At Home - Bill Bryson [72]
Consumer growth was also held back by the depression of the 1890s. But electric lighting was ultimately irresistible. It was clean, steady, easy to maintain, and available instantaneously and in infinite amounts at the flick of a switch. Gas lighting had taken half a century to establish itself, but electric lighting caught on much more quickly. By 1900, in cities anyway, electric lighting was increasingly the norm—and electrical appliances ineluctably followed: the electric fan in 1891, the vacuum cleaner in 1901, the washing machine and electric iron in 1909, the toaster in 1910, the refrigerator and dishwasher in 1918. By that time, some fifty types of household appliances were reasonably common, and electrical gadgets were so fashionable that manufacturers were producing every possible kind they could think of, from curling tongs to an electric potato peeler. The annual use of electricity in the United States went from 79 kilowatt hours per capita in 1902, to 960 in 1929, to well over 13,000 today.
It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one. Thanks to Thomas Edison, electric lighting became the wonder of the age. Interestingly, as we shall see a little further on, electric lighting turned out to be one of the remarkably few Edison inventions that actually did what he hoped it would do.
Joseph Swan was so thoroughly eclipsed that few have heard of him outside England, and he isn’t terribly much celebrated there. Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography gives him a modest three pages, less than it gives to the courtesan Kitty Fisher or any number of talentless aristocrats. But then that’s much more than Frederick Hale Holmes, who doesn’t get mentioned at all. History is often like that.
* The French, according to A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, had a curious expression, which I pass on without comment: “By candle-light a goat is lady-like.”
* Both gasoline and kerosene were variously spelled in the beginning. Gesner actually termed his product “Kerocene” in his patent application of 1854. Scientists hate inconsistency, and petroleum geologists have from time to time tried to make the spelling of the terminal syllables match, but obviously without success. They have been equally unsuccessful with the terminal pronunciations of hydrocarbons, as evidenced by turpentine. The British resolved part of the problem by calling kerosene paraffin.
* South Foreland Lighthouse, now in the hands of the National Trust and very much worth a visit, became famous again in 1899 when Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first international radio signal from there to Wimereux in France.
• CHAPTER VII •
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone