Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender 1880 - 1914

DOMESTICATING ELECTRICITY: TECHNOLOGY, UNCERTAINTY AND GENDER, 1880–1914

SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Series Editor: Bernard Lightman

TITLES IN THIS SERIES 1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858 James Elwick 2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of NineteenthCentury History of Science Rebekah Higgitt 3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain Jessica Ratcliff 4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences Victoria Carroll 5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877 Nigel Richardson

FORTHCOMING TITLES James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age David Phillip Miller

www.pickeringchatto.com/scienceculture

DOMESTICATING ELECTRICITY: TECHNOLOGY, UNCERTAINTY AND GENDER, 1880–1914

BY Graeme Gooday

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2008

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2008 © Graeme Gooday 2008 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gooday, Graeme Domesticating electricity : technology, uncertainty and gender, 1880–1914. – (Science and culture in the nineteenth century) 1. Electric apparatus and appliances – Social aspects – History – 19th century I. Title 303.4’83’09034 ISBN-13: 9781851969753

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables

vii ix

Introduction 1. Understanding the Domestication of Electricity 2. The Uncertain Identity of Electricity 3. Electricity as Danger 4. Electricity as Safety 5. Electricity as the Future 6. Aestheticizing Electricity 7. Personifying Electricity Conclusion

1 9 37 61 91 121 153 197 219

Notes Works Cited Index

223 265 289

Dedication To my late great-great aunt Emily Thomason, for her cautiously wise words: ‘Don’t touch that there electricity - it’s dangerous it is!’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In developing the themes and arguments of this book I am indebted to colleagues and PhD students in the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds who heard most of the chapters of this book presented in draft form and gave me invaluable feedback. Particular thanks should be recorded for Greg Radick who suggested to me the title of the book ‘Domesticating Electricity’ and to Geoffrey Cantor and Jon Topham for the many insights about periodical literature that I gained from working with them on the project ‘Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical’. Other members of the SciPEr project Sally Shuttleworth, Gowan Dawson and Richard Noakes also gave invaluable advice and inspiration. Especial thanks are due to my collaborator Sophie Forgan for introducing me to Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’s promotion of ‘decorative electricity’ and helping me appreciate the significance of her work. I am also greatly indebted to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, especially its Directors Sasha Roseneil and Ruth Holliday, who both gave me valuable opportunities to present my researches to them and to help me refine my understanding of the significance of gender. Many thanks are due to Helen Valier and Sam Alberti who both helped me to develop my insights on the nature of the relationship between gender, science and technology. Chapters in this book were presented at Imperial College, London and the Universities of Aarhus, Leicester and Manchester and Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds; at the HSS conference in Minneapolis in 2005, at the BSHS conferences in York (2003), Liverpool (2004), Leeds (2005) and Canterbury (2006). The friendly reception given to my work at these meetings was a great inspiration and I have used many critical suggestions from the audiences at those talks to refine the claims in this book. I am indebted to the Department of Philosophy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with the research leave in 2005–6 to undertake the bulk of the writing for this book. Also my thanks go to the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Life in Minneapolis and the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Institution for the visiting fellowships in summer 2006 that

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allowed me to explore the American dimensions of my project in the context of their very kind hospitality and generous assistance in aiding my researches. I am especially indebted to Elizabeth Ihrig at the Bakken and Alison Oswald at the National Museum of American history for their superlative guidance in assisting my studies of their unique collections. A number of other archivists provided invaluable assistance in my preparations for writing this book: Anne Barrett at Imperial College Archives; Anne Locker and Asha Marvin at the Archives of the Institute of Engineering and Technology; Chris Sheppard at Special Collections in the University of Leeds Library and Robin Harcourt William at Hatfield House Archives. Thanks to Bernie Lightman as the series editor for Pickering and Chatto who nursed this volume to fruition, as well as the anonymous referees he commissioned to offer invaluable critical advice to help me make radical improvements to a redrafted version of this book. And there is little I can say to sufficiently praise the staff at Pickering and Chatto, especially Paul Lee, Julie Wilson and Mark Pollard whose patience and indulgence beyond the call of duty made this volume come to press with the least stress that could have been imagined. In preparing this book for publication I received invaluable assistance from four energetic and dependable PhD students at the University of Leeds: Berris Charnley, Richard Gunn, Annie Jamieson and Jamie Stark. I could not have finished this work without the friendship and moral support of Bill and Christine Astore, Andrew Gibson and Natalie King, Christine MacLeod, Abigail Harrison Moore, Hannah Hunt, James Sumner, Julie Anderson, Nalayini Thambar, Peter Bowler, Frank James, Jeff Hughes, Aileen Fyfe, Rebekkah Higgitt, Christopher Renwick and Efstathios Arapostathis. Heartfelt thanks go to my family for too many good things to enumerate - not least the early years of domestic electricity in Rwanda and East Anglia. Finally what can I offer but unending gratitude to the incomparable Karen Sayer for introducing me to gas-lit pubs and the electric chicken.

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 2.1. ‘A Giant in Germ’, Punch, 25 June 1881 Figure 2.2. ‘The Coming Force – Mr Punch’s Dream’ Figure 3.1. From R. Hammond, The Electric Light in Our Homes Figure 4.1. Views of the Crystal Palace Exhibition Figure 4.2. Frontispiece of J. E. H Gordon, Decorative Electricity Figure 5.1. From Punch Almanack for 1877 Figure 6.1. Electric light in London Figure 6.2. Electric light at Cragside Figure 6.3. American conservatory, lit by incandescent lamps Figure 6.4. Advertising from J. E. H Gordon, Decorative Electricity Figure 6.5. Dining room decorations Figure 6.6. Drawing room decorations Figure 6.7. From G. Statter and Co. Lightning, 1 Figure 6.8. Room display at Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition, 1892 Figure 7.1. Frontispiece for T. du Moncel (ed.), La Lumière Electrique Figure 7.2. Replacement frontispiece for 1887 edition of La Lumière Electrique Figure 7.3. Reworking of the electrical fairy by Faraday and Sons Figure 7.4. ‘Electricity: Man’s Mightiest and Readiest Servant’, Scientific American

51 52 85 96 104 126 161 164 169 171 179 180 188 190 204

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1

66 67 112

205 206 210

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the cultural problems of early attempts to bring electricity into the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is thus a study of the domestication of electricity in two distinct but inter-related senses. First it concerns why and indeed whether householders decided to allow electricity into their homes, specifically to illuminate their houses with incandescent lamps. This is the issue of domestication construed as a matter of discretionary appropriation and incorporation of a new technology into the order of household life. In a closely related way this book is also about the extent to which electricity was interpreted as sufficiently tamed to be safely, reliably and comfortably introduced to the home. That is the issue of domestication qua technocratic control over the enigmatic natural agency of electricity. In this regard the uncertain identity and risks of electricity as well as the controversially glaring appearance and indeterminate prospects of its associated lighting technologies were serious problems. Accordingly I study the efforts by both ‘electricians’ (as both electrical physicists and engineers were non-disparagingly described during the late nineteenth century) and other male and female allies to deal with these problems, whether successfully or otherwise. While the geographical focus is on Britain, comparative reference is made to the USA both to avoid national parochialism and to highlight the international dialogue and common cultures in the early domestication of electricity, as well as some key transatlantic contrasts. Put more broadly this book asks why, if electrical consumption has (still) not come to monopolize the cultures of transport, cooking, heating and traction in those two countries, how far and why did electricity ever accomplish unique predominance for domestic lighting and power? To raise this question in a provocative manner, I suspend the assumption that electrification was historically inevitable – an assumption which in any case cannot be supported either by empirical evidence or by counterfactual suggestions that the modern world is inconceivable without electrification. Simply to assume that electricity offered a ‘natural’ or ‘progressive’ solution to past cultures’ needs for power and light is not just anachronistic but question-beggingly presumes the necessary association of electricity with ‘modernization’ in ways that this –1–

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Domesticating Electricity

book seeks challenge. I maintain that the historian must recover not only the particular contingences that led consumers to adopt electricity when and where they did, but also why they rejected it in other contexts. Chief among the factors I appeal to in order to explain the selective take up of electricity are the romantic and even atavistic cultures of magic, mystery, utopia, aristocratic patronage and even traditional marital partnership – very far from the tidily aseptic and dispassionate monolith of modernity. Overall my argument is that the domestication of electricity was only (partly) achieved with extraordinary effort towards four specific accomplishments that helped to represent electricity as a serious alternative to the long-running technology of domestic gas. First a widespread cultural fear of electricity’s apparent threat to body and home had to be overcome; second, effective technocratic management of the hazards of electricity had to be offered to the householder; third, plausible utopian visions of electricity as the key to future cultural harmony and contentment had to be constructed and promulgated to the public and fourth, the aesthetic revulsion to the electric light of many, especially female house managers, had to be countered with an effective campaign to show how the use of ‘decorative’ shaded lighting could render the incandescent lamp fit for the domestic domain. Thus I place more explanatory weight than hitherto customary in electrical historiography on the sets of alliances that helped to accomplish these four facets of domestication. These included not just the familiar and less familiar entrepreneurs of electric lighting: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Robert Hammond, St George Lane Fox and numerous other technician-popularizers. There were also three electrical engineering couples: Alice and James Gordon; Maud and Edward Lancaster and Constance and Charles Peel who worked within a significant gendered division of labour to communicate the taming of electricity to both male and female audiences. A further important loose grouping to which I refer is the technophile aristocracy notably Lord Salisbury, Lord Thurlow and Lady Randolph Churchill, all of whom showed strong political, financial and domestic support for the innovation of electric lighting in ways under-recorded by previous historians. Finally I draw attention to the support for the domestication of electricity made by selectively sympathetic press reports not just from the electrical engineering journals, but from such bastions of the Establishment as the London Times and the Anglo-American Review of Reviews founded by its radical Congregationalist editor William Stead in 1890. Notwithstanding the partisan scaremongering of the Journal of Gas Lighting, liberal reporting of reputed electrical accidents by a wide range of newspapers and the gossipy sharing of anxieties about electricity among servants, these advocates of electrical life persuaded at least some of the wealthier and more adventurous citizens to domesticate electricity. And it is through the promotional work of

Introduction

3

such advocates that we will get occasional glimpses of the household consumers deliberating on whether and when to domesticate electricity.

Uncertainty The first major theme in the book is that both laity and experts – crudely demarcated in such terms and thus easily over dichotomized – encountered electricity with a considerable degree of uncertainty, as reflected in contemporary representations of electricity as both mysterious and hazardous. Not even the expertise of authorities was unequivocally sufficient to meet public demands to explain what the mysterious agency of electricity actually was and whether it was safe. Such points of uncertainty were the starting point of my first book The Morals of Measurement in which I argued that physicists and engineers used measurement devices to cope with what they could otherwise not characterize by quantification.1 As I argued in the final chapter of that work, this uncertainty posed a particular problem, however, to designers of domestic supply meters who had to cope with consumers’ bafflement at the immaterial nature of electricity and the improbability of being able to measure the intangible consumption of electricity in any trustworthy way. In this book I take this theme of uncertainty further and pursue as key issues what ‘authorities’ in electricity did not know but were expected by the laity to know (the nature of electricity or the exact nature of its hazards). I suggest that experts’ strategy for dealing with uncertainty was that, finding the informed public both dissatisfied that they did not know what they ‘ought’ to and bored by their technical didactic writings, electrical specialists offered alternative narratives of futurism and luxury as substitutes or diversions from their problematic absence of certain knowledge.

Domestication Recent techno-cultural scholarship has developed an alternative to somewhat deterministic analyses of the putative ‘impact’ of new technology arriving in the home. The literature on the ‘domestication of technology’ presents a more plausible and interesting account of artefacts as needing to be ‘tamed’ by householders to assimilate them to appropriate performance in the home and this process of domestication is characteristically prolonged, fallible and reversible.2 Domestication is not only treated materially but also symbolically: an innovation will only gain a permanent footing in the home if its role is made meaningful and unthreatening to the household economy of values. Chapter 1 of this book draws upon and historicizes this important new approach to analyse early attempts to promote the introduction of electricity into the home. Treating domestication at a metaphorical level I address the related, and very public, problems confront-

4

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ing experts’ attempts to tame electricity theoretically by producing contemporary ontologies and to tame it practically by new species of technologies. As indicated above, neither was easily accomplished, or indeed accomplished to the satisfaction of both consumer and expert. In the face of much authoritative nescience and not knowing themselves what electricity was, householders sought assurances about how it could be managed within the home so as to accomplish safety and possibly even elegance of illumination. They were thus offered rhetorical and technological solutions to problems of bodily contact with potentially dangerous wires and with aesthetic discomfort under the clinical gaze of the electric lamp. The need to show the taming of electricity by technology helps explain, I suggest, why busy electrical specialists in the 1880s and 1890s diverted attention away from immediate problems with domesticating electricity towards the future promise of technological mastery in coming electrical utopias. At the same time, however, they faced stiff competition from rival gas interests who were equally determined to establish gas lighting as the principal domestic medium of illumination, heating and cooking. Thus electrical engineers in the 1880s sought polemically to highlight the health hazards of gas lighting to undermine the prospects of the obvious alternative to electricity. The mere fact that such roles in culture-moulding had passed by the early twentieth century from technical specialists to emerging sub-communities of popularizers and lay-experts should not distract us from observing that self-serving prophecies of complete electrification by the former group were not borne out in practice. By comparison with Anne Clendinning’s study of the highly effective role of women ‘demons’ (gas demonstrators) in promoting fin de siècle domestic gas consumption,3 I will explain why electric cooking and heating were not by any means as ‘universalized’ as electric lighting.

Electricity The third overarching theme of the book is an examination of what was meant by the term ‘electricity’ in the pre-1914 period when its potential arrival in the home prompted a growth in specialist literature more spectacular than that evinced by the advent of telegraphy and telephony before 1880. Underlying the question persistently posed by ‘What is electricity?’ were (at least) four different understandings of the nature and significance of electricity: the physical nature of electricity as presumptively discoverable to science (by analogy with the chemical composition of coal gas); the quasi-magical status of electricity as a mysterious craft mastered only by the cognoscenti; the motive power attributed to electricity (as compared to the power of fire, steam or animal energy) and the transformative power of electricity as a socio-historical phenomenon (analogous to railways and empire). Rather than acquiescing in these actors’ categories, I

Introduction

5

deconstruct these reifications of electricity to show that there was a persistent disagreement on some of the basic premises of the cultural debates involved in the ‘what is electricity?’ question. It was, for example, not only ether-obsessed Maxwellians such as Oliver Lodge who tried to argue that there really was no such thing as electricity to be discovered, no matter that it was somehow commodified, supplied and charged just like domestic gas supply.4 While theatrical demonstrations of electricity as a species of magic helped attract audiences and show how it could be tamed, it had to be represented as a mundanely safe product to be consumed without fear of risk in the home within the viable limits of householder’s own expertise. While many early representations of ‘electromagnetism’ interpreted the motive power involved as that of the familiar magnet harnessed to the equally familiar steam engine, this representation seemed unable to capture the sheer distinctive novelty of the power on display at numerous public electrical exhibitions. Finally, the notion of electricity as an agent of socio-political transformation was often anthropomorphized by the electrical industry into a human form (often as a female goddess, servant, fairy or muse, sometimes as male baby, imp or wizard), thus naturalizing the expectation of electricity’s rise to maturity and domination (a notion still popular in French culture as la fée électricité).5 Although appealing to some – perhaps more men than women – many female homemakers resisted this progressive-romantic iconography of electricity, preferring gas as the transformative agent of modernity.

Gender The final main theme concerns the complementarity and symbiosis of men’s and women’s expertise in accomplishing the domestication of electricity, just as Anne Clendinning has shown similar gendered patterns in the contemporaneous domestication of gas cookery.6 Traditional accounts of the coming of electricity to the home focus their explanatory endeavour almost entirely on the role of male technicians as if they naturally held the sole agency in social transformation. Thus, for example, Hughes focuses on the system building activities of such engineer-entrepreneurs as Edison or Westinghouse, mentioning but a handful of seemingly marginal females, such as Hertha Ayrton, and does not comment on the female-centred iconography of the electrical lighting publicity that he illustrates.7 Whereas Schivelbusch and Marvin include some reference to women as household consumers, both emphasize their relative lack of expertise or understanding of electricity; both illustrate but do not analyse the visual depiction of electricity as female rather than male.8 My approach will be to bring out what is hidden in these accounts: the great reliance of male electrical promoters on female expertise to transform a mere technological possibility into

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an actual household experience. It was not just that women were by tradition major decision makers about household matters: they had considerable discretion about whether to accept or reject the overtures of the electrifiers. Much of the early cultural anxiety about electricity centred on the female body, specifically threats to its physical safety and aesthetic appearance; this was the case notwithstanding the other purported health benefits of electric light and the raw empirical fact that before 1904 only men had been killed in electrical accidents. Such anxiety threatened the whole electrical enterprise, with many households resiliently maintaining gas lighting, cooking and heating well into the twentieth century as trusted ‘safe’ technologies in spite of the gas accidents reported almost weekly in the press. Given the gender-specific nature of authority in Victorian Britain, women’s expertise and authority were required to overcome the concerns of female householders in domestic contexts in which men’s ‘authority’ typically was either irrelevant or of limited weight. Not coincidentally, it was typically the spouses of electrical engineers who took on this role – whether voluntarily or otherwise – Alice Gordon, Maud Lancaster and Constance (Dorothy) Peel.9 As we shall see, all of these women played a substantial social and technical role in showing how well electricity could be domesticated. Nevertheless, this crucial role was not publicly acknowledged by the male-dominated electrical industry which later wrote such women out of their historical accounts of the purported inevitability of the success of electric lighting, just as much as they overlooked the hundreds of theatrical dancers who sported potentially hazardous electric jewellery to ‘prove’ that bodily security could be attained even in close proximity to electric lighting. Instead, the industry’s standard approach was to personify electricity as if it had its own momentum to enter into the domestic domain, albeit with significantly ambiguous gendering of this anthropomorphized identity. To articulate the basic argument of the book, I divide it into three sections corresponding to the general issues of how domestication and electricity were understood by contemporaries; how electricity posed concerns of safety and danger; and, lastly, how the gendering of electrical culture – both socially and iconographically – played a crucial role in the partial domestication of electric lighting. Chapter 1 contrasts the ‘domestication’ approach with historiographies of both ‘electrification’ and ‘modernization’, illustrating how the allegorical themes of taming and training lightning had a high profile in the history of popular promotion of electric illumination. Chapter 2 looks at the many meanings of electricity from the perspective of the history of science communication, raising some important concerns about what exactly was undergoing domestication and how communicating the understanding of this process was fraught with problems linked to the contested identity of electricity. Chapter 3 looks at a much publicized case study of an accidental fatality linked to electricity in December 1881: the death of Lord Salisbury’s garden

Introduction

7

labourer William Dimmock. By looking at how interpretations of his death multiplied with an ever shifting identity of the victim and causes of his demise, we can understand how fears of electricity were widely propagated in the 1880s and later. Chapter 4 then considers how the reputation of electricity as ‘safe’ was constructed by technocratic measures such as fuses and special insurance regulations for wiring, as well as the deployment of female dancers clad in electric jewellery to demonstrate that electric lighting on the body need not cause corporeal harm let alone death – unlike the paraffin and gas lamps that preceded them in the theatre. Chapter 5 continues by showing how much discussion of the domestication of electricity came to rest on engineer’s projections of an electrical future that appeared to make the domestication of electricity both inevitable and indeed the very epitome of progress – the domain of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Chapter 6 looks at the process of aestheticizing electricity, showing how a significant negative response from women to the apparent glare of electric light provoked something of a crisis for promoters of electric lighting that was in part solved by Alice Gordon’s book Decorative Electricity (1891) which showed wellto-do ladies how to transform their homes into elegant apotheoses of indirect and romantically installed illumination. Chapter 7 concludes by showing how the entire process of the domestication of electric lighting was accompanied by a gendered iconography of electricity in both male and female forms, as if the problem of the unknown identity of electricity could be resolved by anthropomorphization of this mysterious agency into familiar cultural figures that were distinctively either male or female. I conclude with some thoughts on the limited success of the domestication project in the face of competition from gas lighting, and what this tells us both about the history of electricity in the home, and the important historiographical concept of domestication.

1 UNDERSTANDING THE DOMESTICATION OF ELECTRICITY

It would be strange, indeed, if so readily controlled an agent as electricity, an Ariel before whom time and space seem to vanish, did not cross the threshold of our homes and enter into our household life. We find, in fact, that the adoption of electrical household appliances is daily becoming more widespread, here adding a utility, and there an ornament, until in the near future we may anticipate a period when its presence in the household will be indispensable. A. E. Kennelly, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribner’s Magazine, 1890.1 From the hot water for the morning cup of tea and the morning shave in one’s dressing gown, right on to the warming of one’s bed at night, electricity is ready to play its part in the home all through the day. Anon., ‘Electricity as domestic genie’, Review of Reviews, 1905.2

This book is a study of the arrival of electricity in the late-nineteenth-century domestic sphere, arguably one of the most abiding technical-cultural transformations of the modern era. The ‘domestication’ of electricity is represented here as a haphazard, accident-prone and controversial business; the assimilation of electricity into the home was marked by mystery, conflicting interests, a marked gendering of roles and iconographic culture. In this chapter I explain how this approach to the subject both extends established historical approaches and adds new perspectives and explanations to this transformation. In so doing I offer some alternatives to familiar assumptions in the historiography of what is commonly known as ‘electrification’. It is easy to interpret historians of electrification as narrating the unfolding technologization which followed relatively straightforwardly from the development of patents for incandescent electric light in 1878 and the evolution of the dynamo generator in preceding decades. Furthermore it can sometimes seem that presumptive natural endpoint of electrification is the comprehensive utilization of electricity. But, as we shall see, this teleology is not easily justifiable; –9–

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for example, transport systems across the world have not become fully electrified and perhaps may never be subordinated to electrical systems. More tellingly still, the persistence of gas cookery and household heating to this very day starkly rebuts some long vaunted forecasts of an all-electric future, and of the all-electric house and kitchen in particular.3 Given the uncertainty in the future prospects of electrification, I suggest that it is historiographically more productive to suspend belief in the inevitability of electricity’s pre-eminence in all aspects of modern culture and consider which aspects of life have become dependent on electrical technologies and which have not. Accordingly, this volume studies the role of contingency rather than destiny in the history of domestic electrical technology. Adopting this strategy will make it easier to understand why some householders in the United Kingdom chose to keep their homes gas lit for up to six decades after Edison and Swan’s electrical incandescent lamps became publicly available circa1881.4 A major purpose of this chapter, then, is to consider how we can understand the early history of domestic electrification while suspending the belief that electricity would inevitably displace older forms of illumination or cookery. To do this I show that the complex dynamics of domesticating electricity were two-fold in character. In a simple sense, domestication of electricity was the translation of electrical lighting and power supply from the public world into the private domain of the home. Yet this process involved more than just the geographicaltechnical feat of transferring the technologies of electrical lighting from street and factory into the household; it also involved gaining control over and taming the technologies of electric lighting and cookery so that they would adapt to the domestic order of life.5 The taming process involved mitigating the dangers, uncertain behaviour and aesthetic provocations of electricity, specifically of arc and incandescent lighting. Apropos of this I show how much was made in the late-nineteenth-century press of the connections between electricity and lightning; a connection that brought uncomfortably to the fore the folklore of electricity as perilous and lifethreatening, as well as being of mysterious provenance (or uncertified character) and uncomfortably dazzling. The various strategies of attempted house-training of electricity – processes that were fallible and thus also reversible – were crucial to overcoming concern about those threefold problems. In my conclusion I return to consider the extent to which this two-fold domestication thesis succeeds in capturing the dynamics of how electricity was appropriated into many (but not all) homes, despite the resilient challenges just mentioned. I start by comparing early encounters with domestic electricity in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining the many accounts of electrification in US culture and the way in which they relate to the problems mentioned above. In focusing on the works of David Nye, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Thomas Hughes,

Understanding The Domestication Of Electricity

11

Mary Ann Hellrigel and Linda Simon, I consider how far such accounts rely on the premise that electrification was integral to the process of modernization much discussed by such sociologists as Anthony Giddens. I thus give particular attention to the ways in which two major historians have adopted a historiography drawing upon themes cognate with modernization: Schivelbusch’s treatment of domestication as a corollary of industrialization and Hughes’s emphasis on the significance of system-building. Drawing on these accounts I examine how additional insights can be gained from the domestication of technology thesis as developed by Silverstone, Lie, Sørensen, Berker, Hartmann and others. I then consider how the domestication thesis can illuminate the case of the gaslight, the key precursor to the electric light in the home. Finally I conclude by explaining how issues of gender and class are crucial in understanding how the domestication thesis might be applied, extended and supplemented to illuminate the ways in which electric light and cookery did – or did not – become an integral part of domestic life up to the outbreak of the First World War. To begin this survey, I first look at the transatlantic cultures of commercialized electricity, considering the American experience of domesticating electricity in comparison to the British experience.

Electrification: the US Experience It is … fundamentally mistaken to think of ‘the home’ or ‘the factory’ or ‘the city’ as passive, solid objects that undergo an abstract transformation called ‘electrification.’ Rather, every institution is a terrain, a social space that incorporates electricity at certain historical juncture as part of its ongoing development. Electrification is a series of choices based only partly on technical considerations, and its meaning must be looked for in the many contexts in which Americans decided how to use it. David Nye, Electrifying America: social meanings of a new technology, 1880–1940, 1990.6

The ‘cultural’ historiography of electrical technologization in the USA is epitomized in David Nye’s Electrifying America. He elegantly shows how the public arrival of electricity in the USA could be characterized an evolving symbiosis of technology and culture. On his account electrification was not an autonomous phenomenon that impacted upon a passive society, but rather was shaped by societal context while, in turn, electrical technologies of power and lighting were used in ways that reshaped that context. Avoiding simplistic notions of the ‘social’ Nye describes electrical technology as being typical in its variegated relationships: ‘someone makes it, someone owns it, some oppose it, many use it and all interpret it’. Moreover, the social meanings of the ‘it’ were open and multiple since different groups and individuals interpreted electricity in distinctive ways: electricity was not a reified thing but rather an ‘open-ended set of problems and

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possibilities’, a theme I shall return to in Chapter 2. In documenting the advent of electrical culture in the USA, Nye focuses somewhat less on the problems than on the creative possibilities of using electricity to enhance the lives of American citizens, placing particular emphasis on their particular choices between rival forms of electrical technology. Most significant for him are the cultural politics of electrical technology: the predominant choice was for cooking and cleaning technologies designed for individual households rather than that collectivism sharing of technical resources favoured by numerous feminist writers seeking a more woman-friendly home.7 By why did Americans choose to adopt electricity at all? Or rather how were they persuaded to adopt it? Nye plausibly presents Americans’ early cultural encounter with electricity as mediated mostly through the wonder and awe of electrical spectacle; it was through the sheer glamour of public exhibits of electrical lighting that Americans learned to love electricity. Not only did they see dazzling displays in the ‘Great White Way’ that was the electrically lit high street from the late 1870s, but from 1882 they could even admire smaller-scale displays such as electrically lit Christmas trees. And, having taken electricity to their hearts, they then took it into their private homes. Notwithstanding the occasional calamities that were precipitated by early ill-behaved electrical installations, the US householder apparently had no difficulty in judging electrical technologies as offering a superior option to gas lighting and heating that soiled walls, consumed oxygen and fouled air. On Nye’s account the decision to electrify the home was not difficult for Americans. The only challenges were its comparatively high cost and rather localized availability to the consumer; once these problems had been overcome by the advent of large-scale supply systems in the first decade of the twentieth century, by the close of the 1920s the vast majority of US households were not only wired for electric power, but also using it intensively too. Ironically, however, Nye also draws unheralded attention to the problematic contemporaneous limits of the process of electrification in the USA. While accepting electricity in their homes during the 1920s, on the city streets Americans generally rejected the electrical tramcar in favour of the decidedly non-electrical automobile that allowed them far greater individualization of both comfort and style. Although the rise of the automobile is the only exception that Nye reports to the hegemony of electricity, he does also note that the gas stove was long preferred to the electric range as the latter cooked slower and its hardware was less reliable.8 Clearly, then, there were limits to the extent to which Americans were willing to embrace the electrical life. Overall, however, the multifaceted process of electrifying America apparently prompted only a few householders to pose serious opposition to the domestic arrival of electricity, whether through ambivalence or overt rejection.9 Nye certainly reports fears and anxieties about electrical lighting and power, but

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these were not representative of any broader social phenomenon urging caution. While recording some fears of electricity as if it was a dangerously ‘wild’ force of nature, he instead locates this specifically in the first decade of electric lighting. The 1880s saw both the superstitions of the Irish navvies who warily laid Edison’s cables in the streets of New York and the prognostications of eccentric ‘scattered critics’ who forecast apocalyptic consequences of meddling with the natural force of electricity. Nye sees these otherwise fleeting, transient concerns soon being overwhelmed by positive experiences of electricity. These included not only the awe-inspiringly spectacular illumination of the international exhibitions and high streets,10 but also the widespread use of electrotherapy by Americans to harness this ‘natural force’ in attempts to re-harmonize their bodily balance of forces.11 Nye thus astutely considers the question ‘what was electricity’ as symptomatic of the huge cultural interest in the mysterious identity of this new phenomenon,12 rather than as symptomatic of any doubts or anxieties about its nature and potentially harmful properties.13 Overall, his concern is how America was electrified, rather than considering in detail the testimony of those who had doubts about whether to electrify.14 Linda Simon’s study, Dark Light: electricity and anxiety from the telegraph to the X-ray, probes further than Nye into some of the doubts and worries that modulated Americans’ decisions about whether to participate in the public and private cultures of electricity. Unlike Nye, Simon draws attention to the accident-prone nature of early electrical technologies, gesturing both to the anxiety this induced among its potential consumers and to the long-term entrenchment thereby engendered in the more familiar medium of gas. Her subtitle derives from an article in the US Appleton’s Journal in 1881, ‘Electricity as a Factor in Happiness’, which examined the ‘anxious and hopeful attention’ focused on electricity when incandescent lamps first became available for daily usage. Anxiety was reportedly induced not only by the well-known unreliability of telegraphs and phonographs: electric lights flickered and extinguished haphazardly or were too dull, all being ‘more or less disagreeable’ in colour. Rather, opinions were so widely varied about the likely cost and working range of electric lighting systems that the public did not know which expert to trust. This left the American public unclear whether to treat electricity as harbinger of utopian peace or wreaker of gross disturbance to nature and society alike.15 Such doubts persisted for some years after this first phase, with numerous accidental conflagrations and fatalities. Alarm over the prudence of electrical life accompanied the very public debates in the period 1889–90 over the efficacy of judicial execution by the electric chair in New York State. As I discuss in Chapter 3, this episode not only reinforced lay suspicions of the deadly possibilities of bodily contact with electricity, but also revealed the acrimonious rivalry between the direct current lobby led by Edison and the alternating current

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interest led by Westinghouse, whose technology Edison had – with cunning desperation – recruited for the electric chair. As Mark Essig has told us, this anxiety over the implications associated with the electric chair fed off a prior concern: news of the deaths of dozens of workmen from accidental contact with the city’s ubiquitous overhead electric lines, graphically recorded in the local press. Yet no historian of US electrification has yet explained how the populace, faced with such repeated instances of death by electricity, whether judicial or accidental, chose nevertheless to bring electricity into their homes. Against this apparent passion for electricity the long term rejection of the electrical automobile takes some considerable explanation. While I do not offer answers to this question, I raise the problem to illustrate that even in the USA – the country which most enthusiastically assimilated electricity into its culture – the domestication of electricity requires explanation beyond what historians have previously offered. In Chapter 3 I suggest that fears and doubts about electricity in the UK were considerably more widespread than documented in Electrifying America, drawing attention to parallel cases of concern in the USA about bringing electricity into the home. I suggest that the key questions for the historians of domestic electricity are thus not limited to when and how electrification took place: a more telling question is why it occurred. We can thus expand Nye’s critique of the concept of electrification concern in the epigram above. As Nye correctly points out, explaining the cultural arrival of electricity in terms of electrification tends to overstate the autonomy of electrification as a monolithic process and tends to presume unduly the passivity of human subjects who were unable to control or even resist this process. More than this, however, electrification is a problematic historiographical concept because we cannot take for granted that all social spaces are bound at some point to incorporate electricity, whether partially or completely. The resilience of the gasoline-powered automobile and the gas-fitted kitchen show that it is difficult to see electrification as an inexorable process; rather, it is bound up with contingencies of context and discretionary judgment by past actors about the adoption of electricity that the historian must somehow recover. To understand the appeal of the electrification concept for historians (and indeed its consilience with much else in literature on this subject) we can see that it is linked closely to the notions of modernization and ‘modernity’.

Electrification, Modernity and Modernization The literature on the history of electricity in industrial culture has typically linked it closely to the condition of ‘modernity’ and the process of ‘modernization’. While much dispute lingers concerning its nature and provenance, modernization is often treated as a somewhat deterministic phenomenon in which the

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rationalizing power of systems of political-industrial management bring ever more globally standardized experiences: that is the condition of ‘modernity’.16 The technologized systems of production, consumption, communication, energy supply, transportation and surveillance, which are so central to late modernity, can be traced to the nineteenth century, especially the increasingly ubiquitous availability of electricity that underpins the technological endeavour of (post-) industrial societies.17 It is often assumed that electrification and modernization are integral features of the same phenomenon, and thus that electricity is synonymous with modernity. If this were the case, the domestication of electricity would be little more than a consequence of global modernization, needing little further explanation. Historians working, wittingly or otherwise, under the sway of modernization theory have hitherto thus not deliberated much on why electricity was domesticated let alone interrogated the often covert teleology in their writing on electrification. In what follows, I will show there are strong grounds both for avoiding this teleology, and for seeing instead a rather contingent association of electricity and modernity: this was a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon that contrasts greatly with the romanticization of electricity in the late nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 7). Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s celebrated study, Disenchanted Night: the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century, presents the rise of electrical illumination from the 1880s as the product of the inexorable rationalization of lighting production from free naked flame to the controlled clinical beams of electric lighting. Schivelbusch illustrates how, in the first third of the nineteenth century, the fickle blaze of the candle and oil lamp were first displaced by the gas lamp, the burning wick of which was then replaced with a supply from a centralized, extra-domestic supply of manufactured coal gas. This intermediate technology of the gas lamp was in turn eventually replaced by the hyper-efficient, flameless ‘cool’ electrical incandescent lamp, drawing on an external electrical supply system. As appealingly progressive as this narrative sounds, such a clear linear tale of modernization has it problems. Notable among these was the appearance in 1886 of the Welsbach incandescent gas mantle that embodied the same modernist principles as the Swan-Edison incandescent lamp. Rather than recognizing the gas technology rival as an alternative form of modernity, Schivelbusch somewhat begs the question by asserting that modern electric lighting would inevitably outmode even the clean, efficient and comparably modern incandescent gas mantle: In [such] cases the old technology was infiltrated, as it were, by elements of a new technology. While the old technical principle was maintained, new materials and processes did the work of modernization. As always when new wine is put into old bottles, however, the victory of the new technology could not be put off for ever.

