on farms (as distinct from those living in small towns) accounted for less than a third of the U.S. population, which meant less money was directed to rural areas for education and health and social services.

  The situation would only worsen during the next decade. The high demand for food during World War I had given farmers the incentive to increase cultivated acreage and intensify production. When demand fell off after the war, the markets collapsed, and the price farmers could get for their crops plummeted. With mortgages and loan payments to make, farmers were reluctant to reduce their production, and the continued overproduction of crops only ensured that prices would remain low. Many rural areas fell into a depression a full decade before the stock market crash of 1929.

  Invisible beyond the glare, the unending, backbreaking work of farm life continued unabated: "There was no quittin' time and no startin' time—it was all the time." Less than 3 percent of farmers owned tractors; most continued to work their fields with horses, which meant they were still devoting a share of their land to raising feed for draft animals—five acres of oats and hay for each horse. Without electricity, farmers had to haul water for their livestock by hand, and they had to milk their cows by hand, sometimes in the dark—an open flame presented too high a risk in the barn. "You could milk a cow in the dark, but there were a lot of things around a barn you couldn't do in the dark.... And that was terrible, to work around a barn with the explodable things—the hay and dust and so forth—with a lantern," recalled one proponent of rural electrification. A farmer from Texas commented, "Winter mornings it would be so dark ... you'd think you were in a box with the lid shut."

  The bottlers required that milk be kept at 50 degrees before pickup. If it wasn't, they rejected it, saying it was good only for pigs. Without refrigeration, farmers had to haul their milk to a stream or a well to keep it cool, or they packed it on ice. New England farmers had cooler weather in summer, and they could cut ice in winter and store it in sawdust, but Southern farmers had to buy ice, which was expensive, and it melted quickly in the extreme heat, even when buried in sawdust.

  The lack of central station electric power didn't affect all farms equally. The more prosperous and progressive-minded farmers modernized as they could, independent of the grid. Some generated power with the help of steam engines, windmills, and waterwheels, and in 1912, with the advent of Delco electric plants, which were gasoline-powered generators, more farmers found a little ease. Though expensive to operate, the Delco plants lit the barn for a few hours or pumped water and ran machinery. Almost always, farmers who had them reserved their use for farm work; the household itself remained unchanged. By the time half the residents of cities and large towns were connected to electricity, nearly all rural families still saw by the light of kerosene lamps.

  Within the farmhouse, electricity would have made an even greater difference to daily life than in towns and cities, where homes usually had been connected to municipal gas, water, and sewage systems before they were electrified. City wives could take advantage of servants, laundries, bakeries, stores, and butcher shops. For farmwomen, hauling water—a four-gallon bucket weighed more than thirty-two pounds—was one of the more demanding tasks. "I would have to get it ... more than once a day, more than twice; oh, I don't know how many times. I needed water to wash my floors, water to wash my clothes, water to cook.... It was hard work. I was always packing water," commented a Texas farm wife. Another said, "You see how round shouldered I am? Well, that's from hauling the water."

  Besides cleaning the house and cooking meals, farmwomen canned fruits and vegetables, which meant hauling wood or coal for the fire and standing over a hot stove almost daily in high summer. When the peaches were ripe, the corn was also ripe, and the beans and tomatoes, and they rotted quickly in the heat. But cooking and harvesting and canning were the least of it. "I have always lived on a farm except the first five years of my marriage, and I think I might almost as soon have been in jail, because the work is so hard and is never done. The hardest is the washing," remarked one woman. Doing laundry not only required hauling and heating water. Farmwomen soaked and scrubbed their entire family's clothes on a washboard in a zinc tub. "I got up many a time at three o'clock in the morning, when I had the family, to wash clothes," one recalled. They heated more water for rinsing, and wrung out all the clothes by hand or put them through a mangle, or wringer, before hanging them to dry. "By the time you got done washing your back was broke," one woman remembered. "I'll tell you—of the things of my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how much my back hurt on washdays." Women then spent another day pressing the family's clothes with their cast-iron sad-irons. Once again, the stove would be heated and enough wood hauled to keep it going all day.

  As for light, farmwomen still had to polish the globes of their kerosene lamps once or twice a week and deal with the smoke and soot the flame created. Over time, the brightness of oil lamps had increased—the Aladdin lamp, with its delicate mantle, was advertised as giving off the same light as sixty candles—but it was still work and still fussy. Former president Jimmy Carter wrote:

  Our artificial light came from kerosene lamps, and it was considered almost sinful to leave one burning in an unoccupied room. The only exception was in the front living room, where we had an Aladdin lamp about five feet high whose asbestos wick miraculously provided illumination bright enough for reading in a wide area. We turned this flame way down when we went to eat a meal, both to conserve fuel and to avoid the lamp's tendency to flame up and blacken the fragile wick with thick soot. When this happened—a mishap for which someone always had to be identified as the culprit—we had to endure an extended period of careful flame control while we waited in near darkness for the soot to burn off enough for us to read again.

  And kerosene lamps carried another ancient danger for mothers: "You know, you couldn't leave a baby that could move around at all in a room with a lamp or a candle. So you either had to keep the baby in the dark or stay there with him."

  There is a difference between living such a life before the development of electricity and living such a life because you are deprived of it. By the 1920s, farmers knew full well that their isolation existed in relation to another world. Yoke
ls, hayseeds, and cabbageheads, they were called. Some promoters of rural life, as much as they understood the necessity of the expansion of electric lines into the countryside, were apprehensive about the changes in expectations it might bring. They saw electricity as part of "this jazz-industrial age [full of] white-lighters, never satisfied, but excited, [who] just don't want to get away from the white lights, out close to themselves, more or less alone." But most farm families had no such apprehensions and grew to resent the absence of electricity—an absence that was obvious every time they visited a city or heard from friends and relatives living in one. Rural free delivery brought catalogs and magazines to their homes, and with them ads for electric irons and washers as well as electric lights. Although electricity still could not be explained, the electric life was idealized—electricity as the good fairy. The women in the ads were washed and made-up, and they wore the fashions of the day, complete with earrings and high heels. They stood as straight as dancers as they delicately pushed a vacuum cleaner with one hand. The modern kitchens in the ads were entirely free of clutter and were white, brilliant white: the enamel electric stovetops and ovens and the built-in cabinets gleamed—no trace anywhere of the soot and ash that farmwomen struggled with daily.

  But it was about more than ease and cleanliness. General Electric ads equated the electric life with being a good wife and mother. An advertisement from 1925 declared: "This is the test of a successful mother—she puts first things first. She does not give to sweeping the time that belongs to her children.... She does not rob the evening hours of their comfort because her home is dark. To light a room splendidly, according to modern standards, costs less than 5 cents an hour.... Certainly no household drudgery should distract her, for this can be done by electricity at a cost of a few cents an hour." The desire for such modern things meant nothing to a farmwoman. Even if they could be acquired, without central station power they were useless. This was a new kind of isolation.