Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [72]
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."