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To explain the longer-term displacement of electric lamp by gas lamp, Schivelbusch focuses instead on the much publicized dangers of the traditional (pre-mantle) gas lamp as dirty, emitting noxious fumes and prone to explosions. This he contrasts strongly with the electric light that embodied the putatively modernist principles of clean, safe and hygienic technology for consistently uniform illumination. Yet since Schivelbusch does not acknowledge that these virtuous qualities applied equally to the incandescent gas mantle, we need not feel compelled to accept his view of the necessary ‘victory’ of the new technology of electricity. Indeed with some further asymmetry of treatment he underplays the problems of the accident-prone, unreliable and garish early electric light (see Chapters 3 and 6) while playing up the risks of early modes of gas lighting. His account of the domestication is thus simply that: ‘All doors were immediately opened to electric light owing to its self-evident superiority to gas lighting’.18In later chapters I will demonstrate that not only did many domestic thresholds in the UK not open up to electric lighting as Schivelbusch suggests but that the gas industry successfully persuaded householders to keep using gas lighting and to adopt gas, in preference to electric, cookery. Needless to say, standard accounts of modernization theory need supplementing to enable us to understand why the electrical version of modernity won out in some domains – notably lighting and power – while the gas version won out in others, notably cooking and heating.19 While not explicitly case in the mould of modernization theory, Thomas Hughes’s Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society makes a cognate appeal to the explanatory power of ‘systems’ to show how mass electrical supply came to be a feature of modern society. In contrast to Schivelbusch’s focus on lighting alone, Hughes rightly argues that the development of electric lighting cannot be explained by reference to the isolated development of individual technologies but rather by reference to the integrated, systemic relation between interconnected sets of hardware. The term ‘system’ has two significations for Hughes. Firstly, as a former engineer, he emphasizes that as a precondition of an incandescent electric lamp being able to serve as an illuminant it had to be connected to a system of dynamos, wiring systems, switches, technical management and fuel supply. Secondly, it was the growth and geographical spread of such integrated systems – acquiring indeed their own autonomous momentum – that made possible the mass consumption of electricity by 1930. Eschewing crude globalizing narratives Hughes is sensitive to the contextual nature of systems development whilst steering clear of verbose global narratives; he characterizes well both the disparate political cultures within which electrical supply systems developed in American, British and German cities and key roles of system-building individuals: engineers and entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison.20

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His account of electrification allows for the persistent heterogeneity of technical cultures in ways that no previous historian had acknowledged. That being said, Hughes is characteristically modernist in offering only a perspective on the growth of electrical supply. He leaves it as a relatively straightforward ‘given’ that householders would have wanted to electrify their home: on his account there is seemingly no need to explain the consumer demand for electricity. Indeed in terms of his systems analysis, Hughes does not document the roles of a crucial component part of the electrical system: the active consumer, without whose cooperation and engagement new supply systems could not have developed. In following chapters I will critically examine this assumption of the self-evident demand for electricity among householders, showing how – in Britain at least – fears over electricity, concern about its uncertain identity and dislike of its appearance in illumination significantly inhibited the demand for domestic electricity. In Hughes’s terms, these forms of resistance to electrification were as much ‘reverse salients’ for Edison and others as were the technical problems of electrical supply systems that threatened the very possibility of their development, as much indeed as the long-term rivalry of gas. Moreover Hughes’ work has been criticized for restricting its scope to competition between electrical supply systems – primarily between direct current (Edison) and alternating current (Westinghouse). Harold Platt and Mark Rose thus comment that such analysis of early developing electrical systems needs to include both rivals in gas supply as well as stand-alone installations in factories and houses.21 As we will see later, strategically placed examples of domestic installations – such as in the home of Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill in 1883 – were crucial in creating broader consumer demand for domestic electricity, glamorizing it as an upper-class luxury rather than as a utility of modernity. From that point of view we can see that the growth of modern systems of electricity supply necessarily built upon the earlier successes of that most localized of domestic forms of electrical supply, viz. the dynamo in the household basement, garden or shed.22 We thus see characteristic examples of how broad appeals to modernization to explain electrification break down into localized instances of electrical consumption, exhibiting localized meanings. This is symptomatic of a dissatisfaction that critics of modernization theory have with the quasi-determinist thrust of modernization, especially its assumptions of the levelling of knowledge and experience into a homogenous continuum. Most notably, Clifford Geertz has shown how strongly localized knowledge has long remained resilient and necessary feature of modern societies in the face of the allegedly universalizing tendencies of modernization.23 The work of Ronald Kline offers a useful revisionist, neo-modernist analysis of technological change in the mid-twentieth-century USA that uses such a productive framework of localism.

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In Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America, Kline shows how the telephone, automobile, radio and electric light did not simply arrive in the farmlands of America as an inevitable sequel to their adoption in US cities. Each of these technologies was deployed by rural consumers in innovative ways, creating what Kline calls ‘novel forms of modernity’, paying attention to geography, social class and gender to show how each of these technologies was - or was not - implemented in distinctive forms of rural modernity. For example, large numbers of farm men and women were sceptical about the introduction of electrical technology, declining to purchase a full complement of electrical appliances and not using electric lights and appliances as prescribed by the government modernizers (the Rural Electrification Administration) and manufacturers.24 But if modernity was such a pliable attribute of technology the question thus arises: how and why a connection was constructed in the first place between electricity and modernity? Kline does not suggest that ‘modernity’ was part of the active language of farming consumers, nor that this was recognized by them as a major category for interpreting electricity. From the work of Mary Ann Hellrigel we can see how in fact a contingent association between modernity and electricity was forged in the USA by marketing. It was the advertising culture of early electrification that sought to present the ‘electrical’ as synonymous with the ‘modern’ and thus as somehow desirable. For example, the Philadelphia Electric Company exhorted those interested in using electric illumination in shop window displays to draw in female customers in 1910: ‘If it isn’t electric it isn’t modern.’25 And two years later the Harrisburg Electric light Company in Pennsylvania advertised its wares using the slogan: ‘The Chief Attraction of the Modern Home: electric light is the stamp of modernity.’ To explain the nature of its modernity, in contrast to the tradition of gas and oil lamps, it argued that ‘Electric Light is clean, safe, pure and always dependable. It is ready at any time – at the touch of a switch – to flood the home with brilliance, bringing instantly an air of brightness and cheer.’26 From this analysis we learn that US sales agents constructed an appeal to electricity’s modernity as its defining feature in order to contrast it with older, allegedly obsolete, illuminants. Yet, from Hellrigel’s account, it is unclear how consumers responded to such claims about the positively valorized notion of modernity. What did householders understand by the term ‘modern’? Did they value modernity per se in evaluating which technologies to bring into the home? Were they persuaded that electricity was the only domestic energy utility that could be associated with modernity? Did such considerations influence the decisions of householders thinking about whether or not to adopt electricity in their homes? In the absence of answers to such question I will look elsewhere for explanations to explain the domestication of the electric light. We shall see

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that, for the early period of British electrical lighting at least, romanticized presentations of electricity as both an upper-class luxury and a mysterious magical force, anthropomorphized as a benign fairy, goddess, wizard or imp were more important than any appeal to modernity. I suggest that modernity only came to be central to the language of electrification in Britain somewhat later than the period covered by this work, namely in the 1930s. It was thus in 1932 that the Electrical Development Association could present ‘Mrs Modern’ as being delighting at in living in an ‘electrical age’ (see epigraph above). To bring in considerations of modernity to explain the earliest phase of the domestication of electricity in Britain would be to commit an unwarranted anachronism. Finally, in rounding off this section on the critique of modernization theory applied to the development of electricity, we can note Anthony Giddens’s observation of the long-term mystery around electricity. In The Consequences of Modernity Giddens critiques the characteristically modernist notion that, with the aid of experts, modernization has banished the mystery of high-tech modern life, with rational science purportedly being able to explain it all. In sympathy with Clifford Geertz he argues that, insofar as we have seen a process of modernization occurring, knowledge of technical matters has not arrived tidily at a uniform and transparent state. Giddens thus asks rhetorically: ‘how many of us today when we switch on the light know much about where the electricity supply comes from or even, in a technical sense, what electricity actually is?’27 As we shall see in Chapter 2, electricity arrived in the home with hardly anyone being very sure of what it was and only a minority having any clear sense of where it came from. In that sense, little has changed since the late nineteenth century. So if we are to take actors’ categories seriously to recapture the domestication of electricity, what useful themes can we draw from the late-nineteenth-century journalistic culture of writing on electricity?

Tamed lightning – Electricity Under Domestication There are dangers connected with electric lighting, but I believe it can be made safer than any other means of illumination. There have been several accidents arising from electric lighting, houses had been set on fire, and persons had been killed, and especially in New York and Boston some of the conflagrations have been very great. But I have examined, with a great deal of care, all the cases of which I could get particulars... It could not be too strongly urged that the whole danger is due, not to the electricity, but to the want of experience in the workmen. Electricity is most tractable; if it can be led across the Atlantic without danger or difficulty, surely it can be led about our houses without danger. William Preece, Discussion on ‘The Fire Risks of Electric Lighting’, Society of Arts, London, 3 May 1882.28

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In looking at public debates on electricity in the period 1880–1914, there are two strikingly recurrent, countervailing themes that have not been given extensive consideration by historians before. The first is the persistently accident-prone nature of electricity that was widely reported by the press in the UK and USA. Such stories covered – often with hyperbolic embellishment – incidents of electricity causing injury, death, conflagration or embarrassing extinctions of lighting at public events.29 These were tales of electricity out of control: a force of nature acting beyond and even against humankind, narratives readily correlated to the long-known lethally destructive power of lightning. Such tales evidently made good news copy for newspapers and journalists needing a melodramatic story to attract readers. While such stories fascinated the public, they also played upon the fears of the same readers about the risks of bringing electricity into the home. By contrast the second of these representations, typically from promoters of electric projects or from sympathetic reporters, offered a diametrically opposed view. This is the interpretation of electricity as a friendly agency that was ‘tractable’, ‘tamed’, ‘captured’ or ‘trained’, in other words entirely subordinate to human bidding. As we shall see, this was especially manifest in discussions of electrical technologies as forms of ‘captured lightning’ or ‘trained lightning’. How then are we to understand the coexistence of these two apparently conflicting modes of representing the public presence of electricity? I explain in what follows how these can be seen as part of a late-nineteenth-century cultural debate over how far electricity had been or could be domesticated both inside and outside the home. From the testimony of William Preece in the epigraph above, we can see how this latter discourse emerged in response to the former. In the early years of electric lighting, there were numerous calamities attributable to the hazardous nature of electricity especially, but not exclusively, in the USA. By May 1882, there had been three deaths in the UK from workmen who had accidentally come into contact with the electrical wiring of arc lighting systems: a euphonium player at the Holte Theatre in Aston in 1880, a Russian stoker on the Tsar’s yacht, Livadia while moored in the Thames and, most recently, a labourer (William Dimmock) at Lord Salisbury’s estate in Hatfield in December 1881 (Chapter 3). Less fatally, there had been numerous accidental fires at the Paris International Electrical Exhibition in autumn 1881 that had somewhat embarrassed the organizers. As a self-appointed authority on electrical matters, the UK Post Office’s Chief Electrician, William Preece, sought to allay fears about these alarming incidents. In order to do so he relied upon two rhetorical strategies to argue that it was not electricity that was to blame for these incidents, but entirely contingent (and thus avoidable) circumstances. One strategy was to blame inexperienced workmen for incompetent installations that left bare wires exposed to easy reach of passing members of the public.

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This, Preece emphasised, was due to the inexperience of the British workmen who, at this early stage in the new technical development, necessarily had little previous practice in handling electrical installations. As they acquired further experience in handling electricity, he argued, this problem would fade away and one major source of danger would thus effectively disappear.30 From this Preece implied the allegedly inherent ‘tractability’ of electricity would emerge for all to see. His other strategy was historical extrapolation from one of the better known successful accomplishments of electrical engineering closest to his own area of telegraphic expertise. This was the successful laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable, completed in 1866 after several previous attempts, without fatalities or serious injury, Preece passing discreetly over the immense and well-documented practical problems of Atlantic cable laying.31 From this absence of serious harm to those who had handled an electricity-carrying wire over thousands of miles Preece averred that there could ‘surely’ be no danger in leading electricity around the much smaller scale of the ordinary home. In making this case Preece passed silently over a crucial matter of scale. The currents travelling through transatlantic cables were so delicate that telegraph electricians could simply use their tongues to detect them - very far from the case with the ferociously strong currents used in electric lighting. Indeed Preece’s tendentious telegraph analogy was not to my knowledge ever used again to formulate claims for the alleged ease of taming electricity into the domestic environment. We will see in Chapter 3 that, long afterwards, public and professional voices were raised to highlight the risks of electricity, especially high-voltage alternating currents among those more familiar with the trustworthy exploits of telegraphy. As will be shown in Chapter 2, the problem for those like Preece who claimed there was no intrinsic danger to electricity was that very little agreement existed about what electricity actually was and thus there was little incontrovertible ground for asserting anything about its intrinsic qualities. Claims for the inherent safety of electricity as a domestic enterprise thus often retreated in the face of such problems of conflicting authority in identifying the very nature of electricity. And, as Chapter 4 will show, instrumental means were thus adopted for constructing a reputation for electricity as a safe agent in conjunction with new responsibilities for domestic users to ensure that they maintained conditions of safety. It was a key issue prior to Preece’s lecture (and for years thereafter) that almost all deaths associated with electricity arose in the use of high-voltage alternating currents; this was certainly the case with the three fatalities in the UK in 1880–1. But problems of unruly domestic behaviour could arise with direct current installations as well, undercutting the partisan claims of direct current specialists such as Thomas Edison that the public should shun deadly alternating currents from their homes, and allow access only to the mild-mannered direct

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current. As Lady Churchill, found in 1883 when she was taking pleasure from the benefits of a free installation from the Crompton company at the London (Marble Arch) home she enjoyed with her aristocratic spouse and Conservative politician, Lord Randolph Churchill, even their high social prestige and her famed glamour did not prevent the mischief caused by the mundane failure of a Crompton dynamo installed in the basement to power their luxuriant display of dining room illumination: [Ours] was the first private house in London to have electric lights…I remember the fiasco of a dinner-party we gave to show it off, when the light went out in the middle of the feast, just as we were expatiating on its beauties, our guests having to remain in utter darkness until the [oil] lamps and candles, which had been relegated to the lower regions, were unearthed. The electric light did not prove to us an unmitigated blessing…32

In the early years of electric lighting such fiascos were by no means uncommon, either for those with their own domestic power supply, or those lucky enough to live on a street with centralized mains power supply available to them. As Alice Gordon later recalled of her collaboration with her spouse James Gordon in the early 1880s there was a titanic struggle among the nascent electro-technological community to make the technology reliable: Perhaps no one but an electric engineer’s wife can truly judge of what that struggle has been. In all other branches of science, the experiments are carried out in private, and generally with friendly assistance… In the development of the public distribution of electricity for lighting purposes… every experiment has had to be made in public, and every failure has been immediately exposed to the criticism, not only of friends but of an indifferent public, and those who, for various reasons of their own, desired failure…. Many an engineer’s wife know how common it was four of five years ago for their husbands, who had come back late at night worn out and exhausted, to be fetched again by the message that there was “something wrong at the Works.” 33

Rather than electricity performing as the compliant domestic servant publicized by the advertising of the electricity industry, it was nearer to the increasingly troublesome servant who became less and less inclined to act when the mistress or master of the house issued their bidding.34 Even when electrical engineers finally gained the upper hand in their attempt to render generating technology reliable, in the late 1880s the partisanship of the direct versus alternating current battle in the ensuing decade added a further dimension of controversy to whether electricity could be – or had been – tamed. As news reports came in almost daily in 1889–90 of more fatalities from highvoltage alternating current lines in New York, the issue transmuted into the unruly ferocity of alternating currents that, in the hands of its opponents, was readily represented as more difficult to tame than direct current. Thus, for exam-

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ple, as a leading electrical authority, William Crookes wrote in his February 1892 article for the Fortnightly Review, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, ostensibly to present the future utopian prospects of a fully electrified world (see Chapter 5): Whilst we are seeking for cheaper sources of electricity, no endeavour must be spared to tame the fierceness of those powerful alternating currents now so largely used. Too many clever electricians have shared the fate of Tullus Hostilius, who, according to the Roman myth, incurred the wrath of Jove for practising magical arts, and was struck dead with a thunderbolt. In modern language, he was simply working with a high tension current, and, inadvertently touching a live wire, got a fatal shock.35

As we shall see in Chapter 3, this allegory on the death of a workman by accidental contact with high tension alternating current is one of many reworkings of the accidental death of a workman on Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield estate in December 1881. In retelling this tale in classical mythology, Crookes betrays his own commercial interest in the success of the Notting Hill Electric Light Company,36 promoting direct current by imputing to alternating current the quality of inherent fierceness. By implication a contrast was being draw with the more congenial qualities of direct current, from which no accidental deaths had yet been reported, and thus did not need taming to be fit for introduction to the home. Indeed this was the point of Edison’s associate in direct current supply, A. E. Kennelly, in describing electricity as ‘so readily controlled an agent’ in his piece ‘Electricity in the Household’ in 1890 (see epigraph above). In fact Sir William Thomson’s intervention in the dramatic ‘battle of the systems’ between Edison and Westinghouse in 1890 found him adjudicating on ‘Electric Lighting and Public Safety’ between the rival claims of these engineers in the pages of the North American Review. Undercutting the habitual melodrama of the direct current. lobby’s characteristic claims about the treacherous nature of alternating current, his point was that it was not the kind of current used that was dangerous but the voltage at which it was communicated. Thomson emphasized that either direct or alternative current system could transmit at one-hundred volts in the home, and this was ‘perfectly safe to the user’ whichever system was used; a point he emphasized had been proved by a ‘large and varied experience in England’.37 In Chapter 2 we will see how representations of the hazardous nature of alternating currents was further effectively deconstructed by Nikola Tesla’s contemporaneous demonstration that, when operated at very high frequencies, they were also quite harmless to the touch. Contemporaneous with this concern over whether the electric light could safely be adapted to the home was the issue of aesthetics. Could the quality of illumination from the incandescent electric light be adapted to the purposes of domestic ease and comfort, blending harmoniously into household life? Or

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would it always be so aggravating to the eyes, displeasing on the countenance and generally conducive to stress and headaches that it was only fit for the nondomestic arena? As we see in Chapter 6, a significant number felt the latter was the case, especially female house managers who were more accustomed to the softer, warmer glow of burning gas, oil and candles. The main problem was that the sensibilities of late-Victorians were initially attuned to the arc lamp, the first widely available electrical lighting technology on the city streets of the Northern hemisphere in the late 1870s. Only a very few tried it in their own homes and even then not for lighting throughout the house: the electrical engineer Rookes Crompton and his collaborative spouse Elizabeth tried it for ‘special parties’ in their London home in 1878–9, evidently to help promote the Crompton Company launch into the supply of arc lighting systems.38 Lord Salisbury tried it in the dining room at Hatfield house in 1880 as one of his many household experiments with electricity, but was forced to remove it after his female kin complained bitterly about the glare and noise of these dazzling beacons dangling over the meal table (see Chapters 3 and 6). As one lighting engineer later commented, arc lighting actually did a great deal in this period to render electric illumination ‘unpopular’; there was a widespread view that so ‘glaring’ a light could never be generally adopted in the home since it could not displace the ‘soft and mellow glow’ of gas or candles to which householders were accustomed.39 It was thus that the Brush Company, who were responsible for lighting Lord Salisbury’s house, advertised incandescent lamps in 1885 in implicit contrast to the arc light as being ‘soft and brilliant, but not necessarily dazzling’ so much that it could be considered a ‘beautiful object, requiring no external decoration’.40But even the incandescent lamp was the subject of much gendered contestation: while male householders seemed to prefer getting the maximum illumination possible from incandescent lighting, their female kin were often reported as strongly disliking the effect of this, especially when such lights were used directly overhead or shining straight into the face. Their dislike of this illuminant was so deeply ingrained that some vowed never to allow it into their houses (see below and Chapter 6). The controlled management of electric lighting had become a cultural theme by the mid 1890s as we can see by the journalistic reportage terms ‘trained’ or ‘tamed’ or ‘captured’ ‘lightning’ adopted by some partisan supporters of the technology.41 This metaphor was used to dramatize the (not uncontentious) view that the hazardous natural power of electricity had been symbolically and practically harnessed, and not just for household usage. Most conspicuously this trope was adopted by William Stead and his editorial staff in the Review of Reviews in sympathetically framing accounts of electrical endeavours. In June 1893 this journal published a visiting (male) Briton’s description of the opening of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair: exhibition buildings illuminated by both incandes-

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cent and arc lights were thus ‘seen by the tamed lightning.’42An interview with engineer-showman Nikola Tesla, ‘The Electrical Wizard of the West’, published by the same periodical in 1901 reported his forecasts of telegraph transmission not only across the Atlantic ocean, but even to Venus and Mars. Under the subheading ‘Marvels to be wrought by tamed lightning’, readers learned of Tesla’s plans to literally ‘harness the rays of the sun to the chariot of the earth, and make them obedient to man’s bidding’; with the aid of electrical technology, giant mirrors and magnifying glasses, Tesla would thus supply free heat to the world’s poor.43 As I discuss in Chapter 5, the favourable reportage given to the promotion of electrically-wrought utopias was characteristic of the Review of Reviews under Stead’s editorship. It was not, however, just Stead’s journal which utilized this cultural representation of electricity as being domesticated. Two journals reported use of it in innovative cookery techniques to capture the way in which an electric heating element seemed, at least to its advocates, to be more easily controlled than a naked coal gas flame. In 1894 the Crompton Company promoted electric cookery by donating its new culinary equipment to Margaret Fairclough’s elite School of Cookery in London. The upmarket (aristocratic) fortnightly Black and White reported enthusiastically in January 1895 that students at this ‘School with Trained Lightning’ produced food hygienically, safely and efficiently – if not cheaply. Fairclough later, nevertheless, dropped her advocacy of electric cookery, and returned to more conventional modes of food preparation.44 Some years later an attempt to relaunch the art and science of electric cookery was made by Maud Lancaster (writing as ‘Housewife’) in association with her electrical-engineering spouse Edward W. Lancaster in Electric Cooking, Cleaning, Heating: a manual of electricity in the service of the home. For the frontispiece of this book, she adopted a quotation from the journal Truth: ‘Fancy cooking cutlets and frying pancakes with captured lightning! It really seems tremendous. One would have fallen in love with the exquisite cleanliness of the process.’ However, as I have discussed elsewhere, the Lancasters’ plan to promote electrical cookery was never rendered as universal as the adoption of electric light: the use of gas cookery grew rapidly as the use of gas lighting came under ever heavier competition from electric light.45 Even if they could tame electricity to do their bidding, they could not quite tame the cooks of Britain to follow their exhortations that they should cook electrically because it would be cleaner and more efficient to do so. The domestic thrill of harnessing the natural danger of lightning was not quite enough to turn fear or indifference of electricity into a wonderment that brought complete acquiescence. Having considered these contested and partisan claims to the tameability of the electric light, let us know consider how far the recent theory of ‘domestication’ in technology studies might offer us a more useful approach than

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‘electrification’ or ‘modernization’ to the historical changes I discuss in ensuing chapters.

Taming Technology, Domesticating Gas Domestication, in the traditional sense, refers to the taming of a wild animal. At a metaphorical level we can observe a domestication process when users, in a variety of environments, are confronted with a new technology. These ‘strange’ and ‘wild’ technologies have to be ‘housetrained’; they have to be integrated into the structures, daily routines and values of users and their environments … Re- and de-domestication processes can take place – adapting and morphing to meet the changing needs of users, the constitutions of households and workplaces. Maren Hartmann et al. (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technology, 2005.46

One recent sociological approach to explaining how and why new technologies have been adopted in the home has characterized it as a process of ‘domestication’. This is an open-ended process of adapting and disciplining technologies to discretionary needs of users, or rejecting them if they cannot satisfactorily be made part of established routines and practices. Insofar as this approach is applicable to electrical history, this domestication approach contrasts in two major respects with accounts that invoke the processes of electrification and modernization. Those latter approaches, as explored above, can be interpreted as assuming a form of teleology – moving towards a pre-established end point – and non-discretionary, allowing users little freedom of action in accepting new technology. These approaches are akin to what is sometimes caricatured as ‘technological determinism’: the notion that ‘technology’ is an autonomous agent that ‘determines’ key aspects of how society works and especially the idea that changes in technology necessarily lead to correlated ‘effects’ in society.47 We shall see in Chapter 2 how Victorian promoters of electricity often presented electricity as just such an independent force, transforming society and being typically anthropomorphized in various male and female forms to render it more readily culturally recognizable (see Chapter 7). Some of the classic literature in the history of domestic electric technology can be read as tending towards such quasi-determinism, portraying the arrival of new devices in particular social settings as having ‘impacts’ on passive homes and workplaces that simply adapted to the new arrival. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, for example, treats the arrival of the electric light in the home as the end result of the industrialization of illumination. He tells us that householders had to redecorate their homes when they replaced their gas or candle lighting with electric light since different materials and colours were needed to ‘cope’ with electric light. The new technology of electric light thus required householders to adapt to its

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constraints rather than vice versa. In such teleological accounts the only major mode of choice for the consumer pertains to the speed of adaptive responses to new technology. Thus, for example, in his comparative study of the arrival of the telephone in 1876–1912, Charles Perry laments the ‘delay’ in British adopting telephonic communication relative to the presumptive pioneering standard set by the USA. Perry explains this lagging effect as a result of obstruction by UK Post Office bureaucracy that saw the telephone as a lucrative threat to its telegraph monopoly.48 In this characterization Perry does not, however, consider whether the British public either actually wanted or needed the telephone; as I show below the mere existence of this communications technology was not sufficient for consumers to demand it. Since the 1980s historians and sociologists have sought to expose the questionable causal assumptions and evidential selectivity involved in such mono-dimensional construals of technological change. Some of this critique came from left-wing commentators, for example Langdon Winner, who sought to highlight the role of large corporations and governments in the ‘social shaping’ of technology to benefit their own powerful interests.49 A later alternative was the ‘Social Construction of Technology’ (SCOT), whose Edinburgh-based opponents claimed that the contingencies of consumer choice, rather than the visions of engineers or technocratic politics, characterized the design of a technology such as the bicycle or fluorescent lamp. This revisionist SCOT approach mustered cogent evidence of the open-ended form and fate of successions of artefacts,50 yet its emphasis on the apparent sovereignty of consumer choice in the design of new technologies left unanswered some questions about how and why some new technologies were actually assimilated into everyday lives, and why others were not. Thus more recently scholars have began to study the behaviour of users – and non-users – of technology in ways that avoid assuming that they respond in any simple functional way to the existence of new inventions or the processes of marketing them. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore how the fruitful approach of ‘user studies’ focuses attention on technological consumers and their diverse cultural identities to interpret their engagement – or non-engagement – with new devices.51 Before that, I consider here the domestication of technology that directs attention more towards the early dynamics of the technology-user relationship. From its inception circa 1992 in the work of the late Roger Silverstone, this approach mapped the way that new forms of hardware were generally not immediately and readily assimilated into presumptively acquiescent new domains. Such hardware, it is suggested, had to be ‘domesticated’ when introduced to a new setting: users learned to discipline their devices out of tendencies to recalcitrance, complexity, incongruity or perilous mishap, so that they could be assimilated into the existing routines and patterns of life. They could thus

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eventually become part of the perceptual furniture of the home. Just as with the domestic pet, the new device had to be adapted to become a trusted co-resident in a given social setting or face expulsion from it.52 Silverstone, Mies, Hartmann and others initially dedicated their efforts to exploring how this approach can be applied to understanding the new domestic technologies of the late twentieth century - the television, home computer and internet. Some extended this approach to automobile technology; not just because the car was effectively an extension of the home, but also because the metaphor of domestication need not be restricted to technologies in the domestic domain; after all, the key analogical process of domesticating animals can be applied to those that work outdoors. And it is in that vein that I offer the two fold meaning of this book’s title: domesticating electricity refers both to the taming of it and the bringing of it into the home, processes which I argue were closely inter-related, and not absolutely successful. Ironically, for all their enthusiasm for the historicist metaphor of taming animals, Silverstone et al. do not consider the applicability of their approach to earlier domestic technologies, such as lighting, which began their careers outside the home. It is thus left to historians to show that the domestication of technology did not begin with the electronic gadgetry of the twentieth century but arguably with the innovations of lighting technology in the nineteenth century. In taking up this challenge I aim to show both how their approach helps to understand the language of taming and training electricity explored above and how historical research on the domestication of lighting can throw up new aspects to domestication. Before that, the utility of this approach can be seen by revisiting Schivelbusch’s account of the shift of gaslight from street and factory to the household as a matter of domestication rather than (just) the result of industrialization. As is well known, manufactured coal gas was used in London for street lighting in Pall Mall from 1807, and by 1813 was available for domestic consumption for the very wealthy in the Westminster district.53 Although shunned by the upper classes as being ‘vulgar’, gaslight offered the great spectacle of controlled illumination and grandiose display for middle-class public events, as shown, for example, at the BAAS meeting in Cork in 1843.54 Despite the glamour and prestige accrued by gaslight as a result of such displays, in contrast to the familiar unobtrusive candle the unmistakable malodorousness of coal gas and its propensity for explosion had long ago been encountered by its late-eighteenth-century advocates. Some mid-Victorian middle classes evidently chose not have gaslight in their homes, preferring instead to leave it applied to street-lighting and factories where such problems could more readily be mitigated. Those adventurous enough to try coal gas piped into their homes soon found they benefited from having gaslights that were steady, low maintenance and thus less demanding of housemaids’ regular attention; moreover they could easily be regulated by wall

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controls. Yet they soon also found that these lights tended to produce acidic fumes that created more disorderly effects than the familiar blackening of walls by candle soot and errant globules of melted wax. With gaslight, wallpaper was discoloured, leather coverings to books and furniture were damaged, polished metals were tarnished and headaches caused to even the healthiest of householders. Moreover, gas lamps were often accused of making rooms uncomfortably hot and stealing the oxygen from them (see Chapter 4). Given this balance of benefits and drawbacks, why then did so many individual householders in mid-nineteenth-century London opt to have gas installations as their domestic mode of lighting, rather than relying on candles or oil lamps?55 And, having done so, how did they cope with its unruly propensity to acidify, heat, corrode and deoxygenate? To explain how such choices were made, we need to look beyond considerations of the ‘industrialization’ of gas lighting or its apparent corollaries: increasing availability and decreasing cost. Judith Flanders reports that the use of gaslight was often contained both spatially and temporally to keep its negative effects (and costs) under control. In early years gas was typically used only where most strictly necessary: in hallways (where draughts extinguished naked flames), nurseries (to preempt accidents involving tumbling candles or oil lamps) and kitchens (where brightness was at a premium). Where gaslight was used in dining rooms and parlours, its use might be restricted to special days such as Christmas, thus minimizing domestic damage. Yet the adoption of gaslight was not simply domesticated into existing routines: it in fact entailed changes to household practice and architecture. The use of gaslight prompted redecoration much more often than previously and whitewashing took place several times a year rather than just annually. Moreover, ventilation grilles and shafts were introduced into the architecture of houses from the 1860s to ensure that toxic vapours were removed, and the missing oxygen restored to the room.56 Here we see a mutual accommodation between domestic infrastructure and newly arrived technology that does not so easily fit the domestication thesis interpreted simply as the disciplining of the latter to fit into the routines of the former. If the domestication metaphor does not work comprehensively for the adoption of gaslight in those respects, we can at least see how design changes during the second half of the nineteenth century made the domestication of gaslight somewhat easier. For example, in 1858 the industrial gas manufacturer William Sugg produced a new design of gas lamp with incorrodible burner tips; these prevented the hissing, whistling or roaring noises that had afflicted previous forms of batswing or fishtail forms, much to the exasperation of householders. In 1874, Sugg introduced the Juliana lamp with ‘Albatrine’ shades that lent its appearance a particular white, glowing beauty; the apotheosis of early gaslight aesthetics. Most important of all, in 1886, with severe competition from incan-

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descent electric lamps in the offing, the (thorium coated) Welsbach gas mantle emulated electric incandescent lamps in almost every major respect, eliminating toxic vapours and most other deleterious effects.57 Thus, as one home manual observed in 1900: Of the artificial lights now in use for domestic purposes candles are the most elementary and insignificant, oil lamps the most general and economical, coal-gas the most convenient and trustworthy, electric lights the most healthy safe, brilliant and luxurious. Assuming that all methods are equally available, the average householder will choose gas, and the result will justify the preference.58

And indeed so readily domesticated a gaslight as the gas mantle was the standard fitting in many middle-class homes until the 1930s, as indeed it was for the working poor once gas companies began to supply them with gas in 1892, charging them via penny-in-the-slot meters.59 So why then did at least some middle-class homes adopt electric light in preference to gas, and others not? To understand this, we need to consider topics not central to domestication theory: the differentiation of domestication in technology by social class and gender. The next section thus considers the consumption of electric light as sybaritic luxury for the upper classes, set dialectically against the distaste of some middle-class and upper-class women to the glaring ‘brilliance’ of electric light. In other words, we need to ask questions about the social identity of the promoters and users of domestic electric lighting.

Class, Gender and Domestication: Experimenting, Glamorizing and Resisting The number of private residences now lighted by electricity is very considerable. The way in which men of wealth have constituted themselves into amateur electricians is very characteristic of this country. There is something about electricity, in all its practical applications, that renders it captivating. Its marvels excite the imagination, its powers astonish the mind, its ready adaptability encourages invention, and its easy control favours its employment for many purposes. William Preece, ‘Domestic Electric Lighting’, Electrician, 1886.60

A recurrent theme of histories of electric lighting is that, during its first half century, the principal obstacle to widespread adoption in the domestic sphere was its sheer expense. It is indeed undeniable that the price of electric lighting in the United Kingdom did not drop to a cost comparable to that of gas lighting until the construction of the National Grid in the 1930s–40s. But while economic factors are a crucial consideration in the analysis of who was able to electrify their homes and when, appeal to financial issues is insufficient to explain the deci-

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sions of householders to electrify their homes before the arrival of the grid. More specifically, without understanding how a demand was created for the domestic electric light, we cannot begin to understand how its price fell to the point where it could seriously challenge the previously domesticated gaslight.61 As an electrical engineering commentator remarked in Chambers Journal in 1900: It is very frequently asked if there is any possibility of electric light becoming cheaper. The answer to this query depends on a great many factors, the chief being whether and when electricity will come to be generally used for the distribution of mechanical power, cooking, and heating. The reduction of the cost of electricity is very much ruled by the consumption.62

This Associate Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers explored the possibility that auxiliary domestic uses of electricity might increase demand for it, but soon pessimistically concluded that there was no doubt on a large scale that electric heating or cooking was ‘too expensive to admit of its general adoption’. So we need to understand why the demand for electric light increased despite its manifest challenges, especially lack of affordability, for early consumers. Apart from being more expensive for heating and cooking than gas, it was often criticized as being less reliable in supply, harsher on the eye than gas and posed risks to life and limb much less easily understood given its mysterious identity. Certainly then the wealthy elite who had shunned the vulgarity of industrial coal gas were important not only (as William Preece suggests) because they alone could afford to install electric light in their homes; their role was crucial both to experiment with electric light in their homes in attempting to domesticate it, and also to glamorize it as a luxury commodity (of which the lower-middle classes might one day afford to emulate ownership).63 Once this tiny, if influential, upper-class constituency had established the fashionable status of electric lighting, the middle-class masses, who consumed only the popular literature and public displays of electricity, could aspire to indulge in this dazzling extravagance if budgets ever allowed, even if not in the immediate future. Most particularly, it was a few key upper-class and upper-middle-class women, led by Alice Gordon, who were able to overcome feminine distaste for electric light by advocating a particular approach to aestheticising it in the home, albeit in ways somewhat fraught with conflicts over gender prerogatives. The two themes of socioeconomic class and gender I use to differentiate the character of both audiences and advocates for domestic electricity were neither new nor unique to this particular medium. These concerns recapitulated issues that had arisen decades earlier in the domestication of gas, albeit that interest in illumination by coal gas was class-specific for the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie rather than for the upper classes. A satirical commentary from Punch

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in 1854 on this topic shows how domestic gas installation was experimental, expensive and fraught with gendered conflict over whose prerogatives prevailed in household management. In a series of comic cameos dedicated to lampooning the ever overambitious Mr Paterfamalias, the ignorantly patriarchal Mr P perpetually sought to ‘improve’ the family’s London home in response to reports on domestic improvements in recent Parliamentary blue books, despite the prudent reservations of the long-suffering Mrs Paterfamilias. When Mr P tells her he has arranged to install gas for lighting, heating and cooking without consulting her, she gently reminds him of the Times reports of domestic gas explosions and acid fumes that destroy polished covering and books.64 Notwithstanding her informed warnings, the ‘Domestic Reformer’ proceeds with the installation and Mrs Paterfamilias’s fears about the disastrous consequences are confirmed: not only does the installation end up costing twice as much as her husband had imagined, but the cherished household cook Mrs Fieri-Facias resigns even before the installation is begun, disgusted at the prospect of having to prepare the family dinner at a ‘nasty stinking, singing, busting gas-pipe’ instead of her tried and trusted coal-fired stove.65 The message was clearly that experimentation with gas by the ill-domesticated male generated domestic conflict and chaos; a problem that surfaced in the world of domestic electricity a quarter of a century later. In 1880 only the very wealthy, powerful and leisured could afford to try the experimental technology of electricity, in other words the aristocracy. One famous aristocratic location for electric light was Hatfield House, the grandiose hereditary home of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury, leading Conservative politician and later Prime Minister (1885–92 and 1895–1902). Out of political office after his party’s electoral defeat in 1880, Salisbury found time to add electric light to his extant pursuits in photography, chemistry and telephony.66 While he had sufficient wealth to pursue such pursuits, even as former Foreign Secretary (1878–80) he could not get away with imposing the harsh brilliance of the pre-Edison Jablochkoff arc light on the influential dinner parties organised by the Marchioness, Georgina (see Chapter 6). Salisbury was ‘saved from humiliating defeat’ in this social faux pas in autumn 1880 by adopting Joseph Swan’s electric filament lamp (the chief rival to Edison’s lamp) on the advice of mutual Newcastle friend Sir William Armstrong, then also electrifying his north-eastern mansion ‘Cragside’ (see Chapter 3). Those who could neither afford the extravagance of electric light, nor expect to be on the dinner list at Hatfield House could soon enjoy the displays of electric light in London’s public places. The House of Commons was electrically lit from winter 1881, with the British Museum, Savoy Theatre and Royal Academy following soon after.67 But it was one thing to bring electricity to these public spaces and quite another to make it a household commodity. So promoters of domestic electricity sought to harness the aspirations of the upper-middle classes

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to the electric light by finding a domestic site in central London at which it could be displayed. Joseph Swan’s associate R. E. B. Crompton enticed his wealthier audience by free installations in politically expedient and conspicuously metropolitan locations. As mentioned earlier, in 1883 the Crompton company offered a system gratis to Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill at Marble Arch, calculating that his company would benefit greatly from the electrically lit dinner parties hosted by Lady Churchill (the American-born Jennie Jerome). She and Lord Churchill were evidently willing to experiment with the hazards of the new light (see above) and their determination to do so was certainly publicly noticed. It was not just passing horses that were excited by the rumbling noise of their cellar dynamo; she reported that the ‘light was such an innovation that much curiosity and interest were evinced to see it, and people used to ask for permission to come to the house.’68 Crompton thus later recalled the significance of Lady Churchill as being ‘most useful as an advertising agent’ in promoting his companies apparatus for domestic electricity: She delighted in showing off to her friends of the fashionable world our various electrical appliances, among them a pear-shaped switch, christened the ‘Randolph,’ which enabled her ladyship to light up or switch off without leaving her bed.

The glamorization of electric lighting by Lady Churchill’s dinner parties certainly generated an interest for the electric light among the professional upper-middle classes: Crompton’s customers soon afterwards included William and Ellen Crookes and the dramatist William Schwenk Gilbert. Indeed the company’s tactics were soon followed by other suppliers of domestic electricity : Siemens and other rival manufacturers soon began to copy us, but I claim that we, ‘Cromptons,’ introduced the arrangement, and that these private installations were the chief means of popularizing the electric light, and caused the demand for its use which now began to arise.69

The role of upper-class and upper-middle-class women in promoting electric light was not only important to render it fashionable; their gendered authority was also crucial to overcoming the dislike of it by a not-insignificant group of female householders who vowed not to allow it in their homes. This echoed an earlier pattern of response to gaslight by a generation used to the softer glow of candle light: as Charles Dickens’ Household Words recorded in 1868: ‘Ladies tell us they do not look well by gaslight’.70 Since women in well-to-do homes were conventionally responsible for household aesthetics, they played a major role in deciding whether or not to electrify the home. But – following the contours of the disagreement between Mr and Mrs Paterfamilias above – their decisions were not necessarily consonant with the wishes of menfolk who were more typi-

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cally impressed by dazzling public illuminations. It is in this second respect that we can readily see gender as an important theme in analysing audiences for the early electric light. As Mrs J. E. H. Gordon was so much at pains to note in Decorative Electricity of 1891, women had started to exercise a newfound discretionary power in vowing never to allow the ‘very glaring and disagreeable’ electric light into their homes. The unflattering exposure of ‘every wrinkle and line’ and the headaches of which women often complained when faced with the electric light at the dinner table could be prevented by application of suitable artistry to situating and shading the lamps. She thus promoted the art of ‘decorative electricity’ primarily, although not exclusively, to an audience of wealthier middle-class women, and thereby sought (with some degree of success) to reconfigure them as ideal critical consumers. This in turn encouraged the kind of purchasing behaviour that would assist her husband’s electrical engineering business. And, as I discuss in Chapter 6, it was only by winning over such female consumers that electric light came to have a long term future at all in Britain.71 This discretionary power of female audiences to accept or reject electricity was just as important in relation to the popularization of electrical cookery from the 1890s. Thus it was that Maud Lancaster – writing under the familiar authorial title of ‘Housewife’ – sought to revive advocacy of this technology in collaboration with her engineer spouse Edward Lancaster in Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning in 1914. To a bourgeois society faced with the problem of servants becoming ever more difficult to recruit (and more difficult still to discipline), they promoted electricity to a newly-categorized audience of ‘housewives’ as a novel and ultra-obedient home help that never wanted a day off or answered back.72 Yet, as Anne Clendinning has shown in her excellent study of the enormous success of the gas oven in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attempting to popularize electric cookery as a standard feature of ‘modern’ domestic life enjoyed only limited comparative success. Just as in the USA, albeit in somewhat different socioeconomic conditions, gas prevailed in the British kitchen long after the First World War, notwithstanding the rival publicity of Edison and others to promote electricity.73

Conclusion Following in the pattern of Clendinning’s scholarly examination of the role of the gas ‘demons’ – lady demonstrators of the effective operation of gas ovens – much of the rest of this book will be dedicated to studying the role of those who helped to demonstrate why consumers should try electricity in their home. By looking at how these various proponents of domestic electricity actively presented their case to a range of audiences, we will see the irony of how they simultaneously

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erased their efforts by anthropomorphically representing the process of domesticating electricity as allowing friendly personae to cross the threshold to act as benign servants in the home. Thus, the book closes with the final strategy of domesticating electricity: the personification of electricity as Ariel or the Genie of the Lamp, among many other highly gendered forms. As a prelude to that study, the next chapter will consider the question of how electricity was, or was not, understood by contemporaries. After all, what was it that was domesticated under the name of electricity? As we shall see, there was plenty of confusion and mystery surrounding this issue which both perplexed householders and prompted some domesticators of electricity to adopt the mantle of wizards who seem to have tamed the ineffable agency to do their bidding.

2 THE UNCERTAIN IDENTITY OF ELECTRICITY

Our experience is that electricity for lighting purposes, as for telegraphy and telephony, is a most docile and easily managed servant, if only ordinary care and prudence are exercised, and that under such conditions the public need not have any apprehension in availing themselves of the many valuable advantages that exist for them in adopting the electric light. ‘The Accident at Hatfield’, letter of James Humphrys, General Manager of the Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation.1 [It is] impossible for me to tell what Electricity is! I cannot even learn myself from our greatest Scientists “what Electricity really is”. They know how to collect it, or “generate” it, also many methods of utilising it the benefit of mankind. Maud Lancaster [‘Housewife’], Electric Cooking Heating, Cleaning etc: being a manual of electricity in the service of the home, 1914.2

The previous chapter examined what domestication meant for the first few decades of electrification in Anglo-American culture. This chapter examines the diverse meanings of ‘electricity’ for the period in question. What was it that was being – or not being – domesticated under the name of electricity? There was quite a variety of answers to this question, and not only different answers but also different kinds of answers; cultural, material, metaphysical and iconographical.3 This proliferation of different meanings of electricity matters if we are to understand why so little common understanding of electricity was actually shared among contemporary householders, engineers and electrical promoters first discussing its domestication. Different groups had distinctively different concerns here; the identity of electricity mattered very much for those who were considering whether to allow it in their home. Was it a benign and wellunderstood servant who would respond in an orderly way to the householder’s wishes, as claimed by the supplier of electrical generators implicated in the much publicized death of one of Lord Salisbury’s labourers in December 1881 (see epigraph)? Or was it an insidious stranger with uncertain credentials who brought hazard and discomfort into the very heart of the home? – 37 –

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The latter representation was characteristic of those with an economic interest in opposing electric lighting, notably in the gas industry; it was also facilitated by a press that enthusiastically reported alike both electric innovations and electrical mishaps or fatalities arising from the new technology. Moreover, this issue mattered to both suppliers and householders seeking mutual agreement on a commercial arrangement for the latter to pay the former for electrical consumption. Unsurprisingly then, faced with such opposing and morally-loaded representations of the nature of electricity the response of householders was to ask repeatedly ‘what is electricity?’ This is all the more understandable when we consider that they typically wanted to know what kind of commodity they would be paying for if they installed electrical lighting in their homes. Was it a fluid like water or gas that could be metered – if not absolutely reliably – with the technical contrivance of the domestic meter? But if electricity were not such a determinate material commodity but rather an ethereal mystery, how could householders trust suppliers to charge them fairly? As I have shown elsewhere, by the 1890s, for reasons entirely of engineering pragmatism they were billed for the electrical energy they consumed, not the flow or pulsation of that elusive chimera ‘electricity’.4 This chapter explores the diverse meanings on the identity of electricity in 1880–1914 and the provenance of these meanings. As we shall see there were, on the one hand, radical discrepancies among the few who claimed to know what electricity was and widespread uncertainty among the many who professed not to. Among those who did claim to know what electricity was in a physical form, it was variously conceived as a single fluid, as two fluids, as a mode of motion in the ether, as a form of motive power or energy and (latterly) as the collective performance of electrons, as well as an ineffable mystery beyond the power of science to capture. The first section addresses the question of the communication of electricity in the late-nineteenth century USA and UK, locating the issues at the heart of this chapter in the context of historical studies of science communication, especially the prerogative of the ordinary householder to ask the question ‘what is electricity?’ Then I move on to consider the understanding of electricity as a fluid, emerging from the period of telegraphy, documenting the long-term persistence of this understanding of electricity, notwithstanding attempts by experts to categorize this as either a hypothetical or technically erroneous view. Then I reflect on the way in which the new understanding of electricity as a motive power in the early 1880s involved a demotion of the magnet from an older understanding of ‘electromagnetism’ as a cultural and technical driving force, showing how Punch anthropomorphized electricity as a male infant. Finally I consider how the theme of electricity as a motive power was taken up by engineers, most notably William Preece, to present electricity as fundamentally a form of energy,

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against the severe criticisms of Maxwellians who seemed to presume a hegemonic understanding of matters electrical in the 1880s and 1890s.5 I conclude by returning to the theme of the uncertainty over the nature of electricity that arose from the diverse representations of it, and gesture to the relation of this to the persisting sense that – in an important way – electricity belonged to the domain of mystery and romance very far from the modernist sentiments that were imputed to electricity in the mid-twentieth century.

Communicating Electricity: Diversity and Uncertainty The question ‘What is electricity?’ is often asked as if a short and lucid answer could be given which a liberally educated person could comprehend. John Trowbridge, What is Electricity?, 1896.6

As David Nye has observed, questions about the nature of electricity were asked across US culture while America was being electrified in the decades after 1880. His analysis reveals the diverse ways in which the question ‘what is electricity?’ could be answered. ‘Electricty’ was often used as a synonym for the electrical technology itself that started to be seen in more guises and more locations from the 1890s onwards, sometimes linked to magnetism. Initially, Nye explores the meanings of electricity through the various meanings of electrification: the political issue of when and in which districts to install electrical infrastructure and with whose finance; the aesthetic encounter with dazzling publicity displays; the new means of transportation – the electrical streetcar – and indeed electricity understood as both a motive force and source of profit.7 In addition to such matters of technological implementation, Nye notes that American citizens apprehended electricity per se in ways that reflected its extraordinarily ubiquity and utility in the organic domain. Since they often related electricity to the functioning of the brain and more generally to life itself, electricity was invoked in the press and everyday conversation to explain phenomena as diverse as genius, sexuality, nervous physiology, impotence, mental disorder, disease and spiritualism. Such correlations were not made in a simple or consensual way; electricity was invoked not only to explain such phenomena, but often also the converse. Most notably, electricity was attributed the power of both prolonging life and of ending it prematurely, as most notoriously demonstrated by the electric chair, introduced in New York State in 1889. No wonder indeed, as Nye astutely notes, that Ambrose Bierce, author of the satirical Devil’s Dictionary of 1911, first sardonically defined electricity in 1906 as: ‘The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else’.8

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Evidently the fascination of electricity was that it could be both so protean a servant and yet also so powerful a master: its multifaceted nature was indeed represented according to context in remarkably different, even contradictory ways. Given the diverse modes of technocratic and discursive usage for this agency – far beyond the predecessor agencies of fire, steam and water – the question was often posed by the consuming public: ‘what is electricity?’. Nye’s observation on this is that, for contemporaries, electricity seemed to defy definition, remaining a persistent mystery to the citizenry of the USA. This he suggests is captured in the dedication to electricity inscribed on the entrance to Washington D.C.’s Union railroad station circa 1907/8, comparing it to the discovery of fire that enabled cultures to diversify habitations, diets and motive machinery. Electricity was represented here as the distinctive ‘carrier of light and power, devourer of time and space, bearer of human speech over land and sea’ and thus as the ‘greatest servant of man, itself unknown.’ The gendered conclusion ‘Thou hast put all things under his feet’ signalled clearly the anthropocentric subordination of electricity irrespective of its mysterious identity.9 Nevertheless, we will see that neither the claims that electricity was humanity’s greatest servant nor that it was ‘unknown’ were consensual features of the contemporary culture either in the USA or UK. Some thought they really did know what electricity was – a fluid, a form of energy, or a mode of motion – whilst others – such Maxwellians as John Trowbridge – maintained that there was no such thing as electricity anyway since it was but an epiphenomenon of the electromagnetic ether. Others did not agree with the claim that electricity was the greatest servant of humankind, whether gendered as male or female. Some critics and antagonists considered it to be either a menace or an unnerving stranger who subverted human ends rather than enhancing them (see Chapter 3). In other contexts again popularizers of electricity represented it not as a passive servant but as an autonomous agent of social transformation, akin to the power of steam for a previous generation. As we shall see below, and in Chapter 7, this ambiguity featured significantly in the iconography of electricity. But the uncertainty over the identity of electricity was not just a matter of ambiguity: there was profound disagreement about even its most basic attributes. At the heart of the process of the domestication of electricity there was no common understanding even amongst experts and authorities – let alone prospective consumers – on the nature of that which was a candidate to be brought into the home or the process that might take it there. Thus, in contrast to Nye’s account of the US case, I argue that the uncertain nature of electricity was not merely a matter of cultural debate in Britain but an important concern for householders in deciding whether to electrify their home. In Britain and America alike, such divergent and uncertain interpretations of the nature of electricity were manifest not just in technical treatises but in

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the more widely read literature of the general journal. Far from being just a concern of arcane historical epistemology, this issue pertains to the communication of techno-science and the evidence above presents electricity as an interesting case study for the historical understanding of scientific communication. Until relatively recently, historical writing on modern science and technology took for granted the prerogative and competence of authoritative experts to deliver wellgrounded certainties in their subject to a presumptively uninformed laity. On a simple binary version of this model there was a stark asymmetry between those communicating and those receiving this communication. The former group knew about the technical matters in hand, and the latter did not; at least until the communication process came into play to supplying the missing knowledge.10 However, the growing body of scholarship on science communication has been highly critical of this as the ‘deficit’ model of science communication. Primarily this thesis has been criticized for presuming the ignorance of the laity in the face of a monolithic, ‘authoritative’ expertise. Far from being entirely ignorant, we now know that the so-called laity has long typically had its own forms of knowledge which authority figures have sought to attack or replace, not always successfully. We shall see an example of this below in the persistence of ‘fluid’ views of electricity among the broader public, notwithstanding attempts by Maxwellians such as Trowbridge to condemn these as ignorance. This persistence was in a sense vindicated in the early twentieth century by the represented of electrons as a reinvented form of Franklin’s electric fluid.11 More than this, it is clear that the process of communication in techno-science has concerned a quite different kind of absence: an absence of funds, trust or paying consumers on the part of those initiating the communication process. As I have shown elsewhere, the activities of Thomas Edison in the US and Robert Hammond in the UK in the early 1880s in promoting awareness of the electric light were not simply designed to present a disinterested account of their achievements in incandescent electric lighting to an uninformed public. Rather they had to address a substantial constituency in the public that was sceptical of their claims and resistant to the take-up of electric lighting. For Edison and Hammond the process of communication was to win householders’ trust and custom, deficits in which were a major preoccupation of many early promoters of the domestication of electricity.12 A more sophisticated version of communication theory as applied to the case of electricity has been espoused by Carolyn Marvin in When Old Technologies Were New. This allows for a fourfold hierarchy in the communication process concerning electricity and its technological embodiments, as well as recognizing an element of technological agenda-setting by electrical experts. At the centre of the four ‘concentric circles of expertise’ in her model is the expert group of theoretical and entrepreneurial electricians that wrote for and read the profes-

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sional and technical literature. A second group of popular science writers, she contends, aped the appearance of these ‘core’ experts, using cut-and-paste techniques to lend apparent authority to their journalism and book-writing. Both groups addressed a third community of lay audiences, generally the middle classes seeking the wisdom of ‘accredited interpreters’ in the lecture hall and lyceum. The fourth community, at the bottom of this putative scale, constituted the popular press and its ‘unlettered’ readership that consumed expert knowledge and hyperbole alike, apparently without differentiation.13 Importantly, Marvin recognizes that this was not a completely linear or consensual hierarchy; the highest-level experts could not compel the laity to recognize them as the sole authority on electricity, a point that we will see borne out below. At the same time these upper-level experts were also bound by a moral accountability not to mislead the laity in what she calls a ‘rhetoric of reciprocity’. This will feature in Chapter 5 where I show how experts attempting to forecasting usages of electrical technologies could – as William Crookes found – be taken to task by the press for going beyond the acknowledged limits of their authority. Marvin limits her analysis of this reciprocity to the ‘vague but binding bargain between experts and their publics in [sic] behalf of electric progress’.14 In other respects, by contrast, Marvin does not consider that the experts were constrained by the expectations or demands of others in their agenda of communicating about electricity. In what follows I will also extend this notion of a reciprocal relationship to the formulation of the agenda of communicating or ‘popularizing’ techno-science, specifically to the sorts of questions that the broader populace felt ought to be addressed in communications between the ‘expert’ and ‘laity’ (however construed). This is especially important for cases in which the former group had to deal with pressure from the latter to add topics to their agenda of popularization. My analysis relates to one such topic only touched on by Marvin, and observed as ubiquitous by Nye without commenting on the resistance by authority figures to dealing with the ubiquitous enquiry ‘what is electricity?’.15 Eminent writers on, and practitioners of, electrical techno-science were often somewhat troubled by the status of this question and ambivalent about their obligation to deal with it. I shall argue that instead of answering it, they often harnessed public curiosity about the subject in works notionally addressing the point but then proceeded to offer an authoritative view on an indirectly related matter. For example, on 4 September 1884, the Harvard physicist, John Trowbridge, addressed Section B of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Philadelphia, held in conjunction with the Electrical Exposition. He titled his lecture on a question ‘which we all ask ourselves’, namely ‘What is Electricity?’. For this particular issue, however, he encouraged a disposition of ‘humility and a greater consciousness of ignorance’: only the ‘ignorant man’ could feel

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sure he had an answer. Inverting customary expectations about the epistemic credentials of authority, he declared instead that the more learned a person was, the more ‘he is convinced that he does not know what electricity is’.16 Following this Socratic manoeuvre, Trowbridge instead used the opportunity to divert his audience towards an appreciation of the all-encompassing theory of the conservation of energy. Again in 1896, when Trowbridge wrote his book What is Electricity?, he reported with some exasperation that he was often asked this question as though it were somehow his responsibility to answer it in terms that the laity could understand. Instead he argued for a ‘scientific agnosticism’ about such topics as force and electricity, asserting that the nature of these agencies belonged instead to the arcane domain of metaphysics. Indeed the main thrust of the monograph What is Electricity? was not to answer the ostensible question, but to draw readers into appreciating a version of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of the ether, his underlying agenda.17 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the interest of the populace in the question was not met by diversions into the arcana of contemporary physics. The irascibility of those who dealt with this phenomenon is perhaps the most telling sign of its significance. For example, the disappointed expectation that that answer would be known was somewhat archly dismissed by the US journal Electrical World in December 1893 as if the question were quite illegitimate. The nature of electricity was apparently only a subject of fruitful speculation to the ‘metaphysical mind’ and the ‘confident ignoramus’; and for the latter especially it seemed a reproach that contemporary science could not describe ‘the true nature of electricity’: It seems inexplicable to the public at large that the mystery surrounding electricity is not dispelled. The successful business man, who prides himself upon always getting to the bottom of everything, cannot understand why this one problem, as he believes, remains unsolved, and, perhaps unconsciously thinks that if his work had been in this direction, his ‘hustling’ abilities would have produced a more favourable result than that attained by scientific theorists.18

Such lay enquirers gained greater interest in the topic when the electron theory arrived in the early twentieth century. The UCL electrical engineer Ambrose Fleming was clearly as harassed as Trowbridge had been by impertinent and badgering members of the laity demanding to know ‘what is electricity?’: ‘The intelligent but non-scientific inquirer is often disappointed when he finds no simple, and as he thinks essential, answer forthcoming to the above question and he asks why it cannot be furnished’. Here we see most explicitly the often implied expectation on the part of the laity that authorities in the subject really ought to know the answer to the question, and because it was known to such authorities, it perturbed public sensibilities to learn that they could not.19

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Before turning to the next section of this chapter, for the sake of comparison, we should note that contemporary authorities on gas and steam technology had no difficulty in articulating what their subject matter was. As we will see in Chapter 4, in the 1880s organic chemistry had a very clear analytical message to offer about the constitution of manufactured coal-gas. And in How it Works (many editions from circa1900 to the 1930s), the popular science writer Archibald Williams saw no apparent difficulty in answering the question ‘what is steam?’ in terms of the motion of molecules of water above boiling point.20 Yet Williams had no such pat answer available to the question ‘what is electricity?’. To emphasize the contrast, Williams argued that when dealing with the steamengine, any ‘ordinary intelligence’ soon grasps the principles governing the use of steam in cylinders or turbines, whereas electricity was ‘elusive’ and invisible: Of the ultimate nature of electricity, as of that of heat and light, we are at present ignorant […] We must remain content, therefore, with assuming that electricity is energy or motion transmitted through the ether from molecule to molecule, or from atom to atom of matter. Scientific investigation has taught us how to produce it at will, how to harness it to our uses, and how to measure it; but not what it is. That question may, perhaps, remain unanswered till the end of human history..21

My general claim in what follows is that the huge literature dedicated to the question ‘what is electricity?’ was coextensive with attempts to domesticate electricity in the ordinary home. This also faded out once electricity became widespread among consumers by the late 1920s, and the mundane technological utility of electricity came to dull curiosity about its nature.

Electricity: One Fluid, Two Fluids or Mode of Motion? … electricity itself has come to be vaguely thought of by some as one of our modern inventions. Some people even have a hazy idea that our electric-power stations are busy manufacturing a mysterious material fluid, called electricity, in something [like] the same sense as one may speak of gas-work producing [coal] gas. Charles R. Gibson, The Romance of Modern Electricity, 1906.22

Electricity had been a familiar part of the landscape of industrial countries for several decades before the electric bell, telephone and then electric light appeared as likely entrants to the domestic domain. By autumn 1849 newly minted telegraph lines stretched across the UK in symbiosis with the growing network of railways, a pattern soon followed in the rest of other industrializing nations and their colonies. To explain this new electrical marvel to an eager public, a piece on ‘The Electric Telegraph’ in the Edinburgh Review addressed what seemed at

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first sight to be a ‘very formidable’ difficulty facing anyone trying to engage with electrical matters.23 To the question ‘what is electricity?’ there seemed to be no categorical answer. Fortunately, pragmatic considerations allowed that the immediate quest for a definitive theory could be set aside. Just as for the operation of heat and light, to explain the telegraph or any other electrical device only a ‘provisional’ account was needed. The two main views hypothetically suggested were closely analogous to those held on heat, light and magnetism: either electricity was an immaterial state or power of matter, or alternatively it was a kind of matter, a ‘peculiar’ attenuated substance ‘akin to an elastic fluid’. 24The Edinburgh Review recommended the latter to readers as the easiest to apprehend. Not least among the reasons was that it informed the widely used nomenclature of electrical currents: ‘pressure’ was the potential difference tending to move the electrical fluid, ‘resistance’ was a conductor’s impediment to that flow, while ‘capacitance’ was the capacity to store electric fluid.25 Even those who rejected the fluid theory of electricity adopted this vocabulary at an early stage, thus appearing to lend some credence to the notion that electricity really was a kind of fluid. The key point was that whatever electricity might be, all that the laity or specialists needed was a comprehensible metaphor to lessen the mystery, confusion and anxiety surrounding the operation of electrical equipment. And, while technologies were not inside the domestic domain, that was the only immediately pressing reason to have any account of the nature of electricity. One problem that the Edinburgh Review article understated, however, was the extent to which materialist fluid theories were already passing out of fashion by the late 1840s. Few serious natural philosophers maintained any credence in the ‘caloric’ theory once dynamical theories of heat as a ‘mode of motion’ became widely accepted in the 1840s and 1850s, popularized by John Tyndall in Royal Institution lectures and a best selling book.26 In view of this trend, putative authorities on electricity were even more cautious in treating electricity as a literal fluid.27 Instead they presented readers with useful fictions about fluids while denying that the fluid account was a final answer to the question - especially as authorities could not in any case agree whether there were two electrical fluids or just the one. This strategy was not always successful, however. As Charles Gibson noted in 1906 some took this fluid view of electricity quite literally, following analogies with such domesticated industrial commodities as water and gas.28 As we shall see, once the fluid theory of electricity was at large in the public domain - seemingly sanctioned by expert electrical writers - it became hard to quash. One of the very few to attempt a more definitive alternative account of electricity in the 1860s was the social philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had originally trained as a civil engineer. Following plans to re-launch the dormant transatlantic telegraph project in spring 1864,29 Spencer sought to extend his

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famous universal system of ‘synthetic philosophy’ to incorporate the ever more universal commodity of electricity. As a fellow member of the newly launched X-club of scientific radicals, Spencer borrowed from Tyndall’s theory of heat as a mode of motion in formulating an article entitled ‘What is Electricity?’ published in the British weekly the Reader (November 1864) and the American monthly Eclectic Magazine (March 1865). Observing that few ‘competent physicists’ referred to the electric fluid in anything other than a strictly conventional sense, he argued that, now heat and light were ‘proved to be modes of motion’, it was obvious that all ‘allied manifestations of force’ such as electricity must be modes of motion too.30 Spencer’s baroque efforts to resolve negative and positive electricity into different modes of compound molecular vibration certainly won some followers, especially from his widely read extended version in the third volume of his Essays: scientific, political, and speculative.31 Ironically, however, this was the only area of his work in which Spencer – a notorious dogmatist – openly expressed uncertainty. As we will see in the next section, not even his inspiration John Tyndall took up Spencer’s suggestion of electricity as a mode of motion, adhering instead to a two-fluid theory of electricity to account for the operation of telegraphs, electrical machines and lightning conductors.32 The subsequent success of the telegraph cable increased pressure for a more usable approach for handling the uncertain nature of electricity than offered by Spencer. Specifically, this was important for novice telegraphists and electricians who had to ply their daily craft in a very practical profession with huge distances and tight deadlines to contend with. For example in his 1868 text Elementary Treatise on Electrical Measurement for the use of Telegraph Inspectors and Operators Latimer Clark advised that while they ‘must of necessity’ adopt some theory to handle the practical manifestations of electricity, the choice was difficult since natural philosophers were ‘not in accord as to its nature and the theory of its action’. In the absence of an authoritative view, he thus advised them to dismiss the two-fluid theory and treat positive electricity in quasi-hydraulic terms as a ‘substance like water or gas’. The role of telegraph apparatus and/or a battery was in these terms to pump this fluid in and out of the earth, which could be considered a ‘vast reservoir’ of it.33 Five years later, fellow telegraph engineer and Edinburgh University Professor Fleeming Jenkin offered similar advice to both artisan and student readers of his textbook on electricity and magnetism; while it was in a strict sense ‘quite unnecessary’ to invoke fluid imagery, they would find it most convenient to treat electrical phenomena in terms of the ‘presence or absence of a single fluid’.34 Given its wide circulation in popular culture, the notion of electricity as a fluid was thus also used in early attempts to popularize the electric light. In midApril 1881 the well-connected electrical inventor-entrepreneur St George Lane Fox spoke at the Society of Telegraph Engineers in London on the prospects of

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electricity as a useful medium for domestic lighting and heating. As a journalist for The Times present at the lecture reported: Electricity itself might be compared to a very subtle gas or vapour, capable of being compressed by the application of forces, and again capable of extending itself when the force was removed. This electrical force had been called by various names; he preferred, in order to simplify the subject, to use the expression electric pressure. Whatever might be the actual nature of electricity, it must be regarded primarily as a medium for the transmission of power and he proposed to show that it would be an exceedingly convenient and economical medium.35

This reification of electricity as a material substance was significant not only for the promotion of electric lighting, but also for the regulation of its provision and consumption. As I discuss in Chapter 4, the British Liberal government enacted legislation in August 1882 to license electrical generating companies to offer their services to domestic and business consumers. This was presented as an Act of Parliament concerning plans to ‘supply’ electricity for public or private purposes. The notion of ‘supply’ drew directly on the decades-old legislation for the supply of the distinctly material commodities of gas or water that were literally consumed by end-users. Moreover, this sense of the materiality of electricity was reinforced by other key aspects of the legislation, such as penalties for ‘stealing electricity’: anyone who maliciously or fraudulently wasted, diverted, or consumed electricity was guilty of ‘simple larceny’, just as they would be for illicitly appropriating gas and water from supply pipes without permission or payment.36 With this apparent state sanctioning of electricity as a transferable commodity it is not surprising that the laity commonly saw electricity as a ‘mysterious material fluid’ pumped into the home from electrical power stations, just as gas was fed in via pipes connected to civic gasworks.37 Ironically the 1880s was the decade which also saw the rise of Maxwellian ether physics which sought to abolish all talk of the electric fluid, focusing instead on the compressible electromagnetic ether as the key universal medium for understanding matters electromagnetic.38 Nature’s posthumous review of Maxwell’s Treatise and Elementary Treatise in January 1882 argued that a ‘medium’ based account would help to banish the electrical fluids that had ‘worked such mischief in indolent minds, and poisoned electrical literature so long’.39 And later in the decade, arch-Maxwellian Oliver Heaviside privately argued that it was time to abolish the ‘essentially vicious practice’ of associating electric currents with the motion of a hypothetical quasi-substance: ‘The fluids are played out; they are fast evaporating into nothingness’.40 Yet not all Maxwellians were so extreme. In fact fellow Maxwellian Oliver Lodge drew upon a variety of fluid theories in his widely read popular work Modern Views of Electricity. Although ether-based understandings entailed that traditional terms such as ‘electricity’

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might well ‘gradually have to go’ as mere artefacts of older ways of theorizing, he promiscuously reverted to both single-fluid analogy for electricity when explaining how circuits worked and two-fluid accounts when explaining magnetism.41 Indeed when popularizing the electron-corpuscle theory in the early part of the next century, both J. J. Thomson and Lodge likened this new electron account to an adapted form of Benjamin Franklin’s single fluid theory, but with negative charges.42 Although the ‘fluid’ understanding of electricity thus had a remarkable longevity throughout the period, it is important to note that in the 1880s the rise of electric lighting and power brought a quite different and less abstract concern to the identity of electricity. This was the notion of electricity as a motive power, akin to that of steam.

Electricity and Magneto-Electricity as ‘Motive’ Power There is perfect safety from all danger from fire or explosion. There is no expenditure of materials when the engine is not in action, and its power can be applied at a moment’s notice […] With such high rewards in view plans to convert the power of electro-magnetism into a motive force have always been among the most cherished schemes of electricians. ‘Electromagnetism as a motive power’, Times, 26 December 1857.43 An old friend of mine, by profession a banker, who spent a large portion of his life of eighty-nine years in studying geology and astronomy, once put to me the question: ‘Whence comes the motive power of electricity? I can understand the motive power of steam, but not of electricity. William Ramsay, ‘What is Electricity?’, Essays, Biographical and Chemical, 1908.44

Up to the early 1880s, public discussions of electricity as a future motive power were usually linked symbiotically to magnetism and represented in terms that often foregrounded the primacy of magnetism. Thus, in 1870, John Tyndall referred to the greatest accomplishment of the recently deceased Faraday as being that of ‘magneto-electricity’ with The Times glossing this as the economical development of electricity from magnetism: after all Faraday had shown how moving a wire or a magnet in close proximity to each generated an electric current. That is why the generating technology for incandescent light was often described as a magneto-electric machine or ‘magneto’ for short.45 There was little sense before the public arrival of the electric light in the late 1870s that ‘electricity’ was any kind of autonomous motive power or agency primed to transform industry or society. When represented as ‘electromagnetism’ the driving force

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was synonymous with ‘magneto-electricity’ rather than with ‘electricity’ alone.46 Hence it is crucial to stand back from the actors categories depicted here and reexamine how ‘electricity’ rather then electromagnetism came to be represented self-evidently as the motive power for either particular machines or for the transformation of society. While the language privileging electricity over magnetism has come to dominate post-1880s, understanding of the transformations wrought by the technological legacy of Faraday and others, we should ask why, when, and how electricity came to be represented as a motive-transformative agency in its own right.47 I argue that this shift did not occur in the wake of the researchers Oersted, Faraday and Henry in the 1820s developing practical and theoretical understandings of how electricity related to magnetism; indeed until the First World War at least, physics textbooks routinely separated electricity and magnetism as distinct areas of study. Instead I pinpoint this shift to the 1881 Paris Exhibition and the adoption of the simple adjective ‘electrical’ to symbolize what was new about the innovative technology involved; technology that clearly went well beyond the capacities of the ancient and familiar hardware of the magnet. More specifically, I will show that representations of electricity in response to this Exhibition and those that came after it began to personify electricity in anthropomorphic forms as a quasi-human power, with no such personification being applied to the increasingly marginalized force of magnetism. The Times’s coverage of the Paris 1881 Electrical Exhibition was a deeply informed account of the merits of the competing technologies for electromagnetic generation: Weston, Maxim, Edison, Schuckert, Siemens & Halske, De Meritens and Brush to name but a few. Owing to the very recent advent of generators that were significantly reliable much was made of their design features, with much focus on the kind of magnets employed, steel permanent magnets, or electromagnets. As the Times reporter noted on 5 September 1881, the principle of all dynamo-machines was that, ‘when a wire is moved in the presence of a magnet a current is induced in the wire’.48 Focusing on just this point a few weeks later on 17 November, the Times reporter chauvinistically dismissed most American attempts to break into this market after the exhibition had been open for three months, highlighting that the key feature was the magnet: The American dynamo machines for generating electricity have absolutely no novelty. One of them consists of Siemens field magnets, with a Gramme revolving ring. Another has the fixed magnets shaped like Gramme’s, with Siemens’s revolving cylinder. A third is simply one of Siemens’s alternate current machines, with pieces of wood put in certain spaces which were left void in the original. Edison’s is a Siemen’s machine, with field magnets such as no electrician would have devised.49

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Yet, although these new generators were claimed to be more reliable than those that caused Lady Churchill’s dinner parties such occasional chaos in 1883 (see Chapter 1), there was still a need for householders to have access to an alternative technology, especially at night when neighbours might easily be disturbed by the throbbing dynamo in the basement. Householders or businesses adventurous enough to try electric light in the early 1880s needed a back-up source of current either in case of dynamo breakdown or in order to operate lights noiselessly during the night. This demand focused attention on the rechargeable secondary battery or ‘accumulator’ developed by two French inventors Faure and Planté in the spring of 1881 just before the opening of the Paris Exhibition. As the muchtouted solution to the problem of continuous electrical supply often dubbed the ‘storage of force’ their completely magnet-free construction made it easier to represent the (latent) power of electromagnetism from the consumer’s point of view as the electric current directly demanded by the householder’s equipment.50 This accumulator had a particularly significant iconographic manifestation in Punch on 25 June 1881, involving an oft-republished picture of a white infant male ‘Electricity’ in a cot, with a bottle marked ‘Storage of force’ modelled loosely on the design of a Faure accumulator. He is not supping at the bottle, however: rather he is blowing into it to fill it with electricity as ‘force’ to be stored. Alluding to the industries threatened by this parvenu, King Steam and King Coal look over the infant uncertainly, unsure what he will grow into. This particular anthropomorphizing of electricity was a satirical comment on a vigorous debate in the previous month in The Times on the future prospects of the Faure accumulator. This was initiated in a letter from Major Ricarde Seaver on 16 May, claiming that he had a Faure cell holding a million ‘foot-pounds’ of stored energy in the ‘electric fluid’ directly installed by its maker. After taking it past a suspicious customs official, announcing it to be ‘condensed lightning’, Seaver planned to take this ‘box of electricity’ to Sir William Thomson in Glasgow to test its properties.51 Already planning to have one of his Scottish houses lit by electricity, Thomson wrote a long letter to The Times on 9 June extolling the virtues of the cell. The million ‘foot-pounds’ kept in the box during the seventy-two hour long journey from Paris to Glasgow was, he reported, ‘no exaggeration’. One of the four cells was recharged and even after being undisturbed for ten days yielded 260,000 foot-pounds; thus, Thomson felt sure he had ascertained enough regarding the cell’s qualities to be sure that it solved the problem of ‘storing electric energy in a manner and on a scale useful for many important practical applications’. Seven boxes sufficed to illuminate Swan or Edison lights to a hundred candle power for six hours:

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Thus, instead of needing a gas engine or steam engine to be kept at work as long as the light is wanted, with the liability of the light failing at any moment through the slipping of the belt or any other breakdown or stoppage of the machinery, and instead of the wasteful inactivity during the hours of day or night when the light is not needed, the engine may be kept going all day and stopped at night, or it may be kept going day and night, which undoubtedly will be the most economical plan when the electric light comes in general enough use. 52

The Manchester professor of engineering Osborne Reynolds cast doubt on the uniqueness of this wonderful solution, pointing out that a one-and-a-half ounce lump of coal carried about the same amount of energy: ‘electricity has been found wanting as a substitute for coal.’53 Thomson’s initial enthusiasm for Faure cells and evident misdiagnosis of its capacities led to serious financial losses on his part after an investment backfired,54 and such public squabbling among fallible authorities thus prompted Punch to highlight the uncertain future that awaited this particular solution to the ‘storage of force’ problem outlined above In this cartoon we see a classic Punch pun on the storage facility of the accumulator as the ‘Faure feeding bottle’, and an allusion (arguably) to Faraday’s famous comment when asked what the use might be of his discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831: ‘what is the use of a baby?’. The two friendly giants, King Coal and King Steam, debate whether the accumulator bottle will be sufficient to nurture the infant electrical industry to mature adulthood. Wil-

Figure 2.1. Punch cartoon: ‘A Giant in Germ’, Punch, 25 June 1881. In an all-male scene (a characteristic trope of Punch magazine’s representations of electricity (see chapter seven) the majestic King Steam and sooty King Coal confer uncertainly over the future prospects of the babe ‘Electricity’ who blows into a Faure accumulator bottle labelled ‘Storage of Force’. By permission of University of Leeds, Brotherton Library Special Collections.

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liam Thomson’s advocacy of the bottle is evident from both use of his phrase ‘dynamical energy’ in his letter to The Times of 9 June 1881, and in the doggerel dense with Shakespearian allusion in the phrase uttered by King Steam to King Coal captures some sense of possible future prospects of the putative ‘Giant in Germ’ in the concluding stanza: If this young spark, as is fancied by THOMSON, Turn out a true Titan-Ariel-Puck,55 Who, without mischief, will carry huge romps on, All I can say is, the world is in luck!

As contemporaries observed, King Coal need not have been too worried as the motive power of electromagnetism ‘stored’ in the accumulator originally derived from the burning of coal to drive dynamos.56 Nevertheless, as we will see in chapter seven, it soon became common practice to anthropomorphize ‘electricity’ as a distinct humanoid figure - albeit of contingent gender, age and disposition - specifically distinct from magnetism. For now it is sufficient to note that in Punch the figure of electricity as potentially or actively mischievous young ‘spark’ became embodied quickly thereafter in the (unpaginated) Punch Almanack for 1882 issued on 8 December 1881, that depicted the ‘coming force’; the glowing young male electricity is driving forward the lighted stallions of destiny, sweeping away the forces of sooty smoke and dirt to bring a clear and harmonious future of electric leisure and employment. Somewhat satirically, this future includes the availability of such farfetched wonders as electrically-preserved beef imported from Australia, turkeys hatched by electricity and plants grown more speedily under the benign power of the electric light.

Figure 2. 2: Punch Almanack for 1882: ‘The Coming Force – Mr Punch’s Dream’, 6 December 1882, un-paginated. Mr Punch dozes in the bottom right hand corner, indulging in a reverie of the technical wonders to be wrought by the newly unleashed force of electricity. By permission of University of Leeds, Brotherton Library Special Collections.

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We also see here what has happened to the magnet operative in the process of electromagnetism: it is still an integral part of the dynamo, loaded on the bank of the chariot driven by the young electrical spark who presides over the picture; but the magnet is now distinctly in the background and merely as auxiliary context for the generative power represented (ironically) as if inhering in the infant (but fast growing) baby electricity. This is symptomatic of the way that representations of electromagnetism, both as a motive power and correlatively as force of cultural transformation, sought thereafter to focus on ‘electricity’ as the defining phenomenon of the day. One major manifestation of this new understanding of electricity as an autonomous agent of social transformation was the growth of an iconography of electricity as human agency that, like fabulous beings of ancient mythology, had the power to transform whole civilizations (see Chapter 7). Another related consequence was a new major representation of electricity as being associated with the canonical representation of motive power in the 1880s: energy. And it is to this which I turn in the next section.

Electricity: Form of Energy or Mode of Ether? Would it be possible to light the streets of New York by the energy of the falling water at Niagara, as has been suggested by our Past President, Dr Siemens, if the cycle of changes from the one spot to the other were not all different forms of this same form of energy? Would it be possible to plough a field a mile away from the source of motive power of the transmitting medium if the electric currents were not forms of the same power? Electricity in its effects is and must be a form of energy William Preece, ‘The Nature of Electricity’ (Presidential Address to the Society of Telegraph Engineers) 28 January 1880.57

Throughout the 1880s and 90s, widespread interest in explanations of the strange phenomenon of electricity elicited a new view that challenged both the popular account of it as a fluid (or fluids) and the Maxwellian attempt to downgrade ‘electricity’ as a mere epiphenomenon of the electromagnetic ether. Following the example of William Preece as President of the Society of Telegraph Engineers in 1880, many – but not all – engineers came to see electricity literally as a form or manifestation of energy; and this was a view presented in many popular handbooks on electricity produced by engineers. The main antagonist in Preece’s campaign was the Maxwellian Oliver Lodge who, following previous disputes with Preece, also found much to disagree with in his explanation of electricity to the broader population. While this was a personalized dispute between Lodge and Preece, its very public character can only have added to the wider public perplexity about how to understand the nature of electricity.58

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Preece’s promotion of electricity as a form of energy was not an inevitable result of his work as an engineer. In 1876, when Preece was just a Divisional Engineer for the Post Office Telegraph system, he co-wrote a handbook, Telegraphy, with J. Sivewright, a Superintendent of the Post Office Telegraph engineering department. In contrast to the telegraphic guidebook by Clark and Jenkin discussed above, this work stipulated that: The nature of electricity is not known, nor is it necessary to the telegraphist that it should be known by him. He is only interested in its quantitative measurement and application to practical purposes. Let him master its elementary principles, its general ideas, its properties and its conditions, and he can well afford to leave to physicists the discussion of its nature, and to mathematicians the determination of its laws.59

Tellingly, after Preece had been promoted to the status of Electrician to the Post Office in 1877 he took on a much broader view of his prerogatives, extending to all new electrical technologies as they came along: telephony and electric lighting in the late 1870s and wireless telegraphy in the 1890s.60 Thus, by the time he had become President of the STE in 1880, he had re-imagined the scope of his professional domain to incorporate the new field of electric power and light. From this standpoint he (somewhat imperialistically) sought to define electricity from the engineer’s perspective as a form of energy that could be manipulated by his profession in accomplishing a new technocratic order. To construct this claim he appealed to the legacy of Faraday, with whom he had collaborated in 1853, to consider it a form of force: Some maintain with Du Fay or with Franklin, that [electricity] is a form of matter - a substance; others following Faraday and Grove, consider it a form of force - a motion like heat and light. It must be either one or the other. There is no other category in which to class it. If it is not a form of matter it must be a form of force. The question I propose to discuss is, therefore, Is electricity a form of matter, or is it a form of force?61

Tacitly disagreeing with the late-departed Maxwell that electricity might be an agent of hitherto unknown form,62 Preece saw no option but to choose between imagining electricity as either matter or force. And, given the prospect of using electricity to transform the power of Niagara Falls into the lighting of New York, and of remote ploughing of agricultural fields, he could only conclude that electricity was a form of force - or more precisely, energy.63 Overall his position was that electricity ‘is and must be a form of energy’, a claim that Preece repeated publicly on 28 December 1881 and 4 January 1882 in lecturing on ‘Recent Wonders of Electricity’ to a juvenile audience at London’s Society of Arts. Presenting engineers as masters of the transformations of the ‘mysterious’ agency energy, he assured his young listeners that electricity was a mode of energy just like magnetism, light, heat, chemistry and motion.64

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An implicit attack on Preece soon followed from Oliver Lodge, then an assistant to George Carey Foster in the Department of Physics at University College, London. In December 1880, Lodge lectured at the London Institution in Finsbury Circus on Maxwell’s identification of light as a form of electrical propagation. Acknowledging that his audience were by no means ignorant of light and electricity but puzzled about their nature it was only natural and ‘proper’ for them to demand ‘What do you mean by electricity? What do you mean by light?’. He admitted, though, that when asking the question ‘What is Electricity?’ the simple answer had to be ‘We don’t know’. This need not be a depressing outcome, he suggested, since asking similar questions about matter and energy elicited quite the same answer. Although Lodge was hesitant to specify whether electricity was a species of matter, he was certainly convinced as a loyal Maxwellian that electricity was not a form of energy. But it was by performative rather than philosophical means that Lodge showed his audience what he meant by electricity, offering experimental demonstrations of electromagnetism and spark production.65 Returning to the same London venue two years later as Professor of Experimental Physics at University College Liverpool to lecture on ‘The Ether and its Functions’, Lodge suggested that ether was made up in some way of ‘positive and negative electricity together’.66 He developed his account of ether for lectures on ‘Modern Views of Electricity’ delivered before crowded audiences at (again) the London Institution on 1 January 1885 and Birmingham’s Midland Institute on 15 November 1886, serialised in Nature over two years from 1887. At the outset, Lodge reiterated Maxwell’s message that whatever electricity was it was certainly not a form of energy: the energy of an electric current moved through the ‘medium’ outside the wire carrying the current. Casting electricity as the propagation of a strain in a sponge-like electromagnetic medium enabled Lodge to lay his claim to authority as chief public interpreter of the ether - a diversionary alternative to offering his audience a detailed exegesis on the nature of electricity.67 Preece retaliated by attacking Lodge’s ‘modern’ view in his address to ‘Mechanical Science’ Section G at the British Association’s meeting at Bath in summer 1888. As a self-styled practical man engaged in attacking Lodge’s theory of lightning conductors), he sought to highlight the differences among the followers of Maxwell: It seems incredible that, having utilized this great power of Nature to such a wide and general extent, we should be still in a state of mental fog as to the answer that is to be given to the simple question - What is Electricity? The engineer and the physicist are completely at variance on this point. The engineer regards electricity, like heat, like light, and sound as a definite form of energy, something that he can generate and destroy, something that he can play with and utilise, something he can measure and

56

Domesticating Electricity apply. The physicists - at least some physicists, for it is difficult to find any two physicists that completely agree with one another - regard electricity as a peculiar form of matter pervading all space as well as all substances together with the luminiferous ether which it permeates like a jelly or a sponge.

With a none too discreet attack on Lodge’s small scale laboratory investigations of the nature of the jelly-like ether, Preece tried to pull rank on Lodge by asserting that he (Preece) was a more reliable authority on the nature of electricity through having acquired the rigorous manly skills of the practical engineer. The practical man, with his ‘eye and his mind trained by the stern realities’ of daily experience, on a scale vast with that of the ‘little world of the laboratory’, could only feel revulsion at ‘such wild hypotheses, such unnecessary and inconceivable conceptions, such a travesty of the beautiful simplicity of nature’.68 The full version of Preece’s lecture was reported in the Times a few days later. This included his comment that notwithstanding the tendency to ‘hasty generalization among mathematicians’, there was no doubt that the work of Professor Lodge and others was ‘opening their minds to the true nature of electricity’, so that eventually they would grasp its ‘mechanical character’.69 Indeed two days later a Times correspondent wrote up this debate with the clear sense that Lodge’s experimentation on the ether was likely soon to resolve the ‘burning question as to the real nature and action of electricity’.70 Undeterred by Preece’s scorn of his mere ‘laboratory’ learning, and apparently boosted by the Times’ interest in his work, Lodge went on to arrange with Macmillan to publish his popular lectures as Modern Views on Electricity in 1889. Notwithstanding the wide readership for this epitome of Maxwellian ether theory, it did not answer the question ‘what is electricity?’ that was so widely asked. Rather than drawing upon the equivocations and evasions of Lodge on the electricity question, engineers writing advisory manuals for householders tended instead to adopt Preece’s language of electricity as a mode of energy. Few did so as literally as Preece did; more typically they adopted the instrumentalist mode to signal that, as a profession, they had reliable control over the generation and transmission of electrical energy. This claim for reliability implicitly served as the basis of their authority, epitomising a newly-emerging identity for the engineer as putative manager and distributor of ‘energy’: the recurrent theme of William Preece’s public lectures. For example the ‘Glossary of Terms’ that opened the Electricity in our Homes and Workshops (1889) by electrical engineer Sydney Walker commenced with the cliché: ‘What is electricity? We do not know.’ Readers were told instead that they just needed to know that electricity had been made ‘obedient’ as a form of energy, just as previous generations of engineers had tamed the energy of heat, light and chemistry.71 ‘The abstract nature of electricity has still to be determined’ was the comment of electrical manufacturer and retailer John Verity’ in his 1891 promotional

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manual Electricity up to Date for Light, Power and Traction. This instead offered readers the advice that, avoiding difficult theoretical discussions, electricity was ‘best defined as a form of energy’, in other words the ‘power of doing work’.72 Seven years later, Percy Scrutton’s Electricity in Town and Country Houses still presumed that the very first question his readers would ask is ‘what is Electricity?’ While he reiterated it was ‘a matter for regret’ that no satisfactory answer was available, engineers not only knew how to produce and control it, but they were constantly producing new apparatus to deploy electricity to ‘one hundred and one’ purposes. In terms explicitly invoking a contemporary understanding of a practically (if not theoretically) tamed electricity that could readily be domesticated in the home: […] The reader must think of electricity as a form of energy ready to be turned, by means of suitably designed apparatus, to the service of the most useful purposes. In a dwelling house, the most useful purposes to which energy can be put are the production of heat for warming the rooms, for cooking, for heating irons, for boiling water in sitting rooms, and bedrooms without sending to the kitchen for it, the production of light, and for the production of power to save hand labour [...]73

To conclude we can see how this approach was interpreted from a female perspective inbook Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning: A Manual of Electricity in the Service of the Home written by Maud Lancaster with the editorial collaboration of her spouse, power station engineer Edward Lancaster in 1914. Writing upon the matter ‘from a woman’s point of view’ she offered a brief comment on electricity as being a mystery still since the ‘greatest Scientists’ did not know what Electricity really was. Adopting the popular cultural approach personifying electricity, she cast it as a ‘Silent and Valuable Help’, a new kind of ideal servant willing an able to do untiringly energetic work around the home: Electricity, like the force of gravitation, makes a most valuable servant, when put to do useful work. In its capacity as servant, it is always at hand; always willing to do its allotted task and to do it perfectly, silently and without mess; never wants a day off ; never answers back; it is never laid up; never asks for a raise; in fact, it is often willing to work for less money; never gives notice and does not mind working overtime; it has no prejudices and is prepared to undertake any duties for which it is adapted; it costs nothing when not actually doing useful work. Such are the merits of the housewife’s new ally, a worthy substitute for carrying out many of the duties now done more or less willingly and well by the independent human servant or help of today.74

In Chapter 7 I will discuss further Maud and Edward Lancaster’s experiments with domestic electrification and anthropomorphization, and consider how convincing their contemporaries found their enterprise of domesticating electricity.

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Conclusion We know little as yet concerning the mighty agency we call electricity. ‘Substantialists’ tell us it is a kind of matter. Others again view it, not as matter, but as a form of energy. Others, again, reject both these views. Professor Lodge considers it ‘a form, or rather a mode of manifestation of the ether’. Professor Nikola Tesla demurs to the view of Oliver Lodge, but thinks that ‘nothing would seem to stand in the way of calling electricity ether associated with matter, or bound ether’. High authorities cannot even agree whether we have one electricity or two opposite electricities… William Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, February 1892 75

What prompted the recurrent posing of the question ‘what is electricity?’ in general and popular scientific literature, textbooks, public writings and lectures from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries? One cannot easily correlate the timescale of the public interrogation of the nature of electricity to any mass outbreak of metaphysics. It can, however, be correlated broadly – if not exclusively – to the development of new kinds of electrical technology: telegraphy from the 1840s, electrotherapeutic equipment from the 1850s, arc and incandescent lighting from the late 1870s and power supply (especially for domestic gadgets) from the late 1880s. The demand for understanding of electricity was driven at least in part by the laity’s concern to understand the new agency and its material forms that were reshaping their landscape, opening up new possibilities for investment and experimentation while also threatening to provide new opportunities for bodily harm, domestic conflagration and financial risk. And without the trust or confidence of many householders, electricity took a long time to be fully welcomed into their domestic territory. The transformative enterprises of electrical engineering were not generally undertaken by those who had a definitive answer to the question ‘what is electricity?’ Practising professional engineers were only slightly less circumspect than their scholarly associates in natural philosophy in dealing with this puzzle. So if they did not know the answer, why did they keep referring to the recurrent mystery of the subject and thereby draw attention to the limits of their knowledge? I suggest that in at least some cases, they sought to cultivate interest in their subject by casting themselves as quasi-alchemical masters of a hidden mystery, most notably in Edison’s and Nikola Tesla’s self-fashioning as wizards. This is most evident in the burgeoning ‘Romance’ literature that emphasized the almost supernatural wonder associated with electricity.76In particular Nikola Tesla became a figure of awe for theatrical displays with electricity that were as death-defying as they were magical. For example, on 3 February 1892, the electrical engineer James Gordon reported that Tesla kept a crowded audience at the Royal Institution in London ‘spellbound’ for over two hours. Tesla did this by

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regaling them with his discovery that currents of very high frequency alternating current(of a million cycles per second) not only rendered a normally lethal 50,000 volts entirely harmless to the touch, but could make fluorescent tubes ‘glow and throb’ without any wires connected to them whatsoever. Thus even if Tesla had not fully withdrawn the veil from the ‘fascinating mysteries’ connecting electricity and light, such investigators as he could, as William Crookes told readers of the Fortnightly Review in the same month, discover yet more about the ‘attributes and functions’ of electricity. In so doing, the mysterious nature of electricity served only to heighten the magus-like status that Tesla acquired as manipulator of lightning and prophet of the most spectacular electrical technologies being brought into the domestic sphere.77 Yet such displays did not reach all the population nor necessarily persuade all those who saw them that the technology of electricity had been fully tamed or that its identity thus did not need to be considered. As much as for any other unfamiliar guest that crossed the threshold of their homes, late Victorian citizens still wanted to know the pedigree, credentials and possible hazards posed by the new social arrival of electricity. And without the complete guidance that they sought on such matters from the electrical cognoscenti, they constructed their own narratives of the nature and risks of electricity. To finalize the link to the next chapter on the dangers of electricity, I quote a conversation that Charles Gibson heard between two fellow Glaswegians on an electric tram surmising the powers of two different kinds of electricity: One asked the other how it was that a person might walk along the rails of an electric tramway and yet not receive a shock from the dynamo to which they are connected. His friend’s reply was that the rails only carried negative electricity, which was quite harmless, and that it was the positive electricity, carried by the trolley wire, that killed.78

3 ELECTRICITY AS DANGER: THE MANY DEATHS OF LORD SALISBURY’S GARDENER

Even before the success of the incandescent lamp was fully demonstrated, the gas companies viewed the new [electrical] illuminant not only with disfavour but with evident uneasiness, and were not slow to recognise that it might in the near future become a dangerous rival. It was only natural that those interested in gas undertakings should do all in their power to prejudice the public against the use of electricity, and the wildest rumours were circulated with respect to it. An unfortunate accident at Lord Salisbury’s estate was made use of as an object lesson to demonstrate the fearful consequences to the unhappy mortal who should be so venturesome as to have anything to do with electricity. Gay & Yeaman, An Introduction to the Study of Central Station Electricity Supply, 1899.1

Late Victorians were accustomed to seeing technical novelties not just as entertaining theatrical diversions but as laden with both promises of material luxury and threats of bodily harm.2 Those who read daily press reports of railway crashes, gas conflagrations and steam boiler explosions in the early 1880s were hardly surprised to discover that the electricity provided not only a novel kind of illumination but also a new and unpleasant form of accidental death. The case of electricity posed unusually complex concerns, however, and this was not just because it had been employed for decades in medical treatments of contested therapeutic efficacy,3 nor because it was employed from 1890 as a statutory if still controversial means of execution in New York State.4 There was something new and rather disturbing about letting the strange and powerful agency of electricity loose around the home: a hallowed space in which industrially-sourced gaslight had still not displaced the paraffin lamp or candle by the early 1880s, and the telephone was almost a complete stranger.5 Behind the recurrent lay question ‘what is electricity?’ was householders’ demand to know the nature of the potent commodity that they were invited to risk bringing into the safety of the domestic sphere, notwithstanding evidence of its potentially fatal effects on unwary mortals. The major technocratic rival for household lighting, heating and cooking – coal-gas – offered the advantage of – 61 –

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being analysable into its component parts by the laboratory chemist, detectable by its industrial odour and kept from mishap by the use of robust piping. But what precautions could prevent electricity behaving ‘so badly’ in the homes of those not specially trained in electrical expertise? The public might read with pity the tale of the hapless Georg Richmann, killed by a lightning bolt in his own St Petersburg home while investigating atmospheric electricity in 1753; but how many had the fortitude, inventiveness or sheer good luck that had apparently enabled Benjamin Franklin to avoid a similar fate in the previous year?6 With a widespread folklore maintaining that birds found dead at the bottom of telegraph wires had been electrocuted by the current, 7 who would be able to endure the perils of the strong currents associated with electricity within the home? Following a historiographical survey in ‘Disappearing Fears in Electrical History’ I will then present a quantitative and gender survey of the actual deaths from electrical causes in Britain from 1880 to 1905 (all male), noting comparison with Europe and the USA. The following sections move on to look at one particular incident which crystallized many public fears about electricity and which indeed became a bugbear of the industry for decades thereafter: the socalled death of Lord Salisbury’s gardener at Hatfield House on 12 December 1881. Overall, this chapter and the one that follows examine how competing discourses of electricity and gas as ‘danger’ were developed and played out concurrently, with the development of new kinds of expertise among electrical specialists to construct – materially and rhetorically – the safety of electricity relative to gas in the home.

Disappearing Fears in Electrical History It is not so long ago that we first put electric lights in houses with fear and trembling […] Experiments with the electricity in the home are as yet tentative, and made almost altogether on the lighting circuit. Every manufacturer of electrical apparatus knows this condition is not permanent, but electricity must make its way against prejudice, fear and the tightly held pocket book, even as gas had to do. Carl H. Claudy, ‘Electrical Invasion of the Home’ Scientific American, 1916.8

Few historians of electric lighting have treated the fear of electricity as having any significant role in the dynamics of electrical lighting. While noting the number of deaths from electricity in New York in the 1880s – especially in the ‘wire panic’ of 1889 – as feeding interest in the advent of the punitive electric chair, William Essig leaves us wondering about the extent to which fears about the lethal qualities of electricity deterred US householders from taking up the electric light. More focused on the question is Carolyn Marvin, who has briefly surveyed press-cultivated fears of electricity in the US and UK during

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this period, suggesting that electrical experts dealt with them quite straightforwardly by both ridiculing popular anxiety and reasserting that electricity really was effectively under their control.9 This is an interpretation I shall refine considerably in what follows by problematizing the authority and expertise of the ‘experts’ concerned, and showing how many auxiliary strategies they were forced to adopt in winning over the public to their controversial claims for the safety of electricity vis-à-vis gas.10 The reticence of historians to discuss this matter echoes the tactics of the original nineteenth century proponents of the new illuminant such as Thomas Edison, Joseph Swan, William Preece, Rookes Crompton, Robert Hammond and St George Lane-Fox. For both them and their later historians, the topic of accidental electrocution unhelpfully subverted easy narratives of electrification as a natural or even inevitable route to societal progress or modernity. Whereas, for example, several of the early entrepreneurs liked to present the electric light as a solution to existing safety problems, such as the hazard of flammable gas in coal mines,11 questions from the laity about the hazards of electricity proved highly inconvenient to answer, both on grounds of economic self-interest and also because – pace Marvin – it exposed the limits of their expertise on the nature of hazards of electricity. Typically the earliest promoters of electric lighting were reluctant to mention the new hazards their work might bring to the public. For example on 17 May 1882, Lane-Fox spoke on the ‘Future of Electric Lighting’ at the Royal United Services Institution in London to acknowledge the ‘pertinent questions that the public are ever asking’ about installation and costs. Yet it was not he, but a member of his audience that raised the question of whether there was ‘any danger connected with the use of electricity’. The Times, ever sympathetic to electric light projects,12 faithfully reported Lane-Fox’s view that low voltage supply was completely safe: accidents arose only from ‘gross carelessness’ in installation.13 Unless they had been at the lecture, however, readers of The Times might have gained the impression that Lane-Fox had confidently volunteered this interpretation entirely unbidden. Similarly at the International Health Exhibition at London in 1884,14 the electrical manufacturer Rookes Crompton spoke at a conference partisanly dedicated to promoting ‘Electric Lighting in relation to health’ emphasizing the household virtues of incandescent lighting while railing against the air-poisoning and oxygen-stealing performance of gas lamps. Asked by a military engineer, Colonel Malcolm, in the audience why he had not mentioned any ‘danger’ in relation to domestic electric light, Crompton replied briskly that the risks were infinitesimal when compared to those of using matches in lighting gas lamp. He stressed that in any case these only arose in the ‘high tension’ currents for alternating current systems that (as a direct current supplier) he strongly advised against

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and that in any case the rules imposed by insurance companies were stringent enough to eliminate all risk of fire. A fellow audience member, the British inventor of the incandescent lamp, Joseph Swan, similarly treated the matter as easily resolved: Swan invited Malcolm to see the incandescent lamp installation in his Newcastle home that had been entirely accident-free for several years, so effectively had servants managed it despite only having prior experience of gas lamps. Overwhelmed by the enormous sympathy for electric light at the conference, Malcolm retreated to suggesting that only in ‘uneducated circles’ was electric light thought to be dangerous.15 This response was symptomatic of much discussion thereafter in which direct current electrical entrepreneurs (Lane-Fox, Swan, Crompton and Robert Hammond) sought to stigmatize those who raised fears about electricity as being merely ignorant, uneducated or commercially involved in gas supply, and thus not needing to be taken seriously. Overall they wished the public, their prospective customers for electric light, to see the only hazard as generated by the choice of inappropriate (i.e. alternating current) supply systems and by irresponsible workers, there being allegedly no inherent danger in electricity per se. While almost all electric accidents in the 1880s did indeed involve high-voltage alternating current systems, mitigation of electricity’s dangers – or rather the construction of electrical safety – was not quite as straightforward as either the protagonists or later electrical commentators claimed. Despite their apparent insouciance in face of awkward questions about electrical hazard, in other contexts these figures worked no less hard than their alternating current rivals in the Anglo-American Brush Company and the Gordon, Westinghouse and Ferranti Companies in propaganda campaigns and technological projects to break down a strong popular association between electricity and danger. As I show next, these popularizer-entrepreneurs had to deal with a climate of opinion concerning accidents in which deaths from new industrial enterprises were no longer tolerated as either the inevitable price of progress or self-evidently the result of working class recklessness. This trend was epitomized in 1894, when the UK government’s official investigation into the need for formal safety regulations in twenty-two industrial practices – including electrical generation – classified them as ‘Dangerous Trades’.16 The disinclination hitherto of historians to consider this classification of electrical work motivates much of what follows.

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Cultures of Fear and Death: Historicizing Electricity in the Victorian Workplace The death of a labourer at Hatfield House on Monday last week, from touching a presumably un-insulated electric lighting wire, has attracted considerable attention. It is not our purpose to unduly magnify the very real dangers of strong electric currents, or to discredit electric lighting simply because it is capable of causing damage. We desire to remark on the peculiarly insidious, or rather deceptive character of the principal risk in dealing with electricity in a state of high tension. It is simply impossible that any one should discover beforehand what would be the awful result of touching a pair of harmless-looking wires, which at the time may be conveying a tremendous amount of electrical energy. Escaping coal gas gives its own warning to the senses […]. ‘The Electric Light and its Friends’, Journal of Gas Lighting, 1881.17

The workplace death of artisans was so tragically commonplace in Victorian Britain, that coverage of them could have filled whole newspapers every day of the week. Why then did the demise of a humble labourer who had touched an electrical wire in the gardens at Hatfield House on 12 December 1881 provoke such widespread comment? Although friends of the gas industry publicly capitalized upon such incidents to thwart the prospects of the upstart rival, it was not just Schadenfreude that provoked this level of interest. Nor indeed was such a dread of electricity unique to Britain; as the epigraph of Charles Claudy shows, early fears about bringing electricity into US homes had not been forgotten a whole generation later. We can find plentiful references to such fear throughout the 1880s and 1890s, documented mostly in passing comments by provocative journalists, frustrated electrical engineers (derisorily reporting the worries of servants) and sarcastic representatives of the gas industry. And certainly practitioners in both electrical and gas supply sought to accentuate evidence of the danger in their competitor’s illuminant and emphasize the putative safety of their own; as Caroline Haslett of the Electrical Association for Women later noted, this contributed much to the ‘bad atmosphere’ between the two industries, which female authorities such as her did much to dispel.18 How is the historian to explain this anxiety about electricity in the 1880s that was not matched by any comparable large-scale panic concerning gas lighting or steam power? It cannot be explained by any simple appeal to any putative ‘fact’ that electricity was somehow more or less innately dangerous than those traditional forces. Not even gas propagandists were prepared to say outright that any or all forms of electricity were necessarily deadly (it was widely accepted that the miniscule currents used in the telegraph and telephone posed little hazard of fire or shock). Moreover the intrinsic properties of electricity were among the very points at issue in the public debates on the subject. This fear cannot

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be explained by reference to any quantitative trends in the relative numbers of industrial deaths from electricity as compared with gas or steam. Instead, I indicate how and why this fear was cultivated through diverse cultural pathways by groups with rather different reasons for passing on or refashioning the stories of electrical ‘accidents’. Such tales had sensationalist reporting value for the Press, strategic propaganda value for gas shareholders, and conversational-social currency for rumour or gossip among domestic servants. Given both contemporary empirical evidence and recent research on the cultural specificity of risk perception,19 it would clearly be absurd to attempt any quantitative link between late-nineteenth-century electrophobia and the number of fatal incidents involving electricity. For example, up to 600 deaths occurred in just one night after the gas lighting system exploded in the Ringtheater in Vienna, just four days before the Hatfield incident; yet that led to no generalized panic about the dangers of gas lighting – rather a critique of the theatre’s management and the city’s emergency services.20 By comparison, there were only sixteen deaths in Europe from electricity related accidents for the entire decade 1880–90 and around ten times that number for the USA; both figures still significantly less than the single Ringtheater incident, in one city on one night and yet much press discussion was provoked concerning the potential hazards of electrical shock.21 The relative rarity and infrequency of death by electric shock in the 1880s can be seen from contemporary tables on European fatalities produced by the Telegraph and Electrical Review in 1890 (Table 3.1). For the period 1880–9, ten out of the sixteen fatalities in Europe occurred in Britain, explaining perhaps why anxiety about electricity was particularly accentuated there. Table 3.1: Fatalities in Europe due to Electric Shock, 1880–9 Date 1880

1881

Victims M. Bruno (musician) A stoker

A workman (William Dimmock) (1882) (—) 1883 Railway Official 1884 Emile Martin Joseph Kenarec H(enry) Pink W(illiam) Moore

Place where killed Aston, (Holte Theatre, Birmingham) Yacht, Livadia (owned by Tsar of Russian; on Thames near London) Hatfield (Lord Salisbury’s Garden, Hatfield house) (—) Pesth (Hungary?) Tuileries Garden, Paris Tuileries Garden, Paris Health Exhibition, London Middlesborough

Cause of death (see notes) Jablochkoff alternating current Jablochkoff alternating current Brush (alternating) current under 800 volts (—) Ganz alternating current Siemens 12-light alternator Siemens 12-light alternator 1000 volt Hochhausen machine Arc light plant, high voltage and bad insulation

Electricity as Danger Date (1885) (1886) 1887

Victims (—) (—) R(ichard).Grove J(ames)Williams

Place where killed (—) (—) Regent Street London (Pontyminister tin-plate works) Risca, Wales

1888

A workman A carpenter An attendant E.A. Richardson A workman

Terni, Italy Valladolid, Spain Valladolid, Spain Consett Iron Works Brighton

1889

( John) Connelly

Siemens, London

67 Cause of death (see notes) (—) (—) Alternating current, Grosvenor Gallery Shock from electric lighting wire Alternating current, Alternating current, Killed tried to save his companion Current from arc light plant Touched a live wire on roof of brewery Alternating current of 1000 volts

Table 1: Source: “Fatalities from Electric Lighting” Telegraphic Journal & Electrical Review Jan 10 1890 vol.26, p.39; reproduced in (Gay and Yeaman, 1906) 467. Location are in the UK unless otherwise specified, with additional information added in square brackets from “Electricity’s victims in Europe” The American Architect and Building News Vol. 27, No. 733, 11 January (1890) 27, and other sources cited in this chapter. For the US case see (Essig 2003 and Brown 1888) For discussion of the attributions of cause of death see below. Jex-Blake records that a stage carpenter was killed at a Lyon theatre in 1879 contact with a 250 volt a.c. current from Siemens. A. J. Jex-Blake, Death by Electric Currents and by Lightning. (London: British Medical Association, 1913).

This table was republished and extended by the London electrical engineers Albert Gay and Charles Henry Yeaman in their standard manual Central Station Electrical Supply to include all fatalities in England up to 1905 (Table 3.2). None of the fatalities listed below concerned domestic residents. Apart from the two French youths who trespassed onto the electric lighting station at the Tuileries garden in Paris in 1884 and the two unfortunate men at the Fulham Public baths in 1903, all involved male artisans or technicians in the context of regular employment. Such fatalities only became an annual occurrence in England from 1892, the year in which the first and only nineteenth-century electrical death inside a British home happened (at Chatham in 1892), well after the two main phases of British panic about electricity had taken place in 1881–2 and 1887–91. Table 3.2: Gay & Yeaman, Accidents during fourteen years in England, 1892–1905 (NB no deaths from electrical shock were recorded in the UK for the two years 1890–1) Date Victims 1892 Tradesman’s assistant Jointer’s mate

Place where killed (Consumer’s premises) Chatham (Street) Kensington, London

Cause of death (see notes) Defectively insulated cables Failure to use gloves provided

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Date Victims 1893 Switchboard assistant Workman

Place where killed (Switchboard) Brighton

Cause of death (see notes) Imprudently operating switch

(Substation) Blackfriars, London

1894 Unskilled workman Workman Workman

Attempting to remove workman from contact with h(igh) t(ension) bus bar. Accidental contact with h.t. bus bar

(Substation) Blackfriars, London (Central Station) Prescott Contact with h.t. voltmeter wire (Central Station) BankContact with charged metal usually side, London out of reach. (Central Station) Taunton Careless use of oil-can near alternator. (Substation) Bristol Cleaning live fuses ungloved (Substation) Cheltenham Accidental contact with unprotected h.t. terminal (Central Station) Hamp- Accidental contact at back of stead, London switchboard (Substation) Bedford Breaking Earth connection of transformer (Factory) Newcastle-upon- Contact with arc circuit of 3000 Tyne volts (Substation) Hampstead, Defective earthing of transformer London case (Works) Bournemouth Making repairs; 2000 v(olts) (Switchboard) Bristol Screwed into live cable (Transformer pit) Chelms- Failure to use gloves when disconford necting (Works) Rathbone Place Contact with 1000v (London) (Mains) Southampton Repairing h.t. joint not using gloves (Substation) Bolton Disconnecting transformer

Assistant 1895 Workman Workman 1896 Contractor’s official Workman 1897 Workman Workman Workman Workman 1898 Foreman Wireman

Wireman 1899 Foreman cable junior 1900 Jointer (Substation) Cheltenham Assistant engineer (Central Station) Newport Assistant engineer Manchester Sq. station, Metropolitan Co. Carpenter’s mate Blackheath Central station Miner Colliery new Coventry 1901 Miner Southall Colliery Assistant Switch- Deptford, transformer man room Two men labour- Palmer’s Works, Jarrow. ers Workman Exhall Colliery, Warwickshire Electrician (Substation) Chatham

Testing transformers Switching Making connection, switchboard Touched a bolt at switchboard Fell upon a motor; 450 volts 500 volts Fell against a live fuse; 10,000 volts In motor-house against orders, 410 volts Live wire broke Attending to wires

Electricity as Danger Date Victims 1902 Workman Engineman Workman

Place where killed Alhambra, Sheffield Glapwell Colliery, Derbyshire Yarmouth

Collier

Philadelphia, Colliery

1902 Workman of Cal- Sutton Coldfield Corporalendar & Co. tion Fitter Metropolitan Company, Manchester Sq. Harrogate Corporation Lamp trimmer Workman North Eastern Steel works, Middlesborough 1903 Two men Fulham Borough Council Two boys public baths Colliery, Coatbridge 1904 Boy London Electric Supply Switchman Co. Ironworks Charing Cross and City labourer Co., Stratford Labourer Acklam Ironworks Engineer Metropolitan Electric SupColliery ply Company employ(ee) Walker on Tyne Substation Ferryhill, Durham employ(ee) Scarborough Electric Light Miner Co. Eldon Colliery, Bishop Auckland

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Cause of death (see notes) Shock from bracket; 200 volts. Touched a wire; several thousand volts Changing globe of arc lamp; 700 lamps Shock from broken cable Repairing feeder pillar; 235 volts Handling copper strip which touched live cable Touched live switchbox without gloves Touched live wire Leakage in wiring; 200 volts Touched signal wires making contact with live wires Cleaning terminal without orders; 10,000 volts Removing fuses Grasped at electric lamp to save fall Cutting pipe; current on at time; no gloves used; 500 volts Came into contact with brushes; 300 volts Grasping bare signal wires, 220 volts Dusting switches with gloves on; found dead with head 3 inches from nearest terminal; 130 volts. Grasping electric cable supplying electric current to coal-cutting machine

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Date Victims 1905 Clockwinder (weak heart)

Place where killed Leeds Market Hall clock tower

Cause of death (see notes) Clock gong operated by current from lighting mains; 200 volts alternating Foreman electri- Bolckow, Vaughan & Co., Searching for leakage touched live cal engineer Middlesborough wire Colliery at Tredagear Fuse nipped between lid and case of Electric pump c.i. fuse box; ineffective earthing driver Islington Electricity works Adjusting rectifier, 1500 to 2000 Senior shift volts; no gloves used engineer Bricklayer’s Gateshead railway shops Grasped wire presumably to prevent falling labourer Cut wire with pliers when current Master electrician Kennington on; earth damp, nails in boots; 200 volts Found dead across iron rail guardWorkman Tube Works, Airdrie ing electric switch of scarfing Electrician Neasden Power Station machine Entanglement among live wires in Bricklayer District Railway substatransformer chamber; instruction, Whitechapel tions not to enter; 11000 volts.

1905 Electrician

Hastings Tramway

Electrician

Hammersmith

Removing floor-plates in sub-station; assumed plate caught on feeder switch. Accidentally brought his hand into contact with live part of switch removing ammeter; did not wear gloves; 2500 volts

Table 2: Caption: Source: Gay & Yeaman, (1906) 468–71. For a more detailed survey of the cases for 1892–7, with more sophisticated analysis of cause of death see ‘Second Interim Report of the Departmental Committee appointed into and report upon Certain Miscellaneous Dangerous Trades: Electrical Generating Works’ London, HMSO, 1897, 13

The two tables which Gay and Yeaman published in their appendix to Central Station Electricity Supply were designed to show trainee electrical engineers how remarkably few deaths there had been due to electric shock up to 1905. More specifically they showed how most of these could (by considerable selectivity of explanation) be attributed to the carelessness of the worker involved, for example through either unauthorized action with equipment such as ‘imprudent’ operations of switches or culpable inaction such as the failure to wear regulation safety gloves. Significantly, though, not all deaths were so classified. Gay and Yeaman concede that the number of accidents in the earliest days was ‘remarkably small’ considering the ‘class of apparatus’ used: most early deaths were explained simply by the use of high-voltage alternating current equipment, or occasionally

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the doomed attempts of heroic workmen to save their feckless or luckless electrocuted colleagues. The more detailed investigations of the Table 3.2, signifying the greater depth of investigation emerging with the growing numbers of fatalities, indicate that some fatalities owed much to sheer bad luck in precipitating falls, or defective equipment and, on occasion insulation, that hinted at injudicious management. This move away from blaming the victim is epitomized in the context of the Liberal Government’s 1894 investigation of electrical generation as a dangerous trade’. While Gay and Yeaman drew no inference from the near-tenfold increase in fatalities from the early 1880s to the mid-1900s, from the content of their book it is clear that the number of electrical installations and number of employees in the industry were increasing at a much faster rate than the number of deaths; roughly a thousandfold difference. Thus, by implication, the safety standards of the industry were radically improving even as the number of deaths increased. One can understand therefore why the coauthors were so caustic in criticizing gas journals for continuing to emphasize the danger of electricity in bringing forward their ‘old worn-out platitudes and arguments’ against it.22 While clearly gas journals had long attempted to draw attention to the hazards of electricity, especially capitalizing upon the death of the Hatfield labourer in 1881, pace Gay and Yeaman it is not obvious that the public would have treated those sources as trustworthy authorities on electricity, had they bothered to read gas journals at all. A more likely propagator of anxiety about electrical safety in the popular domain was the worried gas shareholder whose investments had plummeted in autumn 1878 in the panic over Edison’s (premature) announcement of his incandescent filament lam23 This is what engineer-entrepreneur Robert Hammond claimed to have found when he lectured throughout the UK in 1883–4 to promote the electric light as a safer domestic alternative to gas, hoping thereby to drum up custom for his Hammond Electric Light Company. Many who had attended his lectures had told him they were afraid to admit electric current into their homes lest this brought ‘insecurity’ that far outweighed any advantages of the electric light. Hammond alleged that this fear had been cultivated across the country by gas shareholders: ‘everywhere an active body of intelligent men ready to condemn the electric light and to magnify the dangers arising from it’.24Hammond’s complaint about gas shareholders did not restrain him from condemning the gaslight and magnifying the dangers of that rather better-established illuminant. To understand the anxiety about electricity manifest in Hammond’s audience, we should note that there were two other key factors unlikely to be related directly to the machinations of the gas industry. Hammond cited the case of a new servant in his home, who was most alarmed to discover the house was

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equipped with electric light. Unable to sleep the first night, she showed a ‘haggard’ countenance the following morning: This look of distress, indeed, did not wear off with a few days’ experience, but got more marked. At last she begged to be allowed to leave a house where she was put into so much terror. It was in vain that the other servants explained to her that no danger could possibly arise, and showed her – for my servants are great authorities on the electric light question – that she had nothing to dread. She persisted in her intention of going, fearing evidently that some night she would find herself, bed and all, blown into the street.25

This servant was not alone in her fear of electricity leading to an explosion. Two members of an otherwise ‘enlightened’ borough council, with whom Hammond had recently discussed electric lighting, told of similar fears of an unheralded ‘blow-up’. But while they might have been habitual readers of gas journals or conversed with sceptical gas shareholders about the imprudence of purchasing an Edison or Swan lamp installation, Hammond’s servant is unlikely to have acquired her fear by this means. Such stories prompt the question as to why electricity was feared as a source of explosion. As Hammond was at pains to explain, the primary hazards from electricity were physiological shock and fire from overheated wires; no explosion, fatal or otherwise, had till then been reported from an electrical installation.26 Importantly, however, explosion was the primary mode by which steam boilers and gas installations had routinely brought death to the home, street and various modes of public transportation for at least half a century, but without mass panic resulting.27 Evidently some lay perceptions of electricity as a threat were mediated by experiences of more familiar modes of hazard to the home and person: it was thus anticipated from the precedent of gas, that the little understood dangers of electricity might manifest itself in explosion. This is not surprising given the sheer unfamiliarity of the mode by which electricity killed by shock contact; precisely the point made by the sniping December 1881 editorial in the Journal of Gas Lighting in response to the Hatfield accident. This brings me to the second point concerning mediations of anxiety about electricity. Hammond attributed much of the peculiar excitement about electricity to the way in which the general press reported this unfamiliar and mysterious cause of death. Although everyone heard daily of ‘serious and sad accidents’ with gas, the constant recurrence of these accidents had inured the public to them; thus the press could satisfy itself with ‘very meagre reports’ of calamities that after fifty years had ceased to be novel. By contrast, Hammond declared that any accident that occurred in connection with electricity was ‘immediately reported and fully commented upon’ on account of its newness.28 Indeed, it was owing to the enormously wide-ranging coverage of the Hatfield fatality in national

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newspapers and periodicals that Hammond could presume that his lecture audiences were ‘doubtless familiar with the details of the sad accident that occurred at Lord Salisbury’s when a gardener [sic] lost his life’. What Hammond did not explain, however, is how William Dimmock’s demise at Hatfield in December 1881 – curiously transmuted to incorporate the location of the labourer’s death – had acquired an iconic status far greater than the earlier demise of the euphonium player Mr Bruno, who had adventurously touched the connections of a Jablochkoff arc light in an Aston theatre, just like the ill-fated Russian sailor who had a similarly lethal encounter on the Tsar of Russia’s yacht Livadia (see Table 3.1)29. Later I explain how the Hatfield death acquired a peculiar fetish and how Hammond re-appropriated this common point of reference in order to try to explain away the Hatfield fatality as an avoidable and unfortunate conjunction of circumstance and technology.

Interrogating the Electrical ‘Accident’ The Hatfield death was described as an ‘accident’ by those involved in, or sympathetic to, the electrical industry, for example Hammond and The Times. Such an epithet was notably not used, however, by the Journal of Gas Lighting, hinting in more essentialist terms that such fatalities as Dimmock’s were inevitable rather than accidental if one dabbled with high-tension electricity. This difference in descriptive analysis epitomizes the point made by Cooter and Luckin (1997) of the changing and contested understanding of what constituted an ‘accident’ in the later Victorian period. They emphasize that what is deemed an ‘accident’ is not a matter of simple natural fact but of theory-loaded differentiation from those happenings designated by contrast as Acts of God, ‘natural’ events, misadventure or negligence. Such were the kinds of difficult demarcation that inquest juries were required to make in the nineteenth century.30 The need for historiographically sensitive analysis is all the more important given that contemporaries did not always agree on either the kinds of causal attribution involved in accidents or which events were to be labelled as ‘accidents’. Divergent interpretations amongst contemporary observers need to be explained in relation to the particularities of their historical context and their social-political perspective. To put this into perspective for industrial Britain, in a world of increasingly ubiquitous and ever hastening machinery, by the early nineteenth century theistic explanation of unintended deaths as Divine punishment upon sinners had become untenable.31 The continued destruction of lives, limbs and health in factory machinery and railway accidents were, by the 1870s, no longer stoically tolerated as an inevitable (if lamentable) corollary of economic progress. An unusually hard-bitten comment on this can be seen in September 1874 in a Punch cartoon arguing fiercely against railway directors’ denial of responsibility

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for fatal train accidents. Mr Punch confronts a well-fed Railway Director standing complacently in front of a horrific railway disaster: ‘No, no, Mr. Director. They’re not so much to blame. It’s your false economy, unpunctuality and general want of system that does all the mischief ’.32 Cooter specifically observes a rising public intolerance of hazards among the middle classes in the 1870s: the St Johns Ambulance Association was founded in 1877 and the Society for Preventing Street Accidents was founded in 1879, introducing the term ‘First Aid’. The notion that workplace death was generally prima facie an accident brought about by the victim’s own ignorance, inattention or fecklessness, not by (cumulative) managerial negligence or incompetence, met its first serious challenge in this decade. A conventional view of the British situation is thus that the following quarter century saw a general state-managed trend to shift responsibility of workplace deaths away from the artisan victim towards a distributed responsibility for a whole system of management overseen by employers. Employers’ increasing share of the responsibility for accident prevention was instantiated in two state initiatives: the Dangerous Trades committee of 1894 which formulated recommendations for employers about how to prevent avoidable death, disease and injury in the workplace (see above), and a Workmen’s Compensation Act, passed by Lord Salisbury’s last Conservative government in 1897, that formalized all working people’s entitlement to claim compensation from employers for injuries incurred in the working environment.33 To Cooter and Luckin’s analysis of the changing cultural significance of the ‘accident’, my account offers three additional considerations. Firstly, we can expand upon the supposed linear shift in responsibility for accidents from worker to employer by observing that certain kinds of agencies – gas, electricity and steam – were brought into the explanatory analysis as agencies imputed with the propensity to cause accidents. Thus, electrical promoters often commented pointedly on how the use of gas greatly increased the likelihood of accidental domestic explosion or poisoning, whereas gas propagandists would allude darkly to the unforseeability of the danger posed by electricity. There was sometimes considerable ambiguity on this point however: William Preece’s comment at the Society of Arts in 1881 (see Chapter 1) of the apparent tendency of electricity to create danger by behaving ‘badly’ was a rhetorical ploy setting up his subsequent blame of inexperienced workmen handling it. Yet in summer that year, at the BAAS Mechanical Science section debate, Preece reported with less irony – and considerable anthropomorphization – that the use of electric light in homes was not hazard free since electricity was an ‘unruly customer to deal with’.34 Secondly, the explanation of ‘accidents’ (especially the electrical variety) was a highly perspectival matter. Each individual interpretation characteristically picked out one causal factor among many as somehow more important than

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all others, typically selected for reasons expedient or idiosyncratic to the commentator’s specific concerns; this I will illustrate in the divergent accounts of William Dimmock’s death at Hatfield in December 1881. More specifically the kinds of causal factors invoked to explain accidental electrical death increased in number and complexity over time, especially as electro-physiological researches revealed the great variability of body tolerances and electrical resistance, some individuals being killed by shocks that others might well have survived.35 Thus we will see that a significant proportion of electrical accidents latterly came to be construed as governed by quirks in the physiological state of the victim rather than failings on their part or any essential hazardousness of electricity. My third point concerns the culture of fear surrounding possible accidents, taking up Arwen Mohun’s observations about the gendering of risk perception and performance in the industrial world.36 Speaking very crudely, one characteristic form of ‘working class’, masculine endeavour was for men to enact a gender identity of robust fearlessness by seeking out and enacting overtly risky activities; this perhaps explains the high incidence of male workers in the 1890s and 1900s who died of electrical shock after declining to wear their safety gloves or making other voluntary departures from safety regulations (See Table 3.2 above). By contrast, it was unusual for women in the nineteenth century to pursue gratuitous risks to establish their gender role; mortality rates for childbirth were in any case daunting in comparison to anything men had to deal with. Up to 1900, no women were killed in Britain in electrical accidents and only two women featured among the 183 UK fatalities from electricity in the period 1901–10.37 So why then was the most pronounced alarm about electricity more often to be found among women, especially among female servants? Conversely why was it that women were so often involved in staged demonstrations of how easily accidents involving electricity could be prevented? The answer, I suggest, lies in the way that the formal industrial workplace was only one environment in which contact with electricity arose during the course of the working day. In affluent homes where female servants had traditionally trimmed candles, cleaned paraffin and/or oil lamps and maintained gas lamps, such employees were typically redeployed to handle the dusting and changing of new electric lamps at home.38 Indeed, as we saw earlier, in Swan’s and Hammond’s households the entire responsibility for handling electric lighting was given over to servants.39 The daily domestic management of electric lighting was thus often conventionally treated as the women’s responsibility, and with that responsibility there was a heritage of gendered concerns about putatively vulnerable female bodies. Terrible stories of women being burned to death in their own homes by paraffin lamps that were dropped, tipped over or simply exploded were by no means rare. This fed the propaganda of Charles Marvin, a freelance consultant to the oil industry who produced the sensationalist booklet The Moloch of Paraffin

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– ‘one hundred inquests a week’ – in order to show that the victim was generally the innocent and virtuous female and chief culprit was the faulty design of the lamps, not the paraffin itself.40 Female theatrical workers also daily risked their lives on stage by wearing dresses – large and/or easily flammable – that brushed past naked-flame footlights, occasionally leading their wearer to an agonizing fiery death. Most notoriously, the immolation of star English ballerina Clara Webster after her dress touched an oil lamp on stage at Drury Lane in 1844 was witnessed by the entire audience and she died three days later.41 By contrast, gas explosions were treated as mundane by male observers who did not have to face them as an everyday threat; for example, at the 1884 conference on the health benefits of electricity discussed above, the sole voice speaking in favour of gas lighting noted, rather chauvinistically, that while gas explosions might occasionally ‘blow out windows’, this hazard ‘generally affected only the kitchen-maids’. Quite how the housemaids saw this risk was – for obvious gender and class reasons – not considered at the conference. 42 A tradition of anxiety about bodily risks to women in the lighting contexts of home and theatre was transferred from past experience of gas, oil paraffin and candle light to the new phenomenon of domestic electricity. The new and mysterious means of death by electrical shock was interpreted through a long tradition of horrendous conflagration in the home that was specific to women’s domestic labour, hence the anxiety of Robert Hammond’s servant. This fear was cited by Hammond, Gordon and others in the electrical lobby in an attempt to stigmatize fear of electricity as ‘merely’ the irrational anxiety characteristic of such putatively marginal figures as uneducated female servants, a tactic deployed by electricians to try to trivialize an inconvenient public phobia about their area of expertise. Yet, as I show in Chapter 4, enrolling women to illustrate that electrical lighting and jewellery could be safely borne by the female body on stage was a crucial if controversial display strategy for electrical engineers and theatrical impresarios in the 1880s. Having shown the diversity of ways in which fear around electricity was mediated and the numbers of different constituencies for whom such fear was manifested, I will now turn the central feature of the myths at the heart of anxieties about electricity: the death of the Hatfield workman.

The Hatfield accident and Lord Salisbury’s Project of Electrification At Hatfield House, the residence of the Marquis of Salisbury, a labourer named William Dimmock, 22 years of age, was accidentally killed on Monday [12 December] by coming into contact with the wires conveying the electric current which lights the

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mansion… While he was absent the linesman heard the wires shake, and on looking round saw the deceased lying on his back, and on going up to him found he was dead. ‘Fatal Accident with the Electric Light’, Times, 1881.43

The Times regularly published reports – almost on a weekly basis – of events pertaining to Lord or Lady Salisbury or their residence, Hatfield House, some twenty miles north of London. William Dimmock’s employer was something of a political celebrity: Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil (1830–1903), the third Marquis of Salisbury, had been Foreign Secretary in Disraeli’s government up to 1880 and was, by late 1881, the Conservative leader in the (still powerful) House of Lords.44 Yet, except for victims of unusually gruesome murders or public disasters, it was unusual for The Times to condescend to report deaths of unskilled labourers, let alone by name. As noted above, in the early 1880s deaths linked to electricity were newsworthy largely by dint of their novelty and strangeness. Dimmock’s death was not unprecedented, being the third electrical fatality recorded in the UK and the second to be reported in The Times following coverage of Mr Bruno’s death at a theatre in Aston in January 1880; the Russian sailor’s death was not recorded by The Times.45 I suggest that there are four reasons why the Hatfield death – unlike that of Mr Bruno – prompted extended correspondence in The Times, coverage across many other newspapers and periodicals and remained thereafter a popular focal point of discussion regarding the dangers of electricity for the press, public and the interested parties of the gas and electric companies. In the wider context of news coverage, the death was reported during the extensive coverage of the catastrophic Vienna Ringtheater explosion on the previous Thursday night, prompting gas interests to go on the offensive in highlighting the remarkable and unique dangers of electricity revealed by the Hatfield accident. Secondly, no previous death had been recorded in connection with a domestic installation of electric (filament) lighting, thus arousing greater concern among householders than if it had been a (more readily tolerated) workplace accident. Thirdly, unlike – for example – the Aston death, the Hatfield fatality concerned an apparently innocent victim who had not obviously precipitated his own fate by wilful misadventure. Finally, although not reported in The Times, Salisbury’s earlier experiments with electric bells, telephones and arc lighting at Hatfield House were familiar to distinguished international politicians, diplomats and royalty who had attended dinners and balls there. Clearly death from touching an electrical wire at that particular location signalled that it was not just the lives of ordinary labourers that were at stake in this potentially hazardous new operation.46 The intensity of concern that these four factors separately brought to the incident helped to magnify the vested interests that lay in the complex interpre-

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tation of causality involved in this event as a putative ‘accident’, at least from the electrical lobby’s point of view. Although it was widely presumed that Dimmock had just slipped on wet grass and received a fatal shock from touching the bare wires as he fell, it was not just the absence of direct witnesses to that death which compounded the complexity of interpretation among contemporaries, experts and laity alike. Was it perhaps a ‘natural’ accident in virtue of the damp weather conditions that magnified the conductivity of Dimmock’s clothing and body, or some weakness in Dimmock’s heart condition that disabled him from surviving the shock of an encounter with alternating current at 800 volts? Was it perhaps instead an avoidable human error? A variety of possibilities of this sort were raised: managerial negligence on the Salisbury estate in allowing exposed wiring to remain uninsulated; the foreman’s instructions to labourers to work in the proximity of such wiring against managerial orders; Salisbury’s unorthodox decision to light Swan incandescent lamps from a high-voltage alternating current generator designed for arc lighting; the Anglo-American Brush Company’s installation of generating equipment that broke down necessitating intermittent tests on the day in question and a breakdown of communication between the Brush company and Dimmock’s foreman about the timing and hazards of their test procedures. Was it even Dimmock’s ignorance of the dangers of touching electric wires that prevented him acting more prudently when he fell? If the lattermost was that case – possibly construed as misadventure – the question then arose as to whose responsibility it would have been to inform him of these dangers, or to issue him with protective advice and clothing. Then again, there was the essentialist suspicion, which seems to have been adopted strongly by many in the public and promoted by the gas industry, that his death was evidence of the inherently dangerous nature of encounters with (high-voltage) electricity. An alternative reading was that this sad event was just another of the many sorts of workplace deaths – often arising from mundane falls – that simply could not be avoided in an industrial culture and had to be accepted as the price of progress. As we will see, the inquest jury, with some difficulty and ambivalence, selectively identified just some of these multiple factors as being critical elements in bringing about Dimmock’s death, prompting recommendations for revised practice. But their lay-expert opinion did not thereby stifle subsequent debate among members of the public, leaving the status of electricity as intrinsic or merely circumstantial hazard under debate for several further decades. What was clear to all was that it was Salisbury’s sole decision to attempt to electrify the interior illumination of Hatfield House in 1880–1, although Salisbury’s route to that position of free-ranging electrical experimentation was not inevitable. The second son of the Second Marquis, he was an (unpaid) Conservative Member of Parliament from 1853, only moving to the House of Lords after

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the death of his elder brother in 1866. As Lord Cranborne (1865–8), Robert Cecil then served as Disraeli’s Secretary of State for India, thereby encountering the great electrical experiment of British imperial telegraphy. Upon the death of his father in 1868, the new Third Marquis of Salisbury inherited Hatfield House and its estate, acquiring thereby both the income and space for extensive experimentation. No sooner had he installed electric bells around the house in 1869, than he was elected both a Fellow of the Royal Society and Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Out of Government office a year later, he had plenty of time to devote to laboratory activity, publishing his only scientific paper and acquainting himself with James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.47 With Disraeli Prime Minister again from 1874, and Salisbury becoming Secretary of State for India then, from 1876, Foreign Secretary, Hatfield House emerged as both an important diplomatic venue and Salisbury’s playground for inflicting pranks on bemused guests and family members, notably with the newfangled telephone from 1878.48 The electoral victory of William Gladstone’s Liberal Party in April 1880 gave Salisbury more leisure for valorous experiments with electric lighting. According to his biographer-daughter, Lady Gwendolen Cecil, when the patriarch of Hatfield House tried garish, noisy and inconstant Jablochkoff arc lights over the dinner table in 1880, he encountered strong aesthetic objections from women in the household (see Chapter 6). According to Lady Cecil’s loyal account, his plans to bring electric illumination to their home were saved from ‘humiliating defeat’ when, in November, Salisbury first saw the Swan filament lamp in use at Sir William Armstrong’s armaments factory in Elswick, north-east England.49 Based in nearby Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Joseph Swan soon arranged for the installation of his filament lamps at Armstrong’s hydroelectric powered mansion, ‘Cragside’, completed in January 1881.50 Salisbury sought to follow suit at Hatfield House, as did the President of the Royal Society William Spottiswoode in London and Sir William Thomson in Glasgow.51 Salisbury was assisted in this endeavour by two key figures: his Clerk of Works, Henry Shillito, who oversaw the electrical installation and the chemist Herbert McLeod, with whom Salisbury corresponded on techno-scientific matters between 1871 and 1898,52 offering McLeod career patronage rather than epistemic deference. Indeed, while little authoritative knowledge was available on the safety of domestic electrification, the relationship between Salisbury and these two men reveals how neither expertise nor responsibility was determinately located in any single individual; McLeod learning rather more from Salisbury about electric lighting than vice versa, and Salisbury significantly declining McLeod’s advice on the dangers of high tension alternating current. Detailed analysis of the correspondence between Salisbury and McLeod in what follows indicates the extent to which the actions and decisions of both Salisbury and Shillito set key condi-

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tions for Dimmock’s death in ways unacknowledged by either the inquest or in Lady Gwendolen Cecil’s biography.53 Since the ready public availability of Jablochkoff arc lighting in 1878, Salisbury and McLeod had discussed the practicalities of dynamos. Whereas Salisbury’s knowledge of Swan lighting came directly from having seen it installed by Armstrong and operated by its inventor, McLeod had only learned of it from Swan’s lecture at the Society of Telegraph Engineers on 24 November 1880, reported in the Times two days later. On reading press reports McLeod responded to Salisbury’s letter two days later presuming that the latter’s adoption of Swan lamps would bring not just ‘diminished brilliancy and the absence of flicker’, avoiding the problems created by the arc light in the dining room earlier that year. Assuming (accurately) that Swan, like Edison, habitually used low-voltage direct current and that Salisbury would be following this, McLeod indicated his relief that Salisbury could now give up the high-voltage equipment previously used on the Hatfield estate for arc lighting. McLeod wrote that he would be glad ‘to hear of the downfall of high potential and intermittent current which have already been fatal in two instances’, clearly alluding to the deaths at Aston and on the Livadia earlier that year.54 Yet, confounding these expectations, Salisbury determined to power his Swan lighting system by using a Brush alternating current dynamo that had originally designed for the AngloAmerican company’s arc lighting system, one that had recently won the favour of British government and military officials.55 McLeod repeatedly warned Salisbury of his concerns. Not knowing how far the Hatfield project had progressed, McLeod wrote to Salisbury on 9 June 1881 reporting the display of Swan lamps at recent Royal Society soirées by President William Spottiswoode using a Siemens machine. McLeod commented bluntly: ‘It was rather a mistake to use alternating currents for an incandescent lamp’. Salisbury’s reply is not extant, but we can guess what it might have contained for, five days later, McLeod wrote apologizing for his impertinence: ‘it is quite obvious that your Lordship knows very much more about the Swan Light than I do.’ Yet he persisted in his concern about the Brush machine, stating: ‘I must confess to a dislike to high electromotive force and especially to reversing currents which are so shocking’. McLeod reported a recent scare at the South Kensington museum involving a Brush machine: when tried for the first time during a storm, the wet leading wires rubbed together, stripping the insulation off them. Although the wires were now kept far apart, McLeod gently insisted that an electromotive force of 600 volts – used both in the Museum and shortly afterwards at Hatfield – was ‘a serious thing to deal with’.56 Six weeks later McLeod reiterated his message and wrote to Salisbury recommending the Maxim dynamo recently demonstrated at the company’s works: ‘This struck me at once to be the thing required at Hatfield and it you are not already bound to the Brush com-

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pany, the Maxim machine may be worth consideration’. Accordingly, McLeod forwarded him an issue of the Telegraphic Journal, giving a description of the ingenious machine on 26 July 1881.57 Although the Marquis declined to accept McLeod’s advice on the choice of generator, he at least arranged for Shillito consider the insulation of the installation, ostensibly with some care. A series of memoranda from Shillito to Salisbury starting in March 1881 documented the development of the electrical installation. Discussing the choice of wiring on 17 August 1881, the Clerk of Works wrote Salisbury a note assuring him that he had tested the connections from the house to the saw mill (where the river-powered dynamo was installed). Most specifically Shillito wrote he was then ‘having all the bare wires coated with tar’. However, it is clear from subsequent events that this policy did not extend to the wires running along the garden walls - although there is no extant evidence that Shillito ever informed Salisbury of this.58 Salisbury was, however, fully aware of the problems that arose when the Brush alternator was first tried on the Swan lamps in early December: when McLeod visited Hatfield on 8 December, McLeod’s diary records that Salisbury asked for advice about the alarming sparking that resulted when the Brush machine was switched on.59 McLeod wrote on the 12 December offering some suggestions, pointing him to a series of articles in the January and February issues of Engineering that might be of assistance. It was on that very day that William Dimmock died at 3.15pm. No written communication remains between Shillito and Salisbury that day to record this event. Salisbury did, however, write to McLeod to tell him of the accident - presumably before the inquest was completed on Tuesday 13th - the Marquis inferring that Dimmock must have suffered from a ‘weak heart’. McLeod replied the next day, gently disputing that any healthy person could have survived the experience: Dear Lord Salisbury, I am very sorry to hear of the accident, I confess to always having had a dread of such high electromotive forces as 840 volts. The shock from 40 cells of Grove’s battery with wet fingers is bad enough; from 500 cells it must be insupportable, except by those of extraordinary constitutions.60

Without further pushing his implied criticism of both Salisbury’s installation and his interpretation of Dimmock’s death, McLeod unsentimentally returned to his familiar trope of advising Salisbury to reduce the voltage: How would it be to have the Brush machine wired with much thicker wire? With the exception of the sparking the machine seems good enough, and with thicker wire on the bobbins the E.M.F. would be diminished, and perhaps to a safe limit.61

The inquest held at the One Bell Inn, Hatfield on the intervening day (Tuesday 13 December) saw similarly conflicting views. There was disagreement among Salis-

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bury’s staff about the orders given to Dimmock’s foreman that day, who knew of the Brush company tests on the wires and what Dimmock had been told about the dangers of contact with electricity. The foreman in question – the itinerant Kentish telegraph linesman, John Rose – broke down in an attack of nervous anxiety as he recalled his experience of Dimmock’s assistance in wire-laying in preceding weeks and the immediate sounds of shaking wires and Dimmock’s cry that heralded his unobserved death. Rose explained that he opted to work next to the wire-bearing wall since the area to which Shillito had directed them was unprepared for line-laying. Shillito’s testimony levelled blame at the foreman for taking Dimmock to a part of the garden that was off-limits and indicated that Dimmock had been told not to touch the wire. Yet Shillito conceded that nobody had ever warned Dimmock of the fatal consequences of so doing,62 and could offer ‘no reason’ why over 300 yards of the wire remained uninsulated. Although he echoed the view of one juror that on a drier day the victim might have survived the shock, both the inquest surgeon Charles Vincent Hall and the Coroner contradicted Shillito on this point maintaining that the ‘strong current’ from the machine was quite sufficient to cause death in any circumstances. In his summing up the coroner, T. J. Sworder, noted that Shillito was the ‘responsible’ person, being as he was in overall charge of the estate’s arrangements. Noting that there had been ‘a certain amount of carelessness’ in the case, he asked the jury whether they wished to call witnesses from the Brush Company, but they declined to do so, rather extraordinarily in view of the recommendations it made.63 The inquest jury’s considered verdict was that Dimmock’s was an ‘accidental death’ caused by touching the current-carrying wire. Yet its recommendations about how to preempt such events in future significantly diverged from Salisbury’s view that the fatality was an accident of physiology or McLeod’s suggestion that the machine operated at an unsafe voltage. In specifically managerial terms the jury advised that either the time for electrical tests using live currents should be generally publicized, or special notice should be given to those working near the affected wires; a disjunctive recommendation that pointed to reform in the practices of both the Brush company and Estate managers.64 Significantly, The Times further elided into this verdict a separate comment from Shillito’s superior, Mr J. R. Dagg (land agent at Hatfield House) that was not discussed in the inquest verdict: to avoid similar accidents in future the wires should be conveyed underground or on poles out of reach. In view of Cooter and Luckin’s problematization of the category of ‘accident’, it is significant that such implied criticisms of Estate staff – indirectly conceded by them – were not sufficient for a verdict of negligence to be recorded, seemingly to avoid embarrassment to the town’s leading patron.

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Electrical Hazard in Rumour: the Many Deaths of Lord Salisbury’s ‘Gardener’ The inquest verdict and recommendations by no means decisively resolved either who was morally responsible for the accident or under what conditions electricity constituted a hazard. Unsurprisingly, among the many ways in which Dimmock’s death was interpreted, members of the gas and electricity industries took diametrically opposing views. Anticipating that the wider public might see the Brush company as fatally implicated in the Times report of the Hatfield accident, its General Manager James Humphrys wrote to national newspapers and technical periodicals pointing out that it had not been involved in the wiring of the estate; claiming always to use insulated wires, it had never experienced a ‘serious’ accident in its lighting installation.65 Shifting to the wider issue, Humphrys added the company’s experience had been that, when used for either lighting or telegraphy, electricity was a ‘most docile and easily managed servant’, if only ‘ordinary care and prudence were exercised’; under such conditions of care the public need have no ‘apprehension’ in availing themselves of this new agent in their homes.66 An editorial in the Journal of Gas Lighting was equally partisan in its judgments, pointing instead to the inherent dangers of high-tension electricity and to the avaricious untrustworthiness of the electrical companies involved. The recommendation of the jury in this instance was, it suggested, ‘ridiculously insufficient to point the moral of such a case’. Indeed, it would not be long before an electrician transmitting a ‘death-dealing force through an unprotected wire’ would find reason to ‘repent his criminal recklessness’.67 Given the wide reporting of the case, the celebrity of the victims’ employer, and the conflicting views among engineers over the nature of this ‘accident’, it is significant that the medico-legal fraternity intervened to try to exercise an authoritative role in the case.68 This is apparent in a letter to The Times on 27 December from J. Rand Capron. Professionally a solicitor and coroner in Guildford, he was also an eminent gentleman spectroscopist, meteorologist and astronomer who habitually corresponded with the Surrey Advertiser and Nature. His letter offered none of the technical credentials or user experience on electricity customary in the regular Times correspondence on this subject; Times readers might even have suspected that his sympathies lay with the gas industry. Seemingly motivated by a coroner’s quest for diagnostic detail, Capron sought to establish the nature of the current employed in order to pinpoint the putative hazard posed: Sir, In reading the account in your journal of the sad accident by which a labourer lately lost his life while laying a telephone wire at Hatfield-hall (sic), one cannot help asking whether we are not herein brought face to face with a new and terrible danger of which the public generally knows little […] The proceedings at the inquest

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Domesticating Electricity not being reported in extenso, it becomes important to know clearly whether the unfortunate man was the victim of the direct current or of the lateral current passing from wire to earth through him […] From some remarks of the head linelayer the latter would seem to be the case, and, if so, it really becomes a grave question whether machines generating currents of such high intensity are safe for general use.

Capron offered hearsay that in damp conditions workmen were ‘cautious’ with even moderate-sized Brush machines since they could deliver ‘a palpable and not insignificant shock’ to the unwary; Capron advised that those working with electrical machinery should do so only using one hand, implicitly to avoid any current passing laterally from one hand to the other hand through the heart .69 A rather different intervention on the Hatfield case to establish a new domain of expertise came from the editorial staff of the Lancet. Focusing morbidly on the likely occurrence of future fatalities rather than advising on preemptive measures against fatal shock, it suggested both medical jurisprudence texts should now include a chapter on ‘Death from Electricity’ and that very careful post-mortem examinations should, as a matter of course, be made by ‘experts’ to establish any subtle traces of murder by electricity.70 Despite the enormous interest in the Hatfield case, both the UK government and medical practitioners felt uncompelled to formalize responses to the alleged hazards of electricity until after the US formally adopted the electric chair as a penal measure circa1889–90 and specifically while domestic electricity became a daily experience for more than just the very wealthiest during in the 1890s (see final section). This is not surprising given the lingering controversies over therapeutic applications of electricity which entailed that physicians and physiologists alike were somewhat wary of trying to win prestige by developing expertise in this area.71 Nevertheless, occasionally specialists in electrophysiology such as William H. Stone of the Westminster Hospital in London were prepared to commit themselves to public pronouncements. At the invitation of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians, Stone presented a paper at their conference on ‘Electric Lighting in Relation to Health’ at the International Health Exhibition in early July 1884. Notionally addressing ‘The physiological bearing of electricity on health’, he also topically considered the physiology of well known electricity-induced fatalities in the preceding four years. Doubting that inquest verdicts had been accurate in simply attributing deaths to ‘electric shock’ – as had long been customary for those struck by lightning – Stone suggested that for cases in which the victim was not killed instantly, thrombosis and asphysixia seemed to be more plausible immediate causes of death. This applied to the case of the ‘foolish’ orchestral player in Birmingham who, after wantonly touching the theatre lighting wires, apparently took three quarters of an hour to die. Stone thus appealed to engineers present for any information they had about the accidents in Paris, Hatfield and on board the Livadia so that he could more precisely determine the aetiology of

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death from the details of the machines used, whether the current was alternate or direct and the time between contact and death. In response to this, two of his audience, Messrs Greenhill and Beeman, commented that they had heard (as Lord Salisbury had suggested) that the victim in the Hatfield accident had simply had heart disease. Beeman advised that communication with the medical officer involved would confirm this, noting that there was ‘not the slightest mark’ on Dimmock’s body to indicate he had even touched the wires at all. Less radically, Greenhill noted that a sufferer of heart disease who received any electric shock would be predisposed to die as a result but that the newspapers would nevertheless record that he had been ‘killed by a shock of electricity’. Stone agreed with Greenhill, having himself seen an (unidentified) newspaper report that made just such an attribution to a case that was obviously marked by heart disease. The death of dynamo attendant Henry Pink at the same Health Exhibition three months later was not, however, so easily explained by reference to corporeal pathology; Stone’s strategy thus moved to analysing the physiological contingency of the body’s electrical resistance.72 While these medical men and electricians defensively developed an account of the Hatfield accident that diverted blame away from both electricity and the personnel managing the installations, the laity’s countervailing interest in this apparently paradigm case of death by electric shock was perpetuated by Robert Hammond’s book The Electric Light in our Homes, also published in 1884. Conceding his audience’s overriding concern with domestic security, the fifth chapter was explicitly addressed to dangers from the electric light: the topic ‘felt by all’ to be the crucial point. Admitting that ‘serious accidents’ had occurred by accidental contact with high tension electrical systems, from the wide press coverage of the Hatfield case he presumed his audience was ‘doubtless familiar with the details of the sad accident that occurred at Lord Salisbury’s’. On Hammond’s ver-

Figure 3.1. Source: Hammond, The Electric Light in Our Homes (1884), pp. 59–61. By permission of University of Leeds, Edward Boyle Library.

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sion of this, ‘a gardener’ [sic] lost his life by ‘taking hold of the two wires’ carrying a ‘fatal’ current delivered at 800 volts. In contrast to Stone’s account, the aetiology of death for Hammond was construed primarily in technological rather than physiological terms. From this episode Hammond complained that a popular but ‘fallacious’ notion had developed that serious injury was inevitable from touching wires conveying any electric current, however ‘strong or weak’. To dispel that view, Hammond’s lectures had involved him dramatically grabbing the terminals of the battery he had used for his stage experiments. He thus impressed his audience by remaining completely unharmed, as its ‘low tension’ current (as available from Hammond’s own supply company) was safe even with uninsulated wires. Hammond added the less well-publicized implication of the Hatfield death that insulation with cotton, silk, India-rubber, gutta-percha, bitumen – or even asbestos – would make the likelihood of receiving a shock from domestic light wiring even more remote73 (see figure 3.1). Although Hammond thus sought to remove all anxiety that there might be any inevitable danger in using electricity, the British public was not sufficiently persuaded of his expertise in this area, his company being declared bankrupt in early 1885.74 Notwithstanding Hammond’s efforts to construe the issue of electrical safety as entirely a matter of adopting the appropriate kinds of technology, the popularly conceived modalities of the Hatfield accident clearly did merge into servant anxieties about electricity by the early 1890s. Although spread among servants via undocumented rumour and gossip in ways that are accordingly difficult to recover, we can capture some glimpses of this almost completely invisible conversation by the ways in which it was dismissively reported by critical (male) commentators. The consultant electrical engineer, James Edward Henry Gordon, noted in a chapter on safety in Decorative Electricity by his spouse Mrs J. E. H. Gordon that the death of William Dimmock could be re-imagined in ever more divergent ways. His chapter on the ‘fire risks’ of electric lighting reported somewhat despairingly the lingering fear he encountered in response to misreported news of multiple deaths in the USA; many of these were either not electrical in origin at all, or apparently involved workmen’s wilful disdain of regulations. In the context of this litany of irrational fear, exaggerated and self-inflicted death, Gordon related one revealing anecdote of Dimmock’s death; transmuting him by rumour not only into a gardener but, by change of sex, into a female servant: I heard a tragic history the other day of ‘a poor girl who had been killed by the current.’ On asking particulars I was told that it was ‘a housemaid at Arlington Street,’ but the narrator was not quite sure when the accident had occurred. Further enquiry showed me that it was a developed account of the death of the gardener who was unfortunately killed at Hatfield some ten years ago.75

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By the early 1890s, it was not only humble servants who creatively re-appropriated Dimmock’s death – among others in the as yet sparsely populated history of electrical fatality – to make sense of the troubling hazards involved in domesticating electricity. The ‘Battle of the Systems’ between alternate and direct current was underway76 and, far from just worrying about economic and mechanical issues, issues of risk and safety lay at the heart of rival engineers’ attempts to promote their particular technology to householders to persuade them to domesticate electricity. In this competition, proponents of direct current had the enormous tactical advantage that the large majority of accidents had involved high-voltage alternating current. As Mark Essig has recently shown of the USA case, Thomas Edison’s direct current business capitalized upon this to promote alternating current as the best technology for the deadly electric chair and safe direct current for the home, much to the chagrin of his rival Westinghouse.77 In Britain, the distinguished cathode ray experimenter and direct current entrepreneur William Crookes attacked rival alternating current concerns by using neoclassical mythology to refashion the deaths of Dimmock et al. as those of ‘clever electricians’. In his piece for the Fortnightly Review, published in February 1892, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Crookes archly remarked that while alternating currents might prove to be more economical, they had ‘at best a somewhat doubtful reputation’ for safety: Whilst we are seeking for cheaper sources of electricity, no endeavour must be spared to tame the fierceness of those powerful alternating currents now so largely used. Too many clever electricians have shared the fate of Tullus Hostilius, who, according to the Roman myth, incurred the wrath of Jove for practising magical arts, and was struck dead with a thunderbolt. In modern language, he was simply working with a high tension current, and, inadvertently touching a live wire, got a fatal shock.78

Crookes did not write as a completely disinterested authority but as a director of a recently formed direct current business, Notting Hill Electric Supply, that in early 1892 had yet to make a profit.79 The enormous success of his company in subsequent decades reveals not only that we should be cautious in accepting the simplistic story that alternating current power had ‘won’ the battle of the systems by 1893 because Thomas Edison gave up his direct current business. In fact we might infer that the superior safety reputation of low-voltage direct current helped it to maintain an important advantage over the alternating current entrepreneurs until well into the twentieth century.

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Conclusion The Sunday Times [correspondent is] frightening parents by pointing out to them that death might be the fate of their dear ‘Ethel’ and her eleven companions at her juvenile party given in a house lighted by electricity. He imagines the whole troop being decoyed down into the cellar by the said urchin ‘Ethel’ who, apparently, has been round to the central station and obtained the key of the converter case, and who imparts to them the required amount of scientific knowledge to find the high tension terminals &c. &c. I should fancy that such a child as this would have had a good suck at the turned on gas pipe and poisoned herself, long before the electric light was installed in the house. ‘Social flashes’, Lightning: the popular and business review of electricity, 14 January 1892.80

From the foregoing sections we can see that, pace Gay and Yeaman, it was not just the gas industry that effectually exploited the aftermath of the ‘unfortunate’ death of William Dimmock. The complaints of the popular and business journal Lightning in January 1892 indicate that certain sectors of the Press could equally well dramatize and promulgate popular alarm over electrical dangers to the home. Although clearly some householders were deterred initially from bringing electricity into their homes by both genuine and fictional stories of electrocuted innocents, such tales did not completely quell demand for electricity. Indeed, this demand was growing sufficiently rapidly that the Gay and Yeaman’s handbook for novice engineers on how to operate an electrical generating station ran to a second edition in 1906, still complaining, nevertheless, sarcastically of gas industry slanders.81 Yet as Gay and Yeaman surmised, Dimmock’s sad and much re-imagined demise was widely circulated, appropriated and reworked to various agendas. Not only was the identity of the victim unstable in the retelling, changing from a humble untutored Hatfield labourer to Lord Salisbury’s personal ‘gardener’, to a hapless London housemaid and finally to a ‘clever electrician’ who meddled too much with the secrets of the gods: truly a miscellaneous multiplication of deaths from a single incident. Dimmock’s death was also diagnosed in a myriad of ways, from the misfortune of wet weather in the Hatfield garden on the 12 December 1881, to the (unexplained) absence of insulation on wiring through the Estate gardens; the victim’s alleged condition of a ‘weak heart’; his alleged unawareness of the dangers of touching electric wires (whether his fault or his manager’s); his foreman’s disobedience (for well-considered reasons) of instructions to work elsewhere in the garden; miscommunication between the Brush Company and estate staff about the timing of tests on the dynamos (the issue picked out by the inquest as the key point); Salisbury’s decision to use a high-voltage installation against the advice of Herbert McLeod and the Marquis’s problematic adoption

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of a Brush Company machine that had never previously been used with a Swan lighting system, again against the expertise of his academic chemist advisor. Not only did Dimmock’s death have multiple identities and causes attributed to it but the retelling of this tale served a number of purposes for a range of different constituencies. While it was certainly used by the gas industry to draw attention to the peculiar hazards of electricity at high tension, it was also cited by direct current practitioners to illustrate the comparative safety of their preferred system of electrical supply over that of alternate current; it was employed by electro-physiologists to deconstruct the category of electric shock into a more sophisticated analysis of bodily differences in electrical susceptibility. Not least the story became part of the folklore of housemaids perturbed at the unfamiliar new form of illumination encountered in their job whose shared elaborations of Dimmock’s death evolved in form and substance during their discursive transit. Unable to access relevant literature and not always informed by their employers about the hazards involved in using the electric light, their anxiety about the mysterious electricity is readily comprehensible. That conversational passing of rumour concerning fears of electricity was in turn ridiculed by electricians who sought to caricature some undereducated female servants as the antithesis of authority on electricity82 and indeed the subject of de-legitimizing humour about the putative irrationality of fearful objections to electrification. How the public fear of electricity was overcome will be the subject of the next chapter, bearing in mind of course that the fear had not by any means evaporated. Charles Gibson recorded in 1906 that it was not only in the countryside that he occasionally came across ‘some elderly lady or gentleman who fears that death may result from an ordinary battery current’. In more urbane settings he still often met individuals who were ‘afraid lest they received a fatal shock in handling the connections of an ordinary glow-lamp’, despite the use of low voltages in the home.83 Notwithstanding the complaints of Hammond, Gordon and Gay and Yeaman, fears among female servants persisted for decades thereafter and eventually became the target of a campaign headed by the Electrical Association for Women, directed by Caroline Haslett. In 1931 Ms Haslett reported that continuing fear of electricity among female staff was still often the reason why ‘some of our larger houses do not adopt electrical methods’.84 There is thus a much longer term story than can be told here of how fear of electricity constrained the path and scope of its domestication in strongly gendered ways. In the next chapter, however, we will see how women featured very prominently in countervailing messages in campaigns for the safety of electricity: the female body was exploited – in tandem with the fearlessness of both theatrical dancers and society ladies – to show how electricity could be both glamorous and hazard-free even to the most vulnerable.

4 ELECTRICITY AS SAFETY: CONSTRUCTING A NEW REPUTATION

The dangers associated with the common use of electricity have been abundantly proved. It appears from the paper read at the recent meeting of the Society of Arts by Mr W.H. Preece, that several incipient fires occurred at the Paris Electrical Exhibition through contact of wires, and danger from such a source is recognised at New York, where the fire [insurance] underwriters have issued a code of regulations on the subject. Further illustration is afforded by the recently reported case of a fatal accident at the residence of Lord Salisbury through contact with wires carrying a heavy electrical charge [sic], under circumstances specially favourable for conduction. In view of the probability of the greatly extended use of the agent in question it is very desirable that knowledge on the subject should be spread, and we have the authority of Mr Preece that the forthcoming exhibition at the Crystal Palace is admirably adapted for this purpose [...] A successful metropolitan exhibition may lead to provincial ones, at which the public may, whilst selecting the most efficient principle, learn so much of the practical working as will be necessary to render safe the introduction of electricity into the household. ‘The forthcoming electrical exhibition at the Crystal Palace’, Manchester Guardian, 1881.1 In the compiling of this little book I have endeavoured to set before the General Public a sketch as to the cost, safety, and superiority of Electricity as a lighting medium, and have tried without the use of technicalities to show how readily and cheaply we can utilize this mysterious force, which is as mysterious to the scientist as to others [...] It is hoped that these few pages may help to allay the fears and conquer the prejudices of those who hesitate to adopt electricity for lighting purposes […] Arthur F. Guy, Electric Light for the Million: a handbook for the uninitiated, of concise practical information on electric lighting and its cost (1889).2

In documenting the first decade of electric lighting one major historian has suggested that incandescent electric light had many advantages for the householder: it could be installed with far less risk of fire than gas light; it produced no smoke, consumed no oxygen and let loose no unpleasant fumes.3 While at least some in the 1880s saw the advantages of electric glow lamps in these terms – not least those who had a commercial interest in promoting their sale – this representa– 91 –

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tion by no means captured the whole picture and not just among those with a vested interest in rival lighting illuminants. As shown in the previous chapter and in the epigraph from the Manchester Guardian above, one important and resilient concern was that electricity simply was not safe to have in the home, owing to its propensity to cause shocks far more injurious than those employed in Victorian electrotherapy. It is arguable that claims for electric light’s superlative qualities of safety and hygiene only became orthodoxy by the mid-twentieth century, by which time electric light had replaced most gas lighting in urban Britain. Importantly, of course, no comparable claim for the intrinsic health benefits of electric cooking and heating has ever won over domestic gas users.4 This makes it all the more important to understand why electric light was such an interestingly unique case. Standing back from our twenty-first century vision of an electrically-wrought modernity, we must see how distinctly contingent this association between progress and electric light actually was, accomplished by an evidentially selective anti-gas polemic. The history of domestic electricity must be seen as much as part of the history technological risk as of domestic and urban health. This chapter explains how the ‘healthful’ reputation of the electric light was not a natural, self-evident fact, but a partisan claim that had to be fought for vigorously – indeed ‘constructed’ – by its proponents. They were faced with considerable indifference, even scepticism, from householders and some sectors of the press about their claims that electricity offered an entirely beneficial kind of illumination. In the first section I look at how attempts were made to establish this reputation at two international electrical exhibitions in 1881 (Paris) and 1882 (London) and how this was compromised by accidental fires in the former and the ultra-high insurance premiums charged for the latter. Secondly, I explore the kind of safety technologies for electricity – especially insulation and fuses – that were developed to meet the emerging requirements of fire insurance companies and electrical authorities and indeed to persuade Gladstone’s Liberal Government to pass legislation allowing the public supply of electricity in summer 1882. The mere legal possibility of safe supply was not enough, however, to win a certain and successful future for electric illumination. Thus, the third section shows how demonstrations of electric light on the female body, both on stage and in the context of the ball room, could show safely how electricity could be consumed apparently harmlessly. I then consider how proponents of electrical safety adopted a negative campaign, comparing new and older illuminants to highlight how electricity did not pose the specific chemical dangers of gaslight – ‘stealing’ oxygen and vitiating air – leaning heavily on the authority of chemists to try to prove this point. The last section shows how such arguments for the health value of electrical lighting played an important role in the passage of more

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supplier-friendly electric lighting legislation under Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government in 1888. Overall, the point will be to show that the technical expertise of electrical engineers and entrepreneurs was not a sufficient authority on which to ground claims for the superiority of electricity. These ‘authorities’ had to augment their expertise by borrowing from inventors of safety equipment, stage impresarios, chemists, and public health officials to make the case, and even then without comprehensively defeating their rivals in the gas industry.

Exhibiting Safety – Electricity as Public Consumption It is hardly too much to say that an apparatus for generating electricity, whether it be a galvanic battery or a rotating machine, is stilled looked upon by the majority of people as something more or less perilous and ‘uncanny’, something which may take fire, or explode, or give off sparks, or in some way do unforeseen and direful mischief. Now, one great benefit of exhibitions will be to furnish evidence of the freedom from danger which attends upon the use of force happily described by FARADAY as a “universal spirit in nature.” ‘The List of Awards to British Exhibitors at the Paris Exhibition’, Times, 24 October 1881.5

As historians of electrification have all noticed, the 1880s and 1890s saw a proliferation of spectacular and glamorous electrical exhibitions.6 The first of these was the Paris Electrical Exhibition of autumn 1881, followed in spring 1882 by a comparably international display of incandescent electrical illumination at the Crystal Palace, a major venue of public entertainment and education since its move to south London after the closure of the Great Exhibition in 1851. While continuing a mid-century tradition of lucrative techno-scientific display for public audiences documented by Morus, these electrical exhibitions had, as Beauchamp notes, a strongly educational tone.7 For the first time at Paris, visitors were offered detailed explanations of the equipment on display, especially with respect to the French, German and British exhibits. This was no mere arbitrary innovation: from the point of view of the companies offering these exhibits, the central idea was to persuade visitors by copious supplies of information that they should overcome any anxiety or uncertainty about installing electrical lighting in their own homes. Thus, in October 1881, The Times could ingenuously remark that such exhibitions would furnish evidence of the ‘freedom from danger’, a point echoed by the Manchester Guardian two months later. Indeed, throughout the summer and autumn of 1881 The Times newspaper published regular – often daily – reports of the Paris exhibition. As a publication favourably disposed towards electric lighting (see Chapter 3), its preponderant tone was celebratory, documenting the displays of Crompton, Edison, Brush,

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Lane-Fox and Swan in elaborate details. Times journalists uncritically reported the propaganda of company personnel: that their mode of electric lighting was safe, attractive, reliable and economical.8 To doubly reinforce the connection between electricity and safety, much was made in Paris of new electrical devices that brought speedier and even semi-automated responses to safety hazards (whether electrical in origin or otherwise). One significant instance of this was the Edison ‘safety catch’ or ‘fuse’, designed to break an electrical circuit if the current reached levels likely to melt wires or overheat insulation (the next section contains further discussion on this). Another was the telegraphic fire-alarm that allowed speedy signalling to remote fire stations to identify immediately the location of a conflagration, especially useful for the many parts of London where no telephone was available. Accordingly Captain Shaw, the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, visited the Paris exhibition in mid-September to look over the fire alarms available from British and American inventors with a view to adopting a system in the coming year.9 Nevertheless, it is essential to differentiate between what exhibitors intended and what messages were taken away by visitors: there was no guarantee that visitors would leave as enlightened or reassured as organizers might have wished. Henry Adams surmised of his first encounter with the dynamo that the millions of visitors drawn to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition acquiesced, as did he, in calm incomprehension as to how the dynamo drew its motive power from electricity. They had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo ‘as natural as the sun’ and thus expected to ‘understand one as little as the other’. Of course, not all visitors saw profound mystery in electrical machinery as documented in Adams’s autobiographical musings on ‘the Virgin and the Dynamo’.10 The problem, after all, was not simply the education and expectations that exhibition visitors brought with them; the apparatus on display, and the personnel in charge of it, by no means instantiated the well-behaved orderliness presupposed in demonstrations of safety. It took only one or two accidents to undermine the symbolic elision of electricity with safety; a common recourse was thus to blame the artisans involved to deflect attention away from the notion of either electricity being inherently dangerous or the management irresponsible. The Times correspondent occasionally noted that there were some embarrassing incidents at the Paris Exhibition, but treated them as trivial (even irritating) diversions from the main thrust of the exhibition. He dispatched a note on 11 September 1881 that was published two days later: There have been some more fires in the building. One came from the Swan lights worked by Faure [secondary] batteries on the first floor, and another was in the principal gallery. With the hundreds of miles of wire which are stretched across this

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building, and with the ignorant workmen who are engaged at work on them, this is not to be wondered at.11

A Times editorial on 27 September sympathized with this representation, arguing that these accidents ‘ought not’ to have been permitted, conventionally blaming the workmen employed for their ‘ignorance’ rather than questioning the training given to them by exhibition managers. Yet the messages from the Times editorial team were also somewhat mixed, recognizing more overtly that these fires were not merely passing embarrassments, but had in fact excited genuine ‘alarm’ at the Paris exhibition. Indeed it conceded that, in its early stages, the general use of electricity would be ‘attended by risks’, as if this were a likely outcome independent of artisan misdeeds. It then noted, however, that the overheating of wires involved need not be seen as at all alarming: in the context of surgery, the ‘electric fluid’ was used thus in a controlled manner to generate high temperatures for cauterization.12 Indeed, another editorial gave an even more mixed inerpretation to the Times readership, admitting that the accidents had been both ‘ludicrous’ and ‘alarming’. It was not just workmen’s carelessness that was to blame, since the accidents were due ‘partly to the temporary character of the arrangements’, hinting at joint managerial culpability instead.13 While that ameliorative judgment downplayed the evidential significance of the exhibition as a failed demonstration of safety, it also left Times readers and exhibition visitors with no clear single message about whether electricity could be permanently and safely installed in the home. While the general strategy of The Times was to downplay the significance of the total of five fires that broke out at the Paris exhibition, electrical engineers and associated scientific practitioners were less stoical, for obvious professional reasons. Speaking to the Society of Arts concerning the recently-closed Paris exhibition on 16 December 1881, Preece acknowledged that these fires from contact between live wires epitomized the ‘danger of electric lighting’. Since electricity could be a ‘dangerous servant’ in the wrong hands, he inferred from the Paris exhibition that the key need for accomplishing safety in electricity was for British practices to adopt the kind of electrical wiring regulations recently proposed by the New York Board of Fire Underwriters (see below). Preece’s key point was that danger from electricity could not simply be blamed upon the inappropriate behaviour of workmen: it had to be actively contained in order to construct a reputation for safety. This view became increasingly conventional as more stories emerged from Paris. In May 1882, a Society of Arts speaker on the ‘Fire risks incidental to electric lighting’, the chemist Thomas Bolas, noted that at least one of the accidents at Paris was not due obviously to carelessness on the part of the artisan; a M. Christophie had had his watch-chain melted, and waistcoat set on fire just by leaning against some lighting leads.14 As we shall see

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in the next section, much of the construction of electrical safety focused on wiring insulation; only one of the many factors identified as relevant in the Hatfield case in Chapter 3. Given the widespread knowledge of electrical accidents in 1882 – both in Paris and in Hatfield – there was a strong imperative to make the Crystal Palace electrical exhibition more obviously a display of how safe electricity could be than the crowded galleries of Paris had been. The British counterpart opened unfinished and a month behind schedule on 14 January 1882, delays ‘in many instances’ being attributed to the need for ‘improvements’ to the exhibitors’ equipment. To name just a subset of the companies involved: the Byzantine Courts were lit by the Anglo-American Brush Company; the Alhambra and aquarium by Lane-Fox incandescent lamps; with the Hammond Company lighting one of the Crystal Palace’s three railway stations as well as the ‘Technological Museum’. The Swan Electric Light Company was given the French court and the saloon dining room for its demonstrations, and the Crompton Company lit the central transept of the Palace with its alternating current lamps. Most tactically well-positioned among all the glamorous displays was the British Edison Company that demonstrated a miniature version of its entire distribution system

Figure 4.1. Views of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, March 1882 showing Edison company displays alongside those of the Siemens company, the British post office, War Office cables., the Electric Light and Power Generation company and the Swiss mountain telegraph service (with wooden horses). Source: Illustrated London News, 82 (1882), p. 201. By permission of University of Leeds, Brotherton Library Special Collections.

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within the palace, deploying this to greatest effect in the concert room the sort of venue in which the comparative benefits of electricity over hot, fume-laden gas lighting were considered greatest by the electrical lobby (see below).15 Certainly the montage of the exhibition images presented in the Illustrated London News gave more attention to the Edison exhibit in its reportage than to others – two out of the eight images (see figure 4.1).16 By the middle of February, the exhibit was complete enough to warrant a Royal visitation from the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, with the Prince and Princess of Wales following a month later; both receiving full coverage from The Times. This was precisely the kind of Royal patronage that the Crystal Palace and electrical exhibitors needed in order to enhance the legitimacy of their enterprise; at around this time electric arc lights were also being installed in the Buckingham Palace ballroom.17 Although there were no reports of dangerous incidents among the exotic galleries and installations at the Crystal Palace, there was a public relations disaster in mid-March. Halfway through the exhibition, insurers for the Crystal Palace company and the exhibitors collectively, insisted that to cover the risks of an electrical exhibition, they would immediately double the premiums demanded for protection against fire. This was an ‘excessively high’ rate, as judged by both The Times and Engineering, since it effectively added £2,000 to the bills of the exhibition. The International Electrical exhibition would thus need to attract an additional 40,000 ordinary ‘shilling’ rate visitors to compensate for this extra outlay, as infelicity noted by one gas journal with characteristic Schadenfreude.18 Shrewdly picking up on this anxiety, the Edison company’s officials persuaded a visiting Times journalist in April 1882 that its system was especially ‘safe’, a publicity exercise timed to coincide with the first public trials of Edison lighting on streets in the Holborn Viaduct area. The Times uncritically relayed the Edison propaganda of a demonstration designed to frame the gas–electric comparison in terms of the possibilities of fire, excluding reference to shock: One noticeable point in the [Edison] system is its safety. The electric pressure, to borrow a term from the system of gas distributors, is so low that a child may hold the electrodes without danger; and with regard to the safety of the lamp, a handkerchief being placed over one of the globs and the glass being shattered, the instantaneous extinguishing of the light by the destruction of the vacuum is all that happens. The handkerchief is not even singed.19

Much was made of cooling fans, ‘small plugs’ to act as safety fuses, as well as the use of wood and iron tubing to protect prospective householders from the conducting copper wire. But the Edison company did not just rely on material culture to guarantee safety: the constant surveillance of an Edison engineer ensured that circuits would be adjusted so that no excess current would overheat

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wires or destroy lamps whenever there was a sudden drop in demand, such as the end of a theatre show or church service.20 The enormous efforts made by electrical exhibitors were not just to impress householders and the press with the safety and integrity of the electric light; leading chemists otherwise more likely to be associated with the gas industry were wined and dined at the Crystal Palace in mid-March.21 Arguably though, the key audience for such exhibitors was the Liberal government – known publicly to be appalled at the scandalous liberties that existing private gas and water companies – had taken in organizing local monopolies during preceding decades. Soon a House of Commons Select Committee was established to consider legislation designed to license the public electricity supply.22 Many of the companies exhibiting at the Crystal Palace had submitted private bills to promote this move, the Board of Trade led by Joseph Chamberlain was thus prompted into putting forward its own.23 Accordingly, in late May 1882, the Speaker of the House of Commons was feted along with eleven Liberal MPs and, among others, the Lord Mayor, Sir William Thomson, William Preece and Werner Siemens. After several months of parliamentary debating, faced with genial courtship and elegantly managed displays of the harmlessness and élan of electric lighting, such was the strongly emerging recognition among both Liberal and Conservative parties that household electricity would in some form feature as part of Britain’s future, even vehement gas industry opposition could not prevent the passing of the ‘Electric Lighting Act’ in August 1882.24 The mere passing of this legislation did not of itself signal Establishment recognition that electricity was straightforwardly safe to install in the home, however; this was still very much a contested point. Testimony from Royal Society President Sir William Spottiswoode to the effect that electric lighting had proved harmless in his London and countryside homes was not clinching evidence. Nor did the Times editorial team’s inference from the accident-free Crystal Palace exhibition that ‘the idea of danger’ in connection with electric lighting seemed to be ‘almost wholly dispelled’ from the public – apart from those few ‘ignorant people’ who had touched appliances they ‘did not understand’ – win general assent. The Select Committee had heard contrary testimony from leading electrical expert witness Sir Frederick Bramwell that considerable education of the public was required before they could be expected to undertake the household domestication of electricity with due safety and effectiveness.25 In fact, the 1882 legislation placed the burden of safety not on householders, but on the suppliers, requiring that all licences to dig up streets and lay public supply cable would be subject to Board of Trade regulations on how to secure ‘the safety of the public from personal injury, or from fire or otherwise’. Contrary to all the appeals of electrical suppliers and the electrophilic Times, safety was not seen as a default outcome to be compromised only by careless workers or domestic users;

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it could only be accomplished by a sufficient level of technological intervention. The following sections will discuss the kinds of technological framework promoted to accomplish safety in 1880s Britain, both by the Board of Trade and other rival authorities; material and bureaucratic means of preempting electrical accidents; the theatrical display of electrically adorned female bodies, and the rhetorical stigmatization of the dangers of rival gas lighting.26 In closing this section, we should note that although the well-managed exhibitions, such as that at Crystal Palace from January to June 1882, could illustrate the mooted safety of electricity and thereby win over at least some key constituencies, they did not persuade all. Others saw the central difference between exhibitions and domestic installations; the latter would not necessarily be managed by experts with informed understanding of the enigmatic ways of electricity. The fears of the latter group were all too clearly borne out in 1884 by accidental electrocution in public displays of electric lighting; the two deaths of Emile Martin and Joseph Kenarec who trespassed onto the Siemens installation at the Tuileries Garden in Paris and the unfortunate Henry Pink who was attending a thousand volt Hochhausen alternating current machine at the International Health Exhibition.27 Public displays purporting to show the safety of electricity could thus all too easily transform into alarming demonstration of how dangerous it could be for the unwary.

Technologizing Expertise in Electrical Safety: Wires, Fire-Insurance and Fuses As discussed in the previous chapter, the earliest electrical ‘accidents’ were more prevalent in Britain, France and the USA. While the fatalities themselves tended to have a distinctly national profile, the means for preventing them tended to be transnational in character, not least because some of them were displayed at international exhibitions of the sort discussed above. The development of safety precautions in relation to electricity was most vigorous initially in the USA, specifically in New York, where accidents were more numerous and conspicuous than European counterparts. As Mark Essig notes, in 1881 two extremely wealthy New York patrons of domestic electric light suffered accidents in their plush homes. After short-circuiting between crossed wires brought sparks and heating that singed the wallpaper in their elite Fifth Avenue mansion, the financier Cornelius Vanderbilt was forced by his wife to remove their entire domestic electric installation. Although the investor J. P. Morgan found his library and carpets exasperatingly charred by a similar occurrence soon afterwards, his commitment to electric lighting led him later to be one of Edison’s major financiers.28 By October that year the New York Board of Fire Underwriters had formulated the first technocratic measures to forestall accidents in planning for

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building insurance. In their first formulation, these were constituted by five rules or ‘standards’. These stipulated, firstly, that wires should be fifty per cent thicker than the minimum required to avoid dangerous overheating for the number of lights installed. Secondly, that these wires should not just be insulated, but actually double-coated with an approved material. Thirdly, that all wires should be at least eight inches from each other, and two-and-a-half inches from any light (as further protection all open lights were expressly prohibited, hence arc lights in particular should be enclosed by protective glass globes). Finally, where electricity was supplied from an outside source, a shut-off was required near the building entrance in case of emergency. These rules were soon promulgated throughout other US states and indeed their remit was not confined merely to North America. On 16 December 1881, the day after The Times had reported the Hatfield fatality, William Preece’s lecture on the Paris Exhibition to the Society of Arts cited these New York regulations as a response to the ‘numerous’ fires in that city. These rules were, he suggested, already adhered to out of necessity by every New York electrician.29 As Preece approvingly noted, the Edison company displays in Paris had implemented all these requirements and gone one stage further. It now systematically inserted ‘safety-catches’ – short pieces of lead – into every branch wire, that fused and melted immediately if the current rose above the specified value; as far as Preece was concerned, this technical innovation (later known in the USA as a ‘cut-out’ and the UK as a ‘fuse’) had the effect of ‘producing safety’ by removing a possible source of hazard from oversize currents. This was significant not only as a means of physically reifying electrical safety in a tangible and purchasable form; it also configured the ideal Edison consumer as householders and associated servants who needed no special expertise in electricity, especially in safety matters. Such was Preece’s respect for the Edison company’s procedures that, before any general discussion of his lecture, he arranged for a senior company representative, Edward Johnson to take the platform. Johnson explained that the company’s system was: […] to be used by uneducated and unscientific persons, without the supervision of trained experts in the employment of the company. [The company] proposed to put the electric light into houses in such a simplified form, and with such provisions, as to render supervision entirely unnecessary; to bring the lamps within the care of ordinary house servants, no matter how ignorant they might be; and in such a way that no damage or waste was possible.30

Ironically, among the very first who sought to use Edison fuses in a UK domestic installation was one householder who could hardly have been more ‘educated’ or ‘scientific’: Sir William Thomson. His preserved correspondence with William Preece indicates that he and Lady Thomson installed both Swan and Edison

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lamps in their Scottish country home (Netherhall, Largs) by 13 February 1882, thus beating Preece in their genial race to bring electric light to their respective residences. With a further twist of irony, though, Thomson’s Swan lamps were running (powered by a Siemens dynamo) well before their Edison counterparts, since Thomson had been unable to secure appropriate fuses for the Edison lamps and so arranged for some to be made up especially. Thus, by the end of the year, Thomson had, in collaboration with assistant J. T. Bottomley, developed his own patent fuses sold by his instrument maker James White of Glasgow.31 Indeed, Edison’s was only for a short while the sole company promoting cutout devices designed to protect businesses, householders and workers from the contingent hazards of sparks, shocks and overheated wires. At the Society of Arts on 3 May 1882, a paper presented by Thomas Bolas on the chemical basis of electrically-induced fires, revealed that Swan and Siemens now also had lead-fuse ‘safety-catch’ arrangements. The Savoy Theatre ingeniously integrated these into its light switches, while the Brush Company used automated electromagnetic current regulators. The Swan Company in particular had taken much trouble over the safety of its incandescent lamps, reifying this in the form of a miner’s safety lamp, underground mines being a much discussed site in which protecting workers from danger was uniquely pressing.32 More dramatically, Bolas borrowed the demonstration – soon a cliché – from the Edison company’s display at the Crystal Palace, showing that smashing a Swan filament lamp against a piece of fabric did not lead to the conflagration typical of a shattering gas or paraffin lamp. Although Bolas chose entirely commonplace cloth for his demonstration, the reification of safety in fabric design was taken to a new sartorial form by the United Asbestos company that produced fireproof workmen’s clothing and gloves.33 Despite such an array of devices for bringing safety to electric lighting, and the absence of naked flame by which all other illuminants imperilled life and property, UK insurers were not generally quick to follow the example of their New York counterparts in introducing policies for electrical lighting on terms comparable to gas installations. But, in contrast to the ultra-cautious – or possibly gas-friendly – insurance companies who plotted to surcharge the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition in March that year, the aptly named Phoenix Fire Office became, in February 1882, the first UK company to offer insurance for electric lighting. Significantly, it focused primarily on theatres and cotton mills: the institutions hitherto most expensively prone to destructive conflagration. Drawn up by the Phoenix engineer Musgrave Heaphy, the company’s regulations borrowed verbatim from the New York Board’s five point ruling, although incorporating additional requirements for ‘cut-out’ fuses in the second version of April 1882 that ran to nineteen separate specifications.34 Bolas offered nine additions to ‘Mr Heaphy’s rules’, pertaining, for example, to the exclusion of

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dampness; a major contributory factor in the Hatfield case.35 Indeed, the number and range of regulations for constructing safety in domestic electrical installations came to mirror the number and range of attributed causes of William Dimmock’s death discussed in the previous chapter, albeit with a comparable divergence of emphasis. Such initiatives soon became somewhat fraught when other aspirant authorities – including other insurance companies – recommended rules for safety through design and installation that differed significantly, not just in detail but in form and content from those of the Phoenix company. One week after he had chaired Bolas’s presentation at the Society of Arts, William Preece convened a committee of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians (STEE), the professional UK body representing electrical engineering, to act authoritatively to adjudicate on how safety was to be accomplished. For decades thereafter, this body – later the Institute of Electrical Engineers – struggled to establish any kind of unequivocal authority on the subject. In contrast to Heaphy’s solo deliberations that borrowed from the New York rules, this STEE committee consisted of most of Britain’s senior electrical fraternity: as well as specialists from the emerging community of power and light engineering: Rookes Crompton, J. E. H. Gordon and John Hopkinson. The report this committee issued in late June 1881 took it as axiomatic that the chief danger was ‘ignorance and inexperience’ among those who supplied and installed electric light. As the hazards lurked in the ‘internal and invisible’ aspects of electrical installation, the mere use of special safety equipment was not sufficient to guarantee the removal of hazards. The chief elements of accomplishing safety for the STEE were therefore as much human as material: the supervision of installation work by ‘skilled and experienced electricians’; repeated testing by such personnel to check for emerging hazards; and exclusion of both moisture and ‘injudicious’ earthing from all installations. Construing the parameters of safety as matters of engineering and construction, seventeen of the STEE’s twenty one regulations were devoted to wiring – hence they came to be known as the ‘Wiring Regulations’. Six rules applied to dynamos (assuming still that each installation had its own separate generators) with two for the lamps and lanterns and two covering ‘danger to person’ – a feature absent from the Phoenix company’s rules or Bolas’s critique. Those points corroborated McLeod and Hammond’s views on the Hatfield accident that a sufficient guarantee against harm to householders was a maximum allowed voltage. The STEE rules specified this threshold to be sixty volts – much lower than previously tolerated – presumably to allow for the great variation in the magnitude of bodily electrical resistance to ‘fatal currents’ that was contingent on physique, condition and circumstances.36

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Notwithstanding the institutional power and reputation of the STEE committee, its authority did not prevail. As Brian Bowers has observed, the Phoenix company refused to adapt to these new standards, claiming the STEE rules were too restrictive, inflexible and unduly constraining on the discretion of inspectors. Electrical engineers in turn complained that insurance companies (not just the Phoenix) allowed too much discretion to individual fire-office inspectors to adjudicate safety by personal inspection; moreover it was suggested that such companies had too many rules that increased the expense of installations rather than their safety.37 In this impasse, authority in matters of safety was left unresolved, with the IEE regulations largely being overridden by individual fire insurance companies. As Brian Bowers has observed, these disagreements on how to implement electrical safety persisted for several decades; insurance companies produced diversifying specifications that were not merely unaligned to those of the IEE, but alternately specified even in their mode of expression. Amidst this conflict of authority, householders were left perplexed and installation engineers were often in the difficult position of having to accomplish safety measures by meeting both IEE rules and also what were likely to be the very different rules of the householder’s insurance company.38 Despite this conflict, the regulations employed by the various institutions proved sufficient (but not necessary) guarantees of safety: by 1890 fires from electrical causes were still very rare in the UK, much rarer indeed than those in the USA. Although the number of houses installed with electricity in the London metropolitan area increased from a dozen or so in the mid-1880s to a few thousand by the end of the decade, only three fires occurred in home electrical installations in London during the period 1887–9.39 One of these was a fire from an overheated electric lamp at the London home (8 Grovesnor Square) of MP W. A. T. Amherst on New Year’s Eve 1889. Investigation by Musgrave Heaphy showed that the ‘unworkmanlike, imperfect, and uninstructed manner in which the wiring of the house had been carried out’ would have failed to meet any single insurance company’s standards. It was thus inferred that in practical terms adherence to insurance company rules was as effective as IEE regulations in avoiding electrical danger to property.40 Yet the period around 1889–91 was one in which anxiety about electrical accidents was still high, largely due to the controversy in the USA between advocates of the alternating current and direct current systems. This led to prurient press discussion on both sides of the Atlantic of the dangers of each system in relation to the many electrical deaths in New York over a period during which only one death occurred in the UK – see Table 3.1. This prompted Alice and James Gordon to include a chapter on ‘Fire risks of electric lighting’ in the volume Decorative Electricity, nominally published by Alice as ‘Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’. This specialist chapter was explicitly identified on the frontispiece as having been

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Figure 4.2. frontispiece from 1892 edition of Mrs J.E.H. Gordon Decorative Electricity, showing the prominence of the chapter on Fire risks by J.E.H. Gordon. The first edition had specified his engineering credentials as Director of and consulting engineer to the Metropolitan electric supply company. Source: Mrs J.E.H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, with a chapter on fire risks by J.E.H. Gordon (London: Sampson and Low, 1891). Author’s own copy.

authored by James (see figure 4.2), under the masculine engineering prerogative of dealing with technological hazards.41 This conventional gendering mirrored the characteristic assumption that female expertise was sovereign in matters of domestic aesthetics, which dominated the rest of the book. In the dedicated chapter on fire risks, James Gordon argued that sensationalist stories cabled from America on the deadly ‘risk to life’ from electricity need not ‘alarm Englishmen’; UK regulations particularly the STEE/IEE rules and the Board of Trade regulations, prevented high voltages of the sort used in New York’s tangled skyline of wires ever being used in UK homes. The key point to note, Gordon argued, was that US accidents had typically occurred not to householders, but to linesmen, lamp-trimmers and other electrical employees, precisely the point shown by Gay and Yeaman in 1899 and 1906 (see tables 3.1 and 3.2). Gordon’s harsh judgment was that these workmen had brought death upon themselves by failing to observe strict time-schedules for currents being switched on, or risking their own lives by using a ‘defective’ watch in time-scheduled risk management. In Britain, through the long legacy of the Hatfield case, no such reliance was made on the discretion or time-keeping skill of artisans. Instead a system was employed that borrowed from railway management of single track lines: The practice of all properly managed English central stations is to have brass tallies hung upon the switchboard, under the switches controlling each circuit. On a linesman being sent out to repair any particular cable the switch corresponding to it is switched

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off, and the linesman takes the tally with him, and the switch is on no account allowed to be put on again until the man has returned and replaced the tally.42

The same deal of care was extended, Gordon hinted, to fire precautions within British homes, thus rendering nonsensical the ‘great deal of unnecessary alarm’ prompted by a few fires in electrically-lighted houses. It could not be the case, he wrote, that electric light per se brought ‘specially increased risk of fire’, since Fire Insurance Offices charged the same or even less for policies on electricallylit houses as on gas-lit ones. Significantly here, Gordon appealed to the actuarial expertise and financial self-interest of such companies as the authority for his claims about the minimal fire-risks of electric lighting; an authority that could surely be trusted when the disinterestedness of the electrical engineers’ testimony might be doubted.43 And it was not just in this abstract sense that fire insurance maintained the authority in establishing the apparent safety of electric light. An ‘absolute safeguard’ against electric fire-risk for householders with no technical expertise of their own to rely on was to consult a fire insurance inspector or similar ‘expert’ – they were specially trained to identify the three common cost-cutting tricks of ‘unscrupulous’ contractors: omitting fuses, providing under-thickness wire, and ‘cheap and inferior’ insulation.44 Such a regime of inspection, combined with the material culture of safe installation could, on such authority be said to render electricity safe. Notwithstanding the conventional coding of risks as an engineers’ topic of analysis and demonstration, it was not only James Gordon who took on the burden of demonstrating the putative ‘safety’ of electricity. In Decorative Electricity, Alice Gordon alluded also to her involvement in a practice in which many other women had participated since the early 1880s: wearing electric lights decoratively on their bodies.

