At Home - Bill Bryson [71]
By modern standards those first lights were pretty feeble, but to people of the time an electric light was a blazing miracle—“a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp,” as a reporter for the New York Herald breathlessly reported. It is hard to imagine now how bright and clean and eerily steady this new phenomenon was. When the lights of Fulton Street were switched on in September 1882, the awed Herald reporter described for his readers the scene as the customary “dim flicker of gas” suddenly yielded to a brilliant “steady glare … fixed and unwavering.” It was exciting, but clearly it was also going to take some getting used to.
And of course electricity had applications way beyond simply providing lighting. As early as 1893, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago displayed a “model electric kitchen.” It was exciting, too, though not yet very practical. For one thing, since electricity distribution was not yet general, it was necessary for most owners to build their own “electric plant” on the property to provide the necessary power. Even if they were lucky enough to be wired up to the outside world, utilities couldn’t supply sufficient power to make appliances work well. It took an hour just to preheat an oven; even then the oven could produce no more than a very modest 600 watts of heating, and you couldn’t use the stovetop at the same time as the oven. There were certain design deficiencies, too. The knobs to regulate the heat were just above floor level. To modern eyes, these new electric stoves looked odd because they were built of wood, generally oak, lined with zinc or some other protective material. White porcelain models didn’t come in until the 1920s—and they were considered very odd when they did. Many people thought they looked as if they should be in a hospital or a factory, not in a private home.
As electricity became more freely available, many people found it unnerving to be relying for comfort on an invisible force that could swiftly and silently kill. Most electricians were hastily trained and all were necessarily inexperienced, so the profession quickly became one for daredevils. Newspapers gave full and vivid accounts whenever an electrician electrocuted himself, as happened pretty routinely. In England, the poet Hilaire Belloc offered a snatch of doggerel that caught the public mood:
Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip—
The Terminals—flash—a sound like “Zip!”
A smell of burning fills the startled Air—
The Electrician is no longer there!
In 1896, Edison’s former partner Franklin Pope electrocuted himself while working on the wiring in his own house, proving to many people’s satisfaction that electricity was too dangerous even for experts. Fires due to electrical faults were not uncommon. Lightbulbs sometimes exploded, always startlingly, sometimes disastrously. The new Dreamland Park at Coney Island burned down in 1911 after a lightbulb burst. Errant sparks from faulty connections caused more than a few gas mains to explode, which meant that one didn’t even have to be connected to the electricity supply to be perilously at risk.
Something of the prevailing ambivalence was demonstrated by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who went to a costume ball dressed as an electric light to celebrate the installation of electricity in her Fifth Avenue home in New York, but later had the whole system taken out when it was suspected of being the source of a small fire. Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named Shirley Foster Murphy, in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies—eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness, and possibly even “the premature exhaustion of life.” One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.
For the first few years, no one thought of plugs and sockets, so any electrical appliances had to be wired directly into the system. When sockets did finally come in, around the turn of the century, they were