Electricity and Electrification

Electricity and Electrification. Electricity—so named by the Englishman William Gilbert around 1600—was known since ancient times in the form of static electricity, which can be induced by rubbing amber, for example. From the seventeenth century onward, such scientists as Robert Boyle, Henry Cavendish, Alessandro Volta, G.S. Ohm, and the American Benjamin Franklin added to electrical knowledge. Franklin, whose Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751–1753) won international attention, is best remembered for his 1752 experiment with a kite and a key in a thunderstorm, which demonstrated that lightning is an electrical discharge. By the early nineteenth century, Michael Faraday and other scientists were developing techniques of generating electricity. Working independently of Faraday, the American Joseph Henry began research on electromagnetism in 1827. Henry constructed an electromagnetic motor in 1829 and later discovered electrical induction, crucial to generating power, and demonstrated the oscillatory nature of electrical discharges.

Practical applications came slowly and piecemeal, long before anyone conceived of electrification as a universalizing process.

Most early electrical technologies, including fire‐alarm systems, railway signaling, burglar alarms, doorbells, servant‐calling systems, and the telephone, were modifications of the telegraph (1838). These devices relied on batteries to supply a modest direct current. A much more powerful current was needed for practical lighting, heating, electroplating, and electric motors. Such applications developed only after about 1875, when improved generators and dynamos became available. After 1878 arc lighting, a powerful but crude form of illumination, drew crowds to demonstrations in city centers and expositions. Large cities quickly adopted lights for streets and public places such as theaters and department stores. Once Thomas Edison's firm installed incandescent lighting systems across the country, beginning in New York City in 1881, however, most indoor sites and street‐lighting companies chose his technology. Edison and his assistants developed not only a practical incandescent lightbulb (1879), but the now familiar system of wiring, wall switches, sockets, meters, insulated transmission lines, and central power plants. Edison designed this distribution system to compete with gaslight on price, while offering brighter and safer illumination. Rapidly adopted by the wealthy for fashionable indoor venues, including theaters, clubs, expensive homes, and the New York Stock Exchange electric lighting became a prestigious and sought‐after form of illumination.

Initially electrical technology had a separate energy source, as well as different financial backers. Lighting utilities, factories, and streetcar lines maintained their own power plants and delivery systems, with no uniform standards for wiring or current. The private systems installed by hotels, skyscrapers, and large private homes in the 1880s were incompatible with one another, but they did have the advantage of not requiring overhead wires, which would soon become so numerous in the major cities as to constitute a public nuisance) or costly underground conduits. This pattern of development merely continued the earlier piecemeal commercialization of electricity.

The electrical industry was the most dynamic sector of the economy between 1875 and 1900, growing into a $200‐million‐a‐year industry with the backing of farsighted investors like J.P. Morgan, who financed Edison's work. Once commercial development began, a flurry of mergers reduced the field from fifteen competitors in 1885 to only General Electric and Westinghouse in 1892. Railroads, once America's largest corporations, were now a mature industry, in contrast to the rapidly expanding electric traction companies, local utilities, and equipment manufacturers that collectively exemplified the spread of managerial capitalism (as opposed to partnerships and family firms). From its inception, the electrical industry also relied heavily on scientific research and development, a fact formalized when General Electric founded the first corporate research laboratory in 1900.

Electric trolleys, eagerly sought by burgeoning cities to replace dirty, slow horsecars, became practical after 1887, when Frank Sprague's new motor proved itself in hilly Richmond, Virginia. By 1890, two hundred cities had ordered similar systems. By 1902, two billion dollars had been invested in electric railways, and a typical urban family of four spent about fifty dollars a year on fares.

Electricity spread into factories with equal speed, starting with lighting in textile and flour mills. From a worker's point of view, incandescent lighting improved visibility and reduced pollution and the danger of fire, but it also made possible round‐the‐clock shifts. Furthermore, as electric motors and cranes provided more horsepower for production, they brought radical changes in the construction and layout of factories, most strikingly in Henry Ford's assembly line (1912), an innovation partly anticipated by Edison's experiments with automating iron mining in the 1890s. The assembly line was literally impossible in any complex industry before electricity freed machines from fixed, steam‐driven overhead drive shafts.

As electrical systems spread throughout the industrial, commercial, and residential worlds, utilities improved generating technologies and achieved economies of scale. They began to sell current and service so cheaply that the myriad small plants could no longer compete. Samuel Insull of Chicago early grasped the importance of consolidating power production and maximizing consumption. Insull convinced traction companies and factories to abandon their power plants and to purchase electricity from him. Through astute marketing he created one of the world's largest electrical utilities. As others copied his methods, holding companies created regional power companies and linked the many local systems into a national power grid. Private companies proved more agile in the consolidation process, for they possessed readier access to capital and had fewer jurisdictional problems than government‐run utilities, and by the 1920s they owned all but a fraction of national generating capacity.

The spread of electrification, between the 1880s and the 1940s, first in cities and towns and then in rural areas, provided a major economic stimulus and transformed everyday life in the 1920s and beyond. As an array of electric appliances, from fans and mixers to vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines, eased domestic labor for middle‐class housewives, a different form of electric power, the storage battery, was crucial to automotive technology. Electricity made possible not only the automotive and aviation industries, but also the new mass media—radio, films, and recordings—as well as night baseball, introduced in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935.

During the Depression of the 1930s, the federal government promoted public utilities, in part to create a yardstick to measure the price and performance of private power companies. It built a system of dams on the Tennessee River, administered by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which sold power to rural cooperatives, as well as systems of dams on the Colorado and Columbia Rivers. Because private power had generally ignored farmers, only 10 percent of whom had electricity as late as 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935 established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to bring power to this neglected sector of the nation. Rural electrification spread comparatively slowly in the South and Middle West, where customers were widely dispersed, but more rapidly in the arid West, where farmers wanted electric pumps for irrigation, and in areas served by interurban trolleys. The REA and TVA organized cooperatives and made available loans and technical expertise. By 1945, thanks to the New Deal, most of America was electrified. Electricity had important military applications as well, playing a crucial role in World War II and the Cold War era, for example, in the development of radar, rocketry, and the mainframe computers essential to ballistic missiles and space technology.

Electric lighting dominated public spaces and changed the culture in ways that went far beyond the functional. American cities became the most intensively lighted in the world, not least because of the spread of electric advertising. Spurred by the marketing campaigns of Westinghouse, General Electric, and the utilities, the illuminated skyline became a source of civic pride. Even small cities aspired to emulate New York City's “Great White Way,” where millions of flashing bulbs in Times Square and the theater district created a scintillating artificial environment. Nightlife expanded as hundreds of brightly lit amusement parks emerged as early as the 1890s, followed by stadiums and other outdoor venues.

As early as 1903, American cities were far more brightly lit than their European counterparts; Chicago, New York, and Boston had three to five times as many electric lights per inhabitant as Paris, London, and Berlin. This reflected more than prosperity and wealth. Levels and methods of lighting varied from culture to culture, and what was considered dramatic and necessary in the United States often seemed a violation of tradition elsewhere. Many European communities continued throughout the twentieth century to resist electric signs and spectacular advertising displays. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, for example, the city council refused corporate sponsors the right to erect illuminated signs.

Once American families acquired electrical lighting, they had less reason to cluster at night around the hearth, giving rise to a pattern of dispersed privacy. With power available at the flick of a switch, consumers ceased to associate lighting with physical work such as hauling wood and ashes or cleaning lamps. Electricity also extended the range of usable space. Domestic activity after sunset was no longer confined to the hearth and the range of the kerosene lamp. In commerce, immense department stores, office buildings, and eventually malls could be built with adequate illumination far from any natural‐light source.

In industry, while the flexibility of electrical power permitted the rearrangement of the work flow, the expansion of the electrical grid made it possible to locate a factory virtually anywhere, without regard for proximity to coal supplies or water power. Further, because not only factories, but also shops, homes, and businesses could spring up wherever the grid reached, electrification facilitated urban deconcentration. By the 1930s this trend was being assisted by the development of air‐conditioning and climate control, and later by computers and the electrical transmission of information.

But if electrification homogenized space, delivering light, power, climate control, and information to any site, it also facilitated the concentration of people in cities. Indeed, night satellite photographs of the United States reveal the location of thousands of cities as intense blobs of light. Electricity, a scientific curiosity in 1800 and still a novelty for the rich in 1880, had become indispensable by the mid–twentieth century and beyond.
See also Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Agriculture: Since 1920; Business Cycle; Consumer Culture; Dams and Hydraulic Engineering; Factory System; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Leisure; Mass Production; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era; Shopping Centers and Malls; Twenties, The; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Thomas P. Hughes . Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930, 1983.
Richard Rudolph and and Scott Ridley , Power Struggle, 1986.
David E. Nye , Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940, 1990.
Harold L. Platt , The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930, 1991.
Mark H. Rose , Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America, 1995.
Ronald C. Tobey , Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the Home, 1996.

David E. Nye