Technologizing Expertise in Electrical Safety: Female Bodies and Electric Fairies Dress decorations can be carried out with tiny one-candle electric lamps, fed from a small secondary battery concealed in the dress, but perhaps they are now only suitable for fancy balls, as dress lights have become common [i.e. vulgar] since the theatres have adopted them; but years ago, when electric lights were quite new, we derived a great deal of amusement and also some tribulation from experiments on them. Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, ‘Bedroom’, Decorative Electricity, 1891.45

The manufacture and ornamental use of miniature electric lights in the 1880s is a phenomenon noted in passing by several historians of electric lighting, but little significance has been attached to it beyond that of transient gimmickry and com-

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mercial advertising. I suggest that its role was more important and subtle than this and it had a significant part to play in the technological (re)construction of electricity as a safe commodity for the home. In the first decade of electrical illumination, at least, the miniature ornamental light had a characteristically gendered significance as a form of ‘decoration’ to be worn specifically by women, either upper-class ladies or theatrical performers.46 The superficial purpose was to yield some kind of aesthetic benefit, primarily but not exclusively, for male observers. More interestingly and more specifically, it had the subtext of illustrating how little harm would accrue to women when such lights were worn close to the female body. This was in complete contrast to the form of sartorial encounter with mitigated electrical hazard that working men would encounter. They were typically expected to wear clothing of a very different sort – asbestos gloves and, latterly, metallic protection suits – to avoid all bodily contact with electrical equipment and thus avoid workplace death or injury. The asymmetry in how clothing and electrical technology were juxtaposed for the two sexes was reflected (somewhat contingently) in the comparative death rates for both. Yet as we shall see, the mere absence of electrocution for women wearing decorative electric light bulbs was not evidence that it was merely a hazard-free aesthetic encounter. When the Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Crystal Palace exhibition in March 1882, the Princess received from Edward Johnson, of the Edison company, a souvenir of a tiny electric chandelier fashioned like a bouquet of fern leaves and flowers, the buds of which were miniature incandescent lamps.47 At around the same time the young Alice (Brandreth) Gordon received from Edison’s rival, Joseph Swan, three or four dainty lamps each the size of a large pea which, she later recalled, looked ‘fairy-like’ inside the petals of organic flowers.48 This technique of naturalizing the electric light within quasi-organic displays of artificial flora was central both to upper class women’s elaborate ballroom fashions of electrical jewellery in the 1880s, and to the aesthetic trend for domestic beautification later epitomized in Mrs Gordon’s Decorative Electricity of 1891 (see Chapter 6). More strikingly, these tiny electric lights were deployed on the bodies of female theatrical performers, perhaps first used in French ballet in 1881 to adorn the breastpiece, necklace and headwear of dancers, as shown in the French periodical L’Illustration.49 Given the potential harm to the women involved from electric shock, heat burns and burns from battery acid – especially to the fast-moving dancers – these were not just arbitrary whimsical uses of electric light. I argue that this usage had a special significance in attempts to promote the notion that electricity was not intrinsically dangerous. Since the theatre had been the site of so many horrific deaths of actresses catching their dresses on naked gas footlights (see Chapter 3) and since the female body had become the most characteristic site of cultural

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anxiety about the danger of domestic illumination, the persistent non-injury of female performers wearing electric lights on their bodies was a powerful piece of visual rhetoric for promoters of both the theatre and of electricity. In order to perform wearing such lights, these dancers were typically obliged to wear either primary or secondary batteries hidden under their costumes. According to the editor of French journal L’Electricien, Edouard Hospitalier, the production of miniature batteries for electric ‘jewellery’ and theatrical body lights had been a specialism of the French makers Trouvé,50 Scrivanow and Aboilard; all produced much lower voltages and lower currents than used for room-lighting to minimize the risk. Hospitalier’s Domestic Electricity for Amateurs reproduced images of the batteries, harness and head pieces regularly used by dancing stage fairies.51 Having been the first to electrify a theatre with a spectacle of 1,200 Swan incandescent lamps in November 188152, the impresario and electrophile Richard D’Oyly Carte was the first to employ female performers wearing electric ornamentation in his Savoy theatre exactly a year later. Rumours of this display prompted protests from one engineer – an Associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers [AICE] – who construed this plan as an inhumane imposition on performers: It is no secret that more than one theatrical manager has in contemplation, or has already decided, to employ the electric light in the coming Christmas pantomimes or extravaganzas as a personal ornament for their hobgoblins and fairies. This can only be done by means of some form of accumulator carried by or attached to the individual, and whether the star light is to form an ornament for the head, or to glisten at the end of a wand, the constant danger is patent. There is no need to be an electrician to understand this. A grave responsibility will be incurred by those managers who permit it – a still graver one by those who force it on their employés. The life of even a super[numerary dancer] at 20s a week ought not to be placed in jeopardy by that autocratic production of our time, the theatrical manager, even if both are willing to run the risk. 53

Having successfully managed electric light into the main body of the Savoy theatre without major incident for twelve months, D’Oyly Carte was not deterred by such jeremiads from Times correspondents. He went ahead to include these lights in the final scene of ‘Iolanthe’, Gilbert & Sullivan’s new ‘fairy’ opera. Here, the association between the magical technology of electrical light and the supernatural power of fairies was forcefully illustrated. As the London Morning Advertiser reported of the opening night, Monday 27 November 1882, the dramatic ennui of the last scene was rescued by a startling innovation: In the last scene a very brilliant and original effect is introduced. The Fairy Queen and her three chief attendants wear each an electric star in their hair. The effect of this brilliant spark of electricity is wonderful.54

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The absence of any injuries to dancers or infelicitous failures of the lighting paved the way for further daring expansion of this risk-laden enterprise. By mid-February 1883 D’Oyly Carte increased the number of electrically-lit fairies involved in the final scene to around thirty. As a reviewer for The Times noted this innovation was entirely successful: the ladies’ ‘flowing drapery’ effectively concealing the accumulators carried on their backs to ‘maintain the incandescence of the tiny lamps on their foreheads’.55 Such apparent thespian frivolity even captured the attention of the scientific journal Nature on 1 March 1883. Reporting the well-controlled electric lighting and general safety features in the Savoy Theatre’s installation, ‘all risk of fire’ was apparently avoided by having all leading wires ‘thoroughly insulated’ and the circuit fuses arranged to melt before heated wires ‘cause any danger’. In the context of explaining that there had been no electrical accidents at all for the first eighteen months of operations, the Nature reporter added on the technocratic marvel of the electric fairies: Each battery is provided with a switch, by means of which the light can be turned on or off by the wearer at their pleasure.56

Such was the success of this thespian practice that it was rapidly taken up by other dramatic enterprises. One commentator suggested that, by the mid-to late 1880s, few theatres in either London or the provinces would be without them, especially for the Christmas pantomime.57 In New York, the Edison Company supplied similar miniature forehead lights and electrically-lit wands for female performers at the popular recreation ground, Niblo’s Garden.58 A further cohort of so-called ‘electric girls’ was employed by Edison at the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1884, and the ‘Electric Girl Lighting Company’ hired out their services for respectable social purposes.59 By 1892, large-scale displays of women adorned in electric light were characteristic features of Edison publicity (see further discussion in Chapter 7).60 Whereas the Edison displays were stage-managed to display apparent safety, Wosk suggests that some female performers in the US were employed in musical hall electrical displays deliberately designed to convey a sense of danger, although the electrical press could always treat such performances sceptically.61 During the 1880s, such electrical costuming was extended to women’s fancy dress at high society balls on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit in ways rather less fraught with hazard than bodily electric lighting. Perhaps still wary of the singeing power of electrical wiring, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alice Gwynne) dressed as ‘the Electric Light’ for a Vanderbilt ball on 26 March 1883, posed to be photographed with a single glowing electric lamp held safely aloft in her gloved right hand.62 At a less elevated social echelon, Mrs E. E. Gaylord, spouse of the manager and electrician of the local electric light company wore a costume cov-

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ered in full size electrical bulbs to represent ‘electrical enterprise’ at the ‘Greatest Event in the history of Brookings, South Dakota’, held at the local opera house in 1890. A contemporary photograph shows her tense facial expression, perhaps reflecting the anxiety of having to stand on copper plates that connect wires in her shoes to an offstage dynamo.63 One surmises she was not in a position to request the asbestos insulating clothing standardly available to male employees of her husband’s company. The as yet untold story of women’s experiences of displaying electric lighting on their bodies would probably reveal a much less cheerful picture than posterity has left us of D’Oyly Carte’s electric fairies on the Savoy theatre stage in 1882. A hint of this can perhaps be gleaned from Mrs Gordon explanation to readers of Decorative Electricity of why she had abandoned electric jewellery herself: In those days batteries were difficult to manage. Once the case was set up on the floor and the acids burnt a hole in the carpet. Sometimes the battery heated, and leaked, and once I well remember, the old lamps having worn out, I had some new ones given to me that were a wrong resistant [sic] for the battery. It heated, and we had barely time to cast the battery into the bath before the gutta-percha sides gave way, and the acids poured out, taking off all the paint. So having spoilt a dress, a carpet and a bath, I abandoned personal electric light decorations.64

Although accumulators (secondary batteries) had long made such risks less immediate, it is clear that in getting as far as Mrs Gordon did she had found that there were – as ‘AICE’ writing to The Times had hinted – considerable hazards in trying to prove the safety of the electric light by bodily display. By the early 1890s, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the hazards of electric lighting for many women went far beyond the issues of contact with electricity. Even with the safest of electrical supplies, the perceived glaring qualities of electric light were seen as the cause of eyestrain and headaches, which were far more difficult to prevent than electric shock or fire. It is this issue of general health to which I will now turn to show how attempts were made by electrical specialists to build a tight association between electricity and health by stigmatizing the problems of its main rival: coal gas illumination.

Stigmatizing Coal Gas: the Chemical and Hygiene Rhetorics of Fear Coal gas is a great consumer of the vitalizing element, viz. the oxygen, in the air we breathe, and the products of combustion from a gas burner are poisonous. We know the headache and drowsiness which follow a stay in a badly ventilated room lighted by gas. A more striking instance of the same fact is shown in the accounts of the General Post Office during the first year [1882] that electric light was substituted for gas light in their buildings, for during this year £800 was saved in employées overtime, due to the fact that they could get through much more work in the same time owing

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Why did the promotional literature on electric lighting in the 1880s and 1890s devote considerable effort to criticizing gas lighting while also maintaining that electric light was the inevitable light of the future? More specifically, why did this literature habitually discuss the dangers of gas lighting not just in terms of fire and explosion, but in terms of its allegedly deleterious effects on health and hygiene? With the exception of Mary Ann Hellrigel, historians of electric lighting have tended not to consider such critical discourse relevant to the long term success of electric lighting.66 My argument in what follows is that electrical popularizers had to do a great deal of work to persuade consumers of the far from self-evident claim that electric light was better for their health than gaslight. In general terms, this persuasion was accomplished by arguing for an asymmetry in the risks–benefit balance between gas and electricity: whereas householders could supposedly be protected from the unique hazard of electric lighting – physiological shock – by standard wiring regulations, the distinctive atmospheric threat of gas lighting was, according to electrical propaganda, entirely non-eliminable. This was contentious, since the advent of the incandescent gas mantle and the use of ventilation systems were well established by the late 1880s as an effective and popular means of mitigating the supposed ‘polluting’ effects of gaslight. The campaign to stigmatize gas lighting in particular was nevertheless successful to some extent in transferring householders’ fears away from anxiety about electrical shock (as epitomized in the Hatfield case) to fear of the health threats posed by gas lights (if not of gas cooking or heating). Since the introduction of gas lighting to Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century some eminent commentators, unconnected with rival technologies, had noted that gas lighting had some unappealing side-effects in comparison to older illumination technologies such as candles, paraffin lamps and, indeed, daylight.67 Such were the harmful effects posited for gas-burning, that they attracted the interest of those concerned with wider issues of civic sanitation. One such major figure was Henry Letheby, Medical Officer of Health for the City of London, whose testimony on the problems of civic gas supply to London’s City Court of Sewers was reported in detail by The Times during winter 1853–4. After two years of investigation, he felt it a matter of public duty to report that the gas supplied by some companies would ‘tend to damage very much the atmosphere and the property in it’, by releasing ‘oil of vitriol’ (sulphuric acid) into the air and allowing both ammonia and tar to build up under the pavements. Since not all the public was aware of such ‘impurities’, he emphasized that the corrosive effects of vitriol would become obvious as it damaged furniture in the domestic sphere and made

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books on the upper shelves of metropolitan libraries to tumble ‘to pieces’, as the bindings were corroded by emissions from adjacent gas lights. And whatever was destructive to the inorganic was, Letheby inferred, ‘necessarily’ more injurious still to living matter, particularly through the medium of human respiration.68 The widespread uptake of gas lighting in the two decades before the arrival of electric lighting indicates that many households and employers in the USA and Europe were prepared to adopt whatever precautions were needed to cope with the first major alternative to fire-prone candles and paraffin lamp: ventilation and regular interior redecoration (see Chapter 1).69 Once gas consumers had become accustomed to these systemic requirements of gas lighting, it became harder to see that gas lighting was necessarily a health hazard. To understand how difficult it was to substantiate the case that gaslight was necessarily unhygienic, we can consider the evidence presented in spring 1879 to the Select Committee on Lighting by Electricity, prompted by the arrival of Jablochkoff arc lighting in 1878, followed by Edison’s abortive announcement of the arrival of an electric incandescent lamp. This Select Committee had been appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli in order to enquire into possible future legislation concerning electric lighting by arc methods. When interviewed by the Committee, the Post Office Chief Electrician, William Preece, showed enthusiasm for the extension of electricity to lighting, viewing the matter from the perspectives of economy and hygiene. It was not clear that the electric light could ever be as cheap as gaslight, a point relished and elaborated upon by a major witness from London and Paris’s gas manufacturing fraternity, William Sugg.70 So Preece focused on a health issue that was especially important for the large telegraph galleries at the Central London Post Office, where up to 1,000 employees worked through the night. Preece estimated that every hour, no less than five million cubic feet of air were ‘vitiated’ in that building; one-fifth respired by the telegraph operators, the rest consumed by gas burners producing carbonic acid. Yet Preece admitted that the telegraph clerks did not suffer from this vitiation since, owing to the Post Office building’s ‘splendid system’ of ventilation, the air they breathed was ‘very pure’. The only inconvenience of gas acknowledged by Preece was the ‘extreme heat’ produced by gas burners operating for eighteen hours at a time although, under pressure from the committee, he revealed this duration of burning was only actually required in winter.71 While other pro-electric witnesses such as Sir William Siemens argued that there were ‘considerable sanitary advantages’ in replacing gas with electric light since the latter consumed no oxygen and produced no acidic vapours, he offered no comment on whether ventilation successfully alleviated these problems. Thus the final report of the Select Committee did not identify the potential hygiene benefits of electric light as a critical issue in its favour.72

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Faced with pragmatic toleration and technological-procedural amelioration of the inconveniences peculiar to gaslight, the electrical lobby needed alternative arguments to present the electric light as the more ‘hygienic’ form of illumination. More specifically they needed to present hygiene as the crucial consideration that trumped all others, to divert attention from the threat of shock uniquely associated with electrical illuminants and of course to also maintain a strategic silence over electric lighting’s translation of the dirty products of combustion from household areas either to a cellar or a remote coal-fired generating station.73 To do so, electrical engineers borrowed from other cultural sources of authority and persuasion outside their immediate technical expertise, most notably public health and analytical chemistry, to actively cultivate a fear of gaslight greater than the widespread fear of electricity. Much use was thus made of the work of Letheby’s successor as Medical Officer of Health for the City of London, Charles Meymott Tidy. In his much-cited Handbook of Modern Chemistry (1878), Tidy used the techniques of analytical chemistry to quantify not just the hazardous chemical by-products of various pre-electric forms of illumination: gaslight, candle, paraffin lamps, but also the loss of oxygen and the production of heat.74 Tidy’s standard exercise in the comparative methodology of chemical analysis was soon appropriated by the electrical industry to frame the hazards of illumination in primarily chemical terms, drawing attention away from the nonchemical hazard of electric shock. Such an appropriative move was made by Robert Hammond’s The Electric Light in Our Homes in ways that were in turn re-appropriated in the following decade by colleagues in the electrical industry. Hammond made the point explicit in the opening chapter by adding in to Tidy’s table a comparative analysis of the electric light that purported to illustrate for the laity the radical difference between electric light and its predecessors in terms of oxygen consumption and the production of both heat and carbonic acid. Hammond evidently accomplished the figures cited below by analysing electric lights only in the context of their immediate environment, tactically avoiding reference to the combustion processes in the steam engines driving the electrical generators (see Table 4.1).75 Table 4.1 [Substance] Burnt to give light of 12 candles, equal to 120 grains per hour Cannel [coal] Gas Common Gas Sperm [whale] Oil Benzole [benzene] Paraffin

Cubic feet Cubic feet Cubic feet of Cubic feet Heat of oxygen of air carbonic acid of air produced in consumed consumed produced vitiated lbs of water raised 100 F 3.30 16.50 2.01 217.50 195.0 5.45 17.25 3.21 348.25 278.6 4.75 23.75 3.33 356.75 233.5 4.46 22.30 3.54 376.30 232.6 6.81 34.05 4.50 484.05 361.9

Electricity as Safety Camphine [Oil] Sperm [whale] candles Wax Stearic Tallow Electric light

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6.65 7.57

33.25 37.85

4.77 5.77

520.25 614.85

325.1 351.7

8.41 8.82 12.00 None

42.05 44.10 60.00 None

5.90 6.25 8.73 None

632.25 669.10 933.00 None

383.1 374.7 505.4 13.8

Table 4.1. Hammond 1884, 8 after (Tidy 1878, 67). Borrowing further from chemical expertise Hammond noted that (unlike the uncertain ontological status of electricity) the nature of coalgas was well understood: 47.6% hydrogen; 41.53% marsh gas (methane); “heavy hydrocarbons” 3.05%; and 7.82%. carbonic oxide (carbon monoxide) – a Hammond 1884 4–5; H.E. Roscoe Chemistry (London, 1872); H.E. Roscoe and C. Schorlemmer A Treatise On Chemistry (London, 1878).

The rhetorical point concerning the apparently incontestable quantitative advantages of electric light was reinforced by extreme selectivity in the parameters to be quantified.76 Thus, to emphasize the deleterious qualities of the gas-specific parameters, Hammond further drew on Tidy for a commentary on the ‘deadliness’ of carbonic acid: ‘normal’ air contained 0.04 per cent; air containing 0.1 percent was ‘polluted’, while one per cent was ‘extremely distressing’ and four per cent perfectly irrespirable. Strategically, Hammond did not specify whether any such high percentages would necessarily be obtained in ventilated rooms illuminated by such organic fuels. Instead, he regaled his audience with an anecdote of the extraordinary death agonies of a suicidal French student, who nobly recorded for scientific posterity the experience of suffocation by carbonic acid and carbonic oxide while in a sealed room with a piece of burning charcoal.77 Hammond next capitalized upon this unsympathetic treatment of traditional illuminants to establish six criteria for the conditions of ‘perfect light’ for the home. The first two of these were engineered to allude to the hazards unique to those older illuminants: it should not ‘rob the air of our rooms of oxygen’ nor ‘add noxious fumes to the air’.78 Not only was the incandescent lamp no thief of oxygen, but in fact its vacuum-based mechanism would fail entirely if any oxygen came into contact with the filament. Such were the merits of a light that depended on the absence of oxygen that it was bound to prove ‘charming’ for use in hotels, theatres, public halls, churches and railway trains; a point that was explicitly directed towards both doctors, as guardians of public health and women in the audience whom he treated as the chief victims of gaslight. In long-clichéd sexist terms, Hammond sought to reinforce their sense of a strongly gendered obligation to overcome such impediments to their traditional status, and to win their all-important sympathy as household managers to allow the innovation of electric light: The headache which is the frequent consequence of the assembling of ourselves together, and which is generally produced by the scarcity of oxygen in the air, will be known no more. Ladies, whose endeavour has been, for one hardly likes to say how

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Domesticating Electricity many thousands of years, to look their best when the husbands or would-be husbands return from their daily toil, will not in future be made pallid by the absorption of this necessary element from the air… For this reason, I am sure that my plea for the introduction of the electric light into our homes will have their hearty support and sympathy.79

Tellingly, Hammond’s only proposed solution to the problem of oxygen loss was to replace gaslight with electric lamps, making no mention of enhanced ventilation to gaslit rooms. This was as central to the hazard-removal of gas lighting as the ‘cut-out’ fuse in electric lighting schemes that Hammond later discussed in reference to the dangers of electricity, as illustrated in the Hatfield case. Although not personally successful in this campaign, the importance of Hammond’s borrowing from Tidy’s analysis to promote electric light as the hygienic illuminant and gas as the ‘thief ’ of oxygen, was widely copied by subsequent electrical propagandists, eventually becoming stock features of the ideology of electricity as modernity. For example, a few months after Hammond’s book was published, the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians organized a somewhat partisan conference on ‘electric lighting in relation to health’ at the electrically-lit International Health Exhibition in July 1884; significantly no representatives of the gas industry were invited to contribute. The electrical manufacturer and installation engineer R. E. B. Crompton presented a paper on ‘Artificial lighting in relation to health’, which cited Tidy’s table as extended by Hammond to include electric light. Echoing much of Hammond’s rhetoric, Crompton gestured to Tidy’s data to support an extrapolation from the ‘giddiness and malaise’ induced in fetching books from upper shelves in gas-lit libraries, to a much broader general claim for the ‘fearful’ state of the oxygen deprived atmosphere in both homes and public buildings.80 Next year the Tidy-Hammond table appeared on the opening page of the booklet The Electric Light Brought Home to Us, issued by the Anglo-American Brush Company, with the overt aim of showing primarily that gaslight polluted air, as well as discolouring furnishings and injuring eyesight by its flickering. No comparable comment was offered on the hazard of electric shock manifested in the use of Brush alternators at Hatfield House four years earlier.81 When the Tidy-Hammond table was again published in 1891, in Electricity Up to Date, its engineer-entrepreneur author John Verity claimed that it was ‘almost unnecessary now-a-days’ to detail for his readers the numerous advantages of electric light over its rivals.82 Significantly, Verity made no reference to the Welsbach Incandescent gas mantle then promoted by the gas industry as a plausible – and highly successful – rival, which more nearly matched the putatively health-giving qualities of the incandescent electric lamp by emitting no acidic fumes. This tactical omission, repeated by Percy Scrutton’s Electricity in Town and Country

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Houses of 1898 (and many subsequent electrophilic sources), showed that the case for the unique healthfulness of electric light was still moot.83 As if to acknowledge the limited persuasiveness of analytical chemistry and partisan anecdotes of gas lighting, electrical engineers adopted a complementary strategy of citing the testimony of those who had experienced the comparative effects of gas and electric light in carefully managed trial installations. It was in this vein that Scrutton observed the increase in the efficiency of postal workers at London’s Central Post Office after the introduction of electric light in 1882; a significant decrease in the annual expense of overtime payments thereafter was attributed to the ‘increased healthiness of the atmosphere’, which reduced sickness.84 More directly, Crompton’s 1884 paper on the putative health benefits of electric light at the International Health Exhibition drew heavily on the testimony of the chorus and orchestra at the Birmingham Music Festival in 1882, following his refitting of the hall from gas to electric light. Yet apart from one singer’s comparative observation that ‘the gas used to make me dim’ and another’s that nobody had yet fainted during that year’s performances, the overwhelming response to Crompton’s questionnaire was that the electrically-lit Birmingham Town Hall showed a marked reduction of atmospheric temperature. Crompton could not – pace Tidy – report any musicians noticing a change in the quality of the air owing to the absence of toxic gases.85 Tellingly, another electrical partisan in Crompton’s audience at the London conference, James Shoolbred, made a similar judgement concerning the coolness of electric lighting at a music festival in Norwich and in the House of Commons.86 Thus, attempts by electrical engineers to encourage ordinary consumers into fearing the toxicity of gaslight, were by no means overwhelmingly successful; in Chapter 6 we shall see how far the aesthetics of electric lighting were linked to suggestions of its alleged greater cleanliness.

Lord Salisbury and the Health Arguments for Revised Electric Lighting Legislation While Crompton et al. were mostly speaking to an audience of converted electrophiles already persuaded of the benefits of electric light, indirect experiential claims for the health benefits of electric light, relative to gas light, did play an important role in the political framework of facilitating electric lighting during the latter part of the 1880s. Specifically, such arguments were employed in the House of Lords in 1887–8 in an informal, Conservative-led campaign to revise the Electrical Lighting Act of 1882 introduced by the preceding Liberal government. It was widely felt in the electrical industry that the clauses which entitled local authorities to make a compulsory scrap-value purchase of any lighting scheme after twenty-one years (thereby preventing the kind of notorious pri-

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vate monopolies rampant in water and gas supply) were far too restrictive and had hopelessly discouraged almost all entrepreneurship and investment.87 While historians have noted that the effect of the 1888 revision to this legislation encouraged the industry greatly by doubling the compulsory purchase period to forty-two years, they have not acknowledged three important, UK-specific factors that brought this about. Not only was this a specifically a political move by a wealthy, technophile Conservative elite, but one also under a government led by Lord Salisbury and, most tellingly, a move that leaned heavily on the health benefits of electricity to the working class, with no mention being made of the safety hazards of electricity. We should therefore note the considerable irony in the close involvement of the Anglo-American Brush Company in this campaign – the company whose alternators communicated the fatal current on the death day of Salisbury’s most famously deceased employee: William Dimmock (see Chapter 3). Although Salisbury allowed a number of private Bills to be put forward by a variety of Conservative peers, including the eminent physicist Lord Rayleigh, the bill that won the government’s (unofficial) support was that proposed by the Fifth Baron Thurlow. Lord Thurlow, Thomas John Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, was Privy Councillor to Queen Victoria, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1886, and Paymaster General in the cabinet of Lord Salisbury’s government of 1886 to 1892. His connection with the electrical industry was as Chairman of the Anglo-American Brush Company – which, throughout the 1880s, supplied machinery to Hatfield House. It was in this industrial capacity that Thurlow had been elected to chair a committee representing all of the electric lighting companies in 1884, in a campaign to remove the restrictive clauses in the 1882 Electric Lighting Act.88 Thus, a respectable period after Salisbury’s Conservative party was returned to office, Thurlow was permitted to promote a revised electric lighting bill through the (still predominant) House of Lords.89 In promoting the legislation through his speeches in parliamentary debates from 1887–8, Thurlow shrewdly avoided appearing to speak for the commercial interests of the electrical supply companies. Thus, he instead invoked the health theme repeatedly as the major rationale for liberalizing the conditions in which electric lighting could – and should – be made more readily available to the public on the more viable terms of the revised law. Unlike Tory colleagues more accustomed to arguing for Government non-interference in commercial matters, Thurlow argued that the Government’s Board of Trade ought to make incandescent electric lighting compulsory in all mines, factories, schools, churches, theatres and hospitals. These were all places, he averred, in which gas jets deleteriously ‘consumed the lions’ share of the oxygen’, to the disadvantage of humans congregated there. Appealing to the patrician instincts of his fellow noblemen, he opined to the upper house of British Parliament on 5 March 1888:

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Many of their Lordships had no doubt visited factories lighted by gas full of toiling men, women, and children from 6.30am to 6.30pm, and had noticed the vitiated state of the atmosphere. The difference between a factory lighted by electricity was manifest in a moment. It was like being transported suddenly to another planet. Workmen who had been employed in factories lighted by electricity had told [me] that nothing short of starvation would induce them to work again in factories lighted by gas. It was the same in the case of mines. Electric lighting would minimize the dangers which now occurred through naked lights or faulty lamps.90

Thurlow used this argument – ingenuously or otherwise – to present his advocacy of relaxed electric light legislation as a direct extension of his patrician duties to the lower classes, rather than an expression of commercial interest on the part of the company he chaired, or the industrial campaigning lobby that he represented. Lord Salisbury evidently sympathized with the legislation and the rhetoric that went with it, signalling his approval by pointing to a related problem of environmental health that might be solved by electric lighting; namely, ‘the great need in our smoky towns of diminishing the unconsumed carbon in the atmosphere’.91 With the support of fellow Conservative aristocrat-entrepreneurs Lord Crawford (astronomer and Chairman of the London Electric Supply Corporation) and the Duke of Marlborough, the Electric Light Amendment Bill was passed into law in summer 1888 – leading, as Thomas Hughes has noted, to the first flourishing of electrical lighting in Britain.92 During all of this, however, a discreet silence was maintained about the unfortunate death of William Dimmock on Lord Salisbury’s bucolic Hatfield estate nearly seven years earlier.93 With that incident put safely into the background, the electrical lighting industry celebrated Lord Salisbury’s patronage of their profession by inviting him to be guest of honour at the inaugural dinner of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, formed out of the STEE in November 1889. After hearing his own health toasted, Salisbury’s speech tellingly did not comment on the safety or physical health benefits of the future of electrification. Instead he addressed the moral benefits that electricity would bring to the domestic life of the British working classes so terribly disrupted by the arrival of the steam engine and the factory: If ever it shall happen that in the house of the artisan you can turn on the power as now you can turn on gas (and there is nothing in the essence of the problem, there is nothing in the facts of the science, as we know them, that shall prevent such a consummation from taking place) – that distribution of power should be so organized – you will then see men and women able to pursue in their own houses many industries which now require the aggregation of the factory. You may, above all, see women and children pursue those industries without that disruption of the family which is one of the most unhappy results of the present requirements of the industries; and [… thus …] sustain that unity, that integrity of the family, upon which rests the moral hopes of our race, and the strength of the community to which we belong (hear, hear).94

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Quite what William Dimmock’s widow might have made of this sentimental Tory advocacy of family life being restored by electricity is sadly not recorded. What is recorded, however, is that the health benefits of electric light to the populace were much less conspicuous to the next government than the dangers to the workforce. William Gladstone’s Liberal government of 1892–5 included electric generation – but not gas supply – among the list of ‘dangerous trades’ which a Home Office committee was set to investigate in 1894.95 Following some serious explosions in electrical junction boxes in London’s streets in the spring of 1895, the same government set its Board of Trade to revise and refine existing regulations for the electrical supply in order to secure, once again, ‘the safety of the public’.96 For the electrical industry, both these formal state investigations drew unwelcome attention to the expense, recurrent difficulties and technological complexity of accomplishing safety in electricity. Unsurprisingly then, homemakers and female servants were not easily swayed from their trust in gas and wariness of electricity. As Anne Clendinning has shown (and as I explore further in Chapter 7), a large number of gas ‘demons’ (lady demonstrators) showed British householders, from the 1880s through to 1930, just how they could trust gas as a safe and hygienic means of cooking and heating for their homes, no matter what they might have decided about the merits and demerits of gas for illumination. For decades they firmly resisted attempts to indoctrinate them into the notion that electricity was necessarily the only route to a clean, hygienic, efficient and well lit modernity.97 In particular, female domestic servants were reluctant to risk the use of electric lighting. In 1931 Caroline Haslett, of the Electrical Association for Women, reported that the fear of electricity among female staff was still often the reason why ‘some of our larger houses do not adopt electrical methods’. She proposed a programme of education to rid them of this fear, as if mere instruction in electricity would be sufficient to win their trust in disputed claims for the safety of the mysterious agency.98 From that much alone we can see that even as late as 1932 there was something still contentious in the claim made by fellow EAW campaigner Elsie Elmitt Edwards that it was ‘an established fact’ that electricity in the home was ‘conducive to health, saves eyesight, saves decoration bills, saves labour, and creates leisure’.99

Conclusion The question of whether electricity was safe was at least as troublesome for early electrical promoters as the question of its identity, but for quite different reasons. Whereas uncertainty about the latter primarily had the effect of undermining the authority of putative experts in electricity, disagreements and doubts about the former were of socio-economic consequence in late-nineteenth-century householders’ deliberations about whether they should electrify their homes.

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A further important correlative point is that neither of these two questions could be answered by conventional technical expertise about electrical theory of technology. As we saw in this chapter, there was no simple natural ‘fact’ of electricity’s safety to demonstrate, so auxiliary forms of expertise were borrowed from the insurance company, theatre costumier and gas chemistry manual to ‘show’ as dramatically as possible that electricity could be made at least as safe as gas. Indeed, by seeking to raise the profile of risks from gas lighting, the electrical community made it all the easier to provide convincing demonstrations of the contested safety of electricity. However, as we shall see in ensuing chapters, there was more to the successful domestication of electricity than the persuasive assertion of its safety. In Chapter 5, I will explore how householders also had to be persuaded of the inevitability of an all-electric future, and this required a further augmentation of electrical expertise into the domain of futurist narrative.

5 ELECTRICITY AS THE FUTURE: PROPHETIC EXPERTISE AND CONTESTED AUTHORITY

Electric lighting, on some distributive [public] plan like that of gas, is still an event of the future, in England. Other countries (notably the United States), Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, &c., are ahead of us; but in the electrical illumination of our homes – the traditional castle of the Englishman, we are in advance of all other countries. […] In fact electric lighting is becoming a fashion, and the only fear for its ultimate general success is its falling into the hands of the inexperienced and ignorant – one chief cause of its check in the past. William Preece, ‘Domestic Electric Lighting’ [Address to the Society of Arts], 1886.1 Considering, then, that the household is in itself the condensed history of a nation’s past, the centre of its present, and the cradle of its future, it is doubtful whether, among the many triumphs of the age that electricity may claim, any can be quoted of brighter renown than the rapid progress it has already made in the cultivation of the arts of life, and its adaptation to the needs and graces of the household. A. E. Kennelly, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribner’s Magazine, 1889.2

In its earliest decades, civic electrification was closely associated with futurity: wherever the electric light dawned, so the story goes, modernity was at hand. As David Nye shows in Electrifying America, this resulted from electrical promoters’ (apparently) confident forecast that coming decades would bring a utopia wrought by convenient electrical utilities and household devices. Though no licensed clairvoyant, Thomas Edison was among the most vocal on this theme, prophesying among other things, that electricity would bring the ending of night, the intellectual equality of men and women, and even the end of sleep. Above all, as Edison’s associate Arthur Kennelly wrote in 1889 for Scribner’s, the American home, the ‘cradle’ of the nation’s future, would be the greatest beneficiary of this transition. Just as erstwhile luxuries such as tobacco, and table knives and forks had eventually become commonplaces then ‘necessaries’, so hereafter, Kennelly extrapolated, would electricity. Nye documents how such quasi-prophesies – 121 –

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filtered into US popular fiction, particularly in the wake of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling future utopia Looking Backward: 2000–1888, 3 encouraging great expectations for electrification among the American public. Indeed with the understated exception of some unidentified ‘anti-modernist’ factions, Nye argues that the US population circa1900 confidently expected electricity to play a ‘major role’ in the nation’s future.4 However, some unanswered questions lurk beneath such uncontroversial observations. Why did electrical expert-entrepreneurs spend so much time creating prophetic narratives, given their enormous range of other technical, financial and diplomatic responsibilities? If a fully-electrified future was inevitable, why did such characters need to expend great effort attempting to persuade prospective consumers that this was the state of things to come? On what authority and with what expertise could they extrapolate so confidently from technical knowledge of the present to such apparently secure knowledge of a future state? Was it that, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests in Disenchanted Night, that this was a consequence of the industrialization of lighting? On Schivelbusch’s account, the seemingly inexorable movement first of the gas light then of the electric light from the 1880s factory, through the public streets, into the theatre and thence into the home, displacing gaslight wherever it went, was one of the corollaries of modernization.5 Nevertheless, as the previous two chapters demonstrate and, later, chapter six will show, there is plenty of evidence of contingency and resistance to the process of electrification that might lead us to suspend belief in the ineluctability of electrical hegemony. Promoting the virtues of the British bourgeoisie for being the most avid in adopting household dynamos in 1886 (for want of public supply systems as available in the USA), William Preece identified only one threat to the future success of the electric light: that installations might fall into the hands of the ‘inexperienced and ignorant’, whose disastrous workmanship had allegedly been the sole cause of accidents in the past (see Chapter 1). Following the arguments of Chapters 3 and 4, however, we can interpret Preece’s view as just one partisan representation of the uncertain prospects of electricity. A further reason that Preece and others like him had to persuade the public that they were destined to adopt the electric life was a concern to present popular anxieties over the dangers of electricity as merely a transient phase. And here we find the reason for the effort devoted to creating possible electrical futures: if enough consumers believed in such narratives, they would literally buy into the idea and make it come true; the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy. Such moves could only be helped by suggestions, as mooted by Preece, that domestic electricity was becoming fashionable. As we shall see, however, the strategy of selling grandly comprehensive visions of electrical futures to sceptical publics (and an often satirical press) did not come

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easily or obviously to the electrical lighting practitioner. In the first section, I show how the arrival of the telephone in the years preceding the incandescent lamp prompted many diverse speculations about the future of the telephone but only journalists saw it as having an obvious place in the domestic sphere. Then I consider how some early upper-class promoters of electric light and power preferred adopt a cautious didactic tone in writing for popular periodicals in the 1880s, eschewing utopian prophecy. The third section examines the troubled attempts by Thomas Edison, St George Lane-Fox and other electrical entrepreneurs in the early 1880s, to construct optimistic futurist narratives with the aim of enthralling and ensnaring potential domestic customers with their products. Then I examine how, in the British case, the popularity of Bellamy’s Looking Backward from 1889–90 created enormous public interest – indeed credulity – in the electrified future, especially as mediated by the radical journalist William Stead for the Review of Reviews. Yet, in the fifth section, we shall see that electrical experts could overstep the mark in their quasi-clairvoyant speculation. William Crookes, for example, was severely criticized by the periodical press for overstating his authoritative claims to somehow know the future. Then, by way of ironic counterpoint, in the final section we shall see how the non-realization of some important futures forecast for electricity reinforces the interpretive point that the futurist fantasies of electrophiles cannot be attributed to any preternatural prescience.

Prophetic Extrapolation and Satirical Deconstruction: Future Telecommunication We hear every day of new patents being taken out, and fresh suggestions, some of which, indeed, coming the other side of the Atlantic […] But after the experience of the human race during the last thousand years or so, we need not be in any hurry to dismiss the wildest of these projects as absurd. If we laugh at them, so did we, a few years ago, at the very notion of the telephone or the microphone, as our forefathers must have laughed in their day when some dreamer foretold the powers of artillery, of the mariners compass, of reading and writing, all which at one or other period of the worlds’ history seemed just as incredible as almost any other invention that can now be suggested. Ascott R. Hope [pseud.], Wonders of Electricity, 1881.6

In 1870s Britain, as in other industrializing nations, the major sites of technological innovation were outside the home. Factories, railways and telegraph lines constituted the new landscape and set the ever-hastening pace for ordinary city-dwellers. Thus, it might not have been obvious to them how – and indeed how far – technological expansion might affect their future domestic

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lives. Discussion of the future was, in any case, by no means a respectable activity for authorities in science and technology, as Katherine Anderson noted with regards to the controversial nature of forecasting in Victorian meteorology. Before 1890 this mysterious and often disastrously unreliable activity was more typically linked to the notorious writings of astrologers than the seemly institutions of natural science. Indeed, sharp criticism and Government rejection of his plan for ‘storm warnings’ helped to drive even as eminent an aspirant authority as Robert Fitzroy to suicide in 1865.7 In the following decades, meteorology brought recurrent embarrassment to other distinguished natural philosophers, including Balfour Stewart, who had attempted to systematize long-term weather forecasting by linking terrestrial meteorology with (purportedly) eleven-year sunspot cycles.8 We therefore need to understand historically how it was that certain kinds of quasi-prophetic activity pertaining to electricity ever became respectable in the late-Victorian world. Richard Noakes has shown that portentous announcements of new phenomena of the machine age, such as the railways and telegraph, had been greeted with often-merciless derision in the 1840s.9 As Noakes observes, these reactions were most obvious in the pages of Punch magazine, where the apparent absurdity of inventors’ hubris and outlandish expectations was made to do double service as a tool of political satire. We can see in Punch palpable blows against the naked financial ambitions and comical hubris of inventors who sought to entice investors into sponsoring the next phase of British industrialization. As new technologies came along, they received new playful or sceptical press representations, while older devices were shifted into the technological background. Jokes about telegraphy, for example, became less common in Punch after the Atlantic cable-laying enterprise of 1866 proved at last successful and serious questions about its future were not raised until the arrival of wireless telegraphy some thirty years later.10 In the meantime, electricity became represented increasingly as the master agent for dominating both the material and imperial world. As Daniel Headrick argues, the domestication of electricity via telegraphy was readily extended into the domestication of an Empire via the thousands of miles of thin telegraph cable wires, connecting the dispersed elements of the huge British Empire across its unprecedented geographical reach.11 Forecasting the future of electricity in the 1870s was more commonly left to journalists and novelists rather than natural philosophers or engineers. Readers of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, would have encountered the most daring representation of the possible future usage of electricity. In a chapter headed ‘All by electricity’, explaining the extraordinary operation of his advanced submarine, the Nautilus, Captain Nemo states that: ‘there is a powerful agent, obedient, rapid, easy, which conforms to every use, and reigns supreme on board my vessel. Everything is done by means of it. It lights, warms

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it, and is the soul of my mechanical apparatus. This agent is electricity.’12 During the next few decades, Verne’s intimations of more practical uses for electricity were, in some sense, borne out in ways that grabbed the attention of press and public alike. The two most startling innovations of 1877 were Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and Thomas Alva Edison’s sound-recording phonograph, each offering a future in which separation in neither space nor time need be an impediment to human communication.13 At stake in these considerations was not just the future of electrical technology but also the authority of the commentator on electrical matters. There was a clear sense in which making predictions about the outlook of particular applications of electricity traded on the status of the speaker: only those who could not be suspected of self-interest or populist-exploitative horoscopy could be trusted to make disinterested claims. Initially, claims about the telephone in the UK were greeted with some bewilderment. As The Times noted on 14 July 1877, few of the recent ‘applications of science’ had attracted as much popular curiosity or been the subject of ‘such extravagant and erroneous statements’, as the telephone. Outlandish claims that a speaker’s voice could be recognized after travelling through 500 miles of wire or that an orchestra could play to a dozen audiences one hundred miles apart were greeted chauvinistically as ‘only American reports’ (albeit that The Times admitted it would be ‘uncharitable’ to say this alone explained their character). Yet, as the newspaper was forced to admit, the invention was most startling: ‘too remarkable indeed, to be discredited by any amount of exaggeration’.14 Three months later, in September 1877, The Times commented on Alexander Graham Bell’s predictions about the telephone’s future, giving him greater credence than American journalists for being both admirably Scottish and appropriately humble in his claims. On his expectations of this new ‘oral’ form of telegraphy at the BAAS meeting in Plymouth, the newspaper chauvinistically reported: The best guarantee for the future of the Telephone lies in the extremely modest claims put forward on its behalf by its inventor. Professor Graham Bell - who, by the way, is a Scotchman, and not a Yankee - would probably be the last man in the world to claim for his invention even the possibilities with which it has been connected in the fertile imaginations of American journalists. He frankly admitted to his audience at Plymouth that his invention was only as yet in its embryo state, and that he could not tell what form it might ultimately assume.

Indeed, it was to his Scottish ethnicity that the newspaper specifically attributed Bell’s power to differentiate ‘between a scientific possibility and a practical reality’.15

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Two months later still, The Times relied on the testimony of a fellow Scot (albeit of Northern Irish descent), Sir William Thomson. He was so impressed by the rapid development in the sophistication of the telephone that he inverted the predictive process, and rhetorically dared his audience to consider what might not be possible with this device. Having been able to connect simultaneously to audiences both down a mineshaft and in an office, he asked rhetorically that if such ‘admirable results’ could be accomplished by the telephone while even its inventor considered it embryonic, ‘what may not be hoped from the future?’.16 Thomson, like many contemporaries, demurred at the task of offering a determinate vision of the telephone’s future though, again like numerous others, he saw no obvious general usage in the domestic environment. Such were the many cautious discussions about the many possibilities of the telephone that concrete speculation about specific applications was left once again to the satirical cartoonists. In December 1877, Punch published a set of four illustrations by George du Maurier, fantasizing in its Almanack for 1878 about possible future uses for the telephone in very creative ways. Two speculations concerned its leisurely usage for direct conversation between families at home and their kin on opposite sides of the planet, a notion that did not imply regular conversation between those in the same country. This was by no means entertained in the business paradigm of telegraphic usage, which posited the

Figure 5.1. Source: Punch Almanack for 1878 (December 14 1877). Four satirical views of the future prospects of telephony: international communication, remote musical accompaniment, piped opera and bottled music. By permission of University of Leeds, Brotherton Library Special Collections.

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brisk exchange of packets of information. The two other suggestions concerned musical entertainment, showing that a major usage for the telephone in the home would be to mediate music rather than conversation. As Asa Briggs and others have noted, the telephone, rather than being primarily conversational, was widely used to facilitate remote musical appreciation in France and Hungary during the 1880s and 1890s.17 The telephone was used for theatrical entertainment, relaying operas to remote subscribers and sending oral telegrams between businessmen, as if it were a direct extension of the telegraph. Hardly any practical electrician seriously considered that the principal future of the telephone would be its adoption by the domestic masses for extensive leisure conversation with those far and near.18 As Claude Fischer has discussed, the widescale usage of telephones for casual and lengthy social conversation was a feature development by users, specifically female householders in rural USA after the First World War, and much against the preferences of telephone company managers who thought this demeaned the dignity of their product, no matter how much money it made for them.19 As we shall see in the next chapter, the power of the female consumer in determining the fate of a domestic electrical technology is not to be underestimated. For the British in the 1880s and 1890s, however, the telephone was not embraced as a domestic facility as enthusiastically as in the USA. This difference resulted partly from the extraordinarily efficient postal mail service added to the plentiful availability of street-running messenger boys, but also from a cautious culture of interaction that shielded the affluent from strangers, and both unwanted visitors and social threats from the unseen public. Although the telephone did not threaten new means of death or injury as the railway or electric light did it posed, as Carolyn Marvin has noted, new means of disrupting the domestic order by fraud, misunderstanding, unwanted intrusion and excessive expenditure; this was a future world that householders understandably were not drawn speedily to embrace.20 All the evidence of the 1880s pointed to indifference towards the telephone or, more specifically, a scepticism about any putative need for it, leading many in Britain to resist its charms.21 Tellingly, in Mr Punch’s dream of electricity as ‘the Coming Force’ in the Punch Almanack for 1882, the telephone did not feature among the likely benefits of a force represented as inevitably riding into the lives of its readership, banishing coal and dirt as it arrived. Clearly we cannot then impute a supernatural power of clairvoyance to late-Victorian commentators on the domestication of the telephone as the first electrical technology within the home.22 Much that was predicted about telephony did not occur. Much that did occur, most notably the sociable use to which it was put, had not been widely predicted (except by waspish caricaturists of technological fantasy). So we cannot, therefore, presume these observers to have been any more prescient with

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regards to the prospects of the electric light that arrived a few years later. Whatever else might be said, the future of the electric light was to be invented, not ‘discovered’, just as had been the case with the telephone. No wonder then, that, in the early 1880s, speculative futurism was not the obvious means of promoting the earliest forms of electric light. Indeed, in the next section I explore a rather different mode used in that decade by expert-entrepreneurs to persuade important wealthy audiences that electricity was the key to the future.

Didactic Popular Journalism in Electricity Our old men remember when it took many months to get a letter to India; but the rising generation would think themselves ill-treated if they did not read in the ‘Times’ each morning the report of any important event which had occurred in India the day before. Electricity rings our bells, lights our shores, runs our errands, and, as we hope, will blow up our enemies if they approach our coasts. It has become indispensable in peace and doubly indispensable in war. Last, not least, it has [a] young and vigorous literature, and a special language of its own. William Coutts Keppell, ‘The Science of Electricity as Applied in Peace and War’, Quarterly Review, 1877.23

The dazzlingly public application of electricity to technologies of communication, lighting, power and medical therapy was discussed as widely in the late nineteenth century as the advent of steam locomotion had been some fifty years earlier. The electrical entrepreneurs who sought to write authoritatively on the subject for general periodicals in the early 1880s tended to offer their readers historical and didactic instruction on the formal properties of electricity and associated machines, seemingly in order to persuade them to invest in this new enterprise. Rarely, at this stage at least, did they drift into speculatively futurist modes riskily associated with charlatans, clairvoyants and almanac writers.24 This section examines how such didactic writing on electricity was pursued by two entrepreneurial individuals: William Coutts Keppel, Viscount Bury (later Seventh Earl of Albemarle), an aristocrat ‘amateur’ who was intensely active in the business world of electrical traction; and James Edward Gordon, the well-todo student of James Clark Maxwell who, with the support of his spouse Alice, installed some of the most significant lighting systems in London.25 Both Keppel and Gordon wrote for the Quarterly Review and Nineteenth Century, a Tory periodical and upmarket Liberal publication respectively. Both men also treated their audiences as discerning critical readers who needed to be persuaded of the merits of electricity, which, as should be apparent from preceding chapters, were far from self-evident. As such, my account presents an alternative to the interpretation of relationships between electrical experts, periodicals and readers espoused by Carolyn Marvin in When Old Technologies Were

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New.26 Surveying how electrical novelties were reported in a range of popular general journals from the 1880s to 1890s, Marvin treats these as secondary recycling of expert knowledge, which had been more definitively expressed in such professional journals as the Electrician, Electrical Review and Electrical World. Accordingly, she does not look to general periodicals as sites of contested knowledge, where troubled experts might have been seeking to convince sceptical and highly-informed audiences of problematic claims about financially challenged new technologies. My interpretation, on the other hand, considers general periodicals as a primary medium for electrical experts to engage with the public concerning the latter’s anxieties about the uncertain nature of electricity, the manifest dangers associated with electrical technology, and the financial risks for prospective investors and purchasers.27 In contrast to the excited coverage of futurism in the 1890s, writing on electricity featured only occasionally in established British general periodicals in the preceding decades. Indeed, electricity figured generally less frequently than the cognate issues of physical science (meteorology and cosmology) or technology (railways and shipping). Upmarket monthlies, such as Macmillan’s Magazine and the Fortnightly Review, which were launched in 1859 and 1865 respectively, had recently come to dominate the scene, but quarterly periodicals were neither totally eclipsed nor forced to alter the journalistic practices they adopted during their heyday earlier in the century.28 The Quarterly Review long maintained both the Tory commitments and six-shilling price with which it was founded in 1809 and, whereas the new monthlies published named contributions from the ambitious secular community of middle-class academic scientists, for example T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall and Norman Lockyer, the Quarterly continued its tradition of seemly anonymity well into the twentieth century.29 Moreover, most articles on natural science were penned by ‘men of letters’ or marginal scientific figures; for the period from January 1876 to July 1880, William Coutts Keppel (Viscount Bury), contributed six articles on the physical and navigational sciences and a seventh on international politics.30 With the exception of a single piece on electric lighting, published in October 1881, however, the Quarterly’s coverage of science in the 1880s focused predominantly on the life sciences and colonial exploration. Befitting a publication that spoke to its presumptive readership of landed, military and political interests, Quarterly writing narrated the past and present accomplishments of the establishment more often than it addressed prospects for social improvement. Whilst playing to the conservative mores of readers, Quarterly writers nevertheless used various devices – some distinctly didactic – in order to acclimatize readers to unfamiliar concepts in the sciences. The July 1877 issue of the Quarterly Review carried a forty-page article reviewing six diverse publications on electricity from the previous seven years, titled ‘The science of electricity as applied in peace and war’. Sir William

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Thomson’s Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism (1872) and Sir William Snow Harris’s Magnetism (1872) were explored to illustrate that, after decades of argument, the cause of variations in terrestrial magnetism disappointingly remained as much a mystery to the authorities as it was a bane to navigators.31 By contrast, the first five volumes of the Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers (1871–6) were on surer ground with the material culture of electricity, furnishing definitive diagnoses on the hazards of lightning strikes and heralding thirty years of colonial submarine and land telegraphy.32 The didactic-historicist genre of writing is most clearly epitomized in the Quarterly article’s excursions into sources not listed in its header. Note, for example, the concluding passage on the devastating use of the (static) electric torpedo in the American Civil War drawn from the 1865 Report of the Secretary of the United States Navy. Reinforcing the interpretation of the 1876 Select Committee Report, Quarterly readers were offered yet more evidence that electrical techniques had become decisive in modern warfare. Between such historical anecdotes, the narrative explicitly positioned readers as students more or less expert in the important (but arcane) wisdom of electricity. After the conventional admission that not even experts knew what electricity actually was, one quarter of the article was devoted to a standard textbook exegesis of how electricians had created instead a working language of electricity, including such terms as voltage, resistance, current, and induction.33 Acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of the Quarterly audience, both the ‘well-informed’ and the ‘very idle’ reader were ‘solemnly warned to skip’ this lengthy discussion of technicalities. A third major category of reader was thereby implied: the attentive learner who sought to attain the knowledge presupposed in texts addressed to a ‘professional’ audience. By gaining such knowledge, readers would then find the Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers a ‘mine of interesting information’ and thereby come to comprehend the pronouncements of electrical experts contained within its pages.34 The significance of this didactic mode for both the writer and for the standing of the Quarterly, as an anonymous reference volume, is clear when we consider the opening sentences of William Coutts Keppel’s article, ‘Electric Light and Force’, published by the Nineteenth Century in July 1882: In July 1877 the Quarterly Review had an article of mine on ‘Electricity as applied in Peace and War’, to which I refer here because it forms a convenient landmark. Though it was written by me five years ago, and was intended to give in a popular form an account of electrical science as it then existed, it is quite curious to remark how completely recent inventions have left its statements in arrear […] The very nomenclature of the science, which I took some pains to expound, is as archaic as Chaucer’s English.35

Keppel conceded that electrical science had greatly altered since he had introduced Quarterly readers to the professional language of electricity in 1877.

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Indeed, in October 1881, Quarterly readers encountered a piece on electric lighting using a very different discourse (see below). In this piece Keppel admitted that so ‘rapid and violent’ had been the change in language – at a speed indeed to ‘rival that of the imponderable agent’ itself – that such familiar household words as ‘phonograph’ and ‘telephone’ had only come into existence since his earlier article. Whereas Bury had written in 1877 of ‘voltaic electricity’, measured in webers, the re-titled ‘direct current’ was now customarily registered in amperes. Given the resilient status of the Quarterly as a repository of considered periodical wisdom, it is plausible to suggest that Keppel retrospectively revealed his authorship of the 1877 article because it was important to inform periodical readers that the earlier piece was no longer definitive. This was especially significant, since the introduction of electric light a few years earlier had engendered a fast growing demand for knowledge of electricity: ‘The newspaper and the popular lecturer have taken it up’, Keppel wrote, ‘and instilled it into us, so to speak, with our tea and toast at breakfast’.36 Writing in the Nineteenth Century in 1882 was an effective way of reaching an important audience interested in the implications of new scientific and technological developments. Daniel Rutenberg has suggested that this ‘serious’ campaigning monthly, founded in 1877 by the former editor of the Contemporary Review, James Knowles, exercised a ‘very striking influence’ on both periodical literature and ‘liberal thought’ in general; no more so than in 1882, when Knowles secured enormous opposition to plans for a Channel Tunnel.37 Moreover, individual articles on science were a customary feature of its monthly schedule, as were the abstracts of recent research provided first by Thomas H. Huxley and later by Prince Kropotkin. Bury’s piece, ‘Electric Light and Force’, was discernibly attuned to the nineteenth-century house style, with the presumption that readers of his article were all well-informed about such features of modern life as the telephone.38 Presuming ‘everyone nowadays knows’ how to maintain an electric current using a battery and electrical conductor, readers of ‘Electric Light and Force’ were invited to extrapolate such knowledge to new forms of artificial lighting and power supply. Hopefully without ‘wearying’ readers, Bury offered to guide them through the bewildering novelty of vocabulary needed to understand the Edison and Brush forms of ‘dynamo’, especially as textbooks treated such topics in exasperatingly different ways.39 Tellingly, when Bury published the ‘Electrical transmission of power’ in the Nineteenth Century ten years later, he recycled much of the material he had used in ‘Electric Light and Force’, whilst updating his vocabulary yet again; on this occasion including the term ‘energy’ rather than the somewhat antiquated ‘electrical force’. He also candidly revealed that his own financial interests in the electrical industry had been thwarted by the collapse which had followed the brief boom of 1882. Evidently Bury’s didacticism was not that of a disinterested man of letters, but a mode of

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writing designed to give readers an understanding of contemporary entrepreneurial projects of 1892, which he implied were on a much sounder footing. As the recently elevated Duke of Albemarle put it: ‘the bona fide investor may fairly consider that in matters electrical his turn has come at last’.40 Readers of the Nineteenth Century, like earlier readers of the Quarterly, were thus configured in two correlated modes: both as leisurely scholars of electricity and as prospective stakeholders in electrical ventures. This pattern of didactic writing on electricity, inflected with entrepreneurial undertones, was not unique to Bury’s journalism, but characteristic of most periodical writing on this subject before 1890. Consider, for example, ‘Article IV’ in the October 1881 issue of the Quarterly Review – an overtly partisan interpretation of Catalogue Général Officiel of the Paris Exposition Internationale d’Electricité of August 1881, which attacked the conclusion that house-to-house electricity supply was economically unviable, arrived at by the Parliamentary Blue Book Lighting by Electricity of August 1879. Alluding to the scepticism with which contrary claims had been treated, the article claimed that the ‘dream of the visionary and enthusiast has been realized’; what had been deemed impossible two years earlier could be seen ‘in daily action’ at the exhibition in Paris.41 Citing evidence on machines listed in the catalogue, and the writer’s own visits and interviews at the Paris Exposition, technical arguments were offered to show that the ideal dynamo must be robustly designed to run at high speeds. By showing readers exactly how electrical machinery could be so efficiently constructed as to render the enterprise profitable, the wealthiest of readers were thus offered inducements to be treated as potential shareholders in the electrical industry.42 When the engineer James Gordon claimed authorship of this piece at the Society of Arts in 1883 (and subsequently in its journal), he effectively claimed priority for what was, by then, his characteristic technique of designing dynamos for his employer, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company.43 Nevertheless, when Gordon published on ‘The latest electrical discovery’ in the Nineteenth Century, two months after Albemarle’s piece for the same periodical in January 1892, his approach to writing about the subject had changed markedly. Gone were the detailed technical specifications and performance data that were meant to impress readers of the Quarterly with the combined rhetorical resources of the advanced science textbook and engineering company prospectus. Also vanished was the presumption that dreamers and visionaries stood, of necessity, at odds with conventional mainstream wisdom. Gordon presented Nikola Tesla’s recent lecture on fluorescent lighting at the Royal Institution (on 3 February 1892) as a dazzling extension of William Crookes’s theatrical use of cathode ray tubes to produce ‘radiant matter’. In exploring the use of very high frequency currents, this experimenter entered ‘a region of mystery and hope’; the generation of artificial light without the need for wire connections presented

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an astonishing array of new possibilities. If the application of Tesla’s results was ever to fulfil the ‘bold dreams of scientific imagination’, then social and political change on a scale at least as significant as that already associated with the railway and telegraph systems would occur, Gordon argued in the Nineteenth Century: Most manual labour will become unnecessary, as unlimited power will be available at every man’s hand. Engineering works will be carried out on a far greater scale than has yet been even contemplated, and doubtless a corresponding era of material prosperity will set in.44

Why had Gordon adopted this rather different utopian mode of writing on electricity, treating it at as the fulfilment of progressivist ‘dreams’? The explanation cannot be found in simple biography, but lies rather in understanding the widespread adoption of futurist writing during the preceding two years.

Inventing Early Futures for The Electric Light [… T]here are certain useful forms which electricity can take, such as light, heat, and development of motive power; and when once we have got electricity laid on to our houses, we shall find these, and perhaps a great many more uses for it. We can hardly imagine the changes it will introduce into our daily life: one thing is that it will save us all a great deal of time. We shall have no trouble in the lighting by electricity as we have with gas; we shall have always only to turn a cock to have it on or off ; it will be always ready at any moment if we have a proper system of distribution and storage, and so I can imagine that when once it is in the hands of the public they will make good use of it, and find many other applications for it which have not yet been found. It is really only a matter of time how long or how soon this extraordinary change will come about. St George Lane-Fox, ‘On the Future of Electric Lighting’, Royal Service Institution, 1882.45

A great deal has been written about the developing role and rising status of scientific ‘experts’ in popular culture up to the early-twentieth centuries. A common view is that such individuals ascended to a culturally hegemonic position even before the Great War had demonstrated their economic and strategic utility to the military-industrial state. Peter Broks, for example, has suggested that their ‘privileged status’ by the early-twentieth century afforded them a certain ‘paternalism’, which borrowed from the earlier, established model of the Victorian factory-owner. This view is that of a highly asymmetrical and sharply separated relationship: the public was left to trust that scientists did indeed possess ‘the heroic qualities of their magazine stereotypes’.46 I suggest that there is scope for doubting whether this generalization extends to the electrical experts, whose self-serving pronouncements the public did not so obviously choose to trust. So, whereas Steve Shapin has proposed that Victorian ‘experts’ conformed, or at

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least were thought to conform, to the norms of being disinterested and detached in interpreting the arcana of science to a presumptively subservient public,47 we might instead consider them as cultural entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize in charismatic – yet fallible – ways on consumer concerns about electricity. Historians of the public reception of electricity have sometimes been tempted to take at face value electrical writers’ wishes to be authoritative ‘experts’. This has led to some unidirectional accounts of knowledge diffusion, assuming that these experts were generally writing to fill gaps or correct errors in popular knowledge of the subject.48 Yet, from Edison’s testimony to the readers of the North American Review on the ‘Success of the Electric Light’ in 1880, we can see that not even the technical specialist was so quick to presume omniscience. The embattled ‘wizard of Menlo Park’ was criticized by rivals and public alike for failing to fulfil his promise that he could ‘divide’ the dazzling brightness of Davy’s electric arc into units of illumination suitably modulated for the domestic environment. Still without a publicly demonstrable filament lamp in late 1880, Edison acknowledged that the ‘weight of scientific opinion’ declared his system ‘a failure, an impracticability, and based on fallacies’. His promotional North American Review piece on the ‘success’ [sic] of the electric light aimed to gloss over this two-year delay and to win over both technical and non-specialist audiences to his (self-serving) optimism that the new light would soon be available, as had been promised. To reclaim the ground of trustworthy expert in the face of scepticism from both the public and fellow electrical inventors, Edison did not simply appeal to either his most obvious technical expertise or merely to the alleged dangers and inconveniences of gas lighting. Rather, he adopted two kinds of diachronic rhetoric to quell opposition to electric lighting. Firstly, he used historical extrapolation on the carefully chosen examples of ocean steam navigation, submarine telegraphy and duplex telegraphy – all three of which had been dismissed by erroneous sceptics as ‘impossibilities down to the day when they were demonstrated to be facts’, despite being major technological innovations. By implication, such ‘scientific men’, who had gainsaid unproven new inventions, were equally likely to be in error about the future prospects of Edison’s own filament lamp49 – a generalization that informed readers would have found easy to contest. Nevertheless, responding to the direct question that the public that had repeatedly put to him: ‘When will a public demonstration of the working of this system be made?’, Edison extrapolated from previous speedy technological successes with the phonograph and duplex telegraphy that ‘such a demonstration will in all probability be made at Menlo Park within two months’.50 Indeed, Edison’s team finally mounted dazzling displays of electrical filament lamps in late December 1880, culminating in a public spectacle on New Year’s Eve; carefully staged to hush the doubters and unhappy investors.51 Edison’s

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competitors in the UK found themselves under similar public pressure to deal with questions about the likely success of their plans for electric light, as well as its relative safety in comparison to gas. They learned from Edison’s example that popular forums were effective places to address these questions and also that narratives suggesting solutions lay in the future served as an important diversion from present-day failures. One such was St George Lane-Fox, a member of the aristocratic Pitt-Rivers clan.52 From 1878–83, Lane-Fox appeared to Edison to be the main British threat to his and Joseph Swan’s attempt to patent and operate a filament lamp on a commercial scale. Indeed, Lane-Fox did his utmost in that period to publicize his electric lighting and heating technologies to a range of UK audiences. On 17 May 1882, Lane-Fox lectured on the prospects of the electric light to the Royal United Services Institution in London, something that attracted the attention of The Times.53 At this lecture, Lane-Fox reported ‘one or two pertinent questions that the public are ever asking’, with respect to his British patent for electric light: They say, first of all, “Shall we ever have the light in our houses?” Next they say, “Shall we have to produce the electric current ourselves?” and thirdly, they ask, “Will it be cheaper, or even as cheap as, gas?”54

Adopting Edison’s quasi-prophetic mode, Lane-Fox presented his answers to those three questions as an account of ‘The Future of Electric Lighting’, a title he used also for copies subsequently circulated to private individuals. With more rhetorical humility than his US counterpart, Lane-Fox claimed not to be able to ‘withdraw the veil entirely’ from the future created by recent progress. The subject was ‘too vast and complicated’ for him, so his audience were, somewhat tellingly, invited to use their ‘imagination’ to fill out his picture. Yet Lane-Fox informed his audiences, with remarkable self-assurance, that from present knowledge all could be answered ‘in favour of electricity’. He had ‘not the slightest doubt’ in his mind that homes would soon be electrically lit by a public supply, probably at one-twelfth the cost of gas – a much more optimistic forecast than other contemporaries. Lane-Fox also envisaged much scope for kitchen applications. Following the example of the kitchen staff onboard Verne’s fictional Nautilus, Lane-Fox even heated water in an electrical boiling pot – thereby showing that the future was not merely one of electric lighting, but, potentially, one of many electrical kitchen appliances too. Shifting strategically between confident certainties and beguiling mysteries, Lane-Fox told his audience that they could ‘hardly imagine’ the changes that electricity would reap, and that it was only a matter of time before an exciting electrical future came to pass. In responding to Lane-Fox’s paper the meeting chair, William Spottiswoode, President of the Royal Society and Chairman of the English Edison Company,

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sympathetically suggested that, unlike so many treacherous areas of forecasting, it was safer to prophesy what electricity ‘can do’ than what it could not.55 Sadly for Lane-Fox, however, his optimism about the success of his own venture was not borne out. The future of his electrical enterprise was short-lived; acknowledging the practical superiority of Edison’s rival system, he soon withdrew in gentlemanly defeat and took up spiritualism instead for the remainder of the 1880s.56 In the subsequent decade, speculation about the many possibilities of an electrical future became an important feature of ‘popular’ discussions of electricity. As I have shown elsewhere, both the industry for electrical supply and ‘popular science’ publishing developed a futuristic rhetoric symbiotically linked with a fantasy literature on electric utopias.57 In 1883, the Scottish-American polymath scientist John Macnie published a pseudonymous electrical utopia of the ninetysixth century, entitled The Diothas: or, A Far Look Ahead,58 in which electricity was the mobilizing force throughout industry, business and the home – including electrical lighting and labour-saving gadgets. Soon afterwards Macnie’s main premise was undermined by the financial collapse of schemes by Edison et al. as too few businesses and householders took up electric lighting for their heavily mooted predictions of the future to become self-fulfilling.59 Borrowing from Jules Verne stories, fantasy speculation about the many possibilities of an electrical future gradually became an important feature of popular writing by electrical entrepreneurs, journalists and novelists. In 1883, Macnie had prudently written under the pseudonym ‘Ismar Thiusen’, as speculative fiction was not (yet) a respectable area for a professional scientist. Given the very limited and slow success rate of contemporary electric light projects, Macnie conceived the prospect of a fully-electrified society to lie in the remote future; nearly 7,500 years hence. Then, electricity powered a democratic world civilization in which homes were fitted for lighting and music on tap, with so much automated machinery that servants had become superfluous. Moreover, so many labour-saving devices were employed in an electrically-powered industry, that men and women worked only a three-hour day, using their leisure to enjoy intercontinental electric transportation and global telecommunication; ideas that Macnie later angrily accused Edward Bellamy of plagiarizing from him.60 The Diothas was at least as much a conventional romance as it was an innovative foray into envisioning the longer-term beneficial transformations to be wrought by electricity, wrapped up in a melodrama of his involvement with the Diotha family. As in so many early time travel stories before H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, the nineteenth-century hero of The Diothas falls into a mesmerically induced sleep to carry him into the future; perfectly preserved, he wakes up in the ninetysixth century to find himself addressed as ‘Ismar Thiusen’. In the ensuing sentimental narrative, his Victorian clumsiness in handling an advanced

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electric boat leads to the tragic death of his fiancée Reva Diotha and his own return to 1883. In the real world, and the doldrum years of the electrical industry, circa1884–8, futurological fiction about electricity was no more successful or popular than the electrical endeavours that inspired Macnie. The situation changed considerably in 1888, however, when Bellamy published Looking Backward.61 A socio-political critique that contained little of Macnie’s pulp romance of the remote future, Looking Backward cited technologies that bore striking similarities to those cited in The Diothas. Bellamy’s Bostonian protagonist, Julian West, awakes from a mesmeric sleep of 113 years to find men and women working as equals in a peaceful Christian civilization, facilitated by nationalized utilities of transport and communication. Poverty, exploitation and war have been abolished and all citizens live in fully-electrified homes. Looking back to 1887, Bellamy portrayed the America of his own day as an unjust nightmare, waiting for a benevolent revolution to occur. Bellamy did not specify whether the social transformation in his story would be facilitated by electrification or vice versa – implicitly, perhaps, the two develop in symbiosis. Either way, for Bellamy, the prospect of a fully-electrified world lay only a little over a century away – arriving very much sooner than Macnie had predicted. Writing in 1888, for a society already starting to see the electrification process in action, Bellamy attracted readers through a future of greater proximity and plausibility. Selling in hundreds of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, Looking Backward inspired imitations about technologically enhanced societies of the future that have lent it a prominent place in the history of science fiction. The following year, Macnie opportunistically republished The Diothas as Looking Forward, strongly hinting in his still anonymous preface that Bellamy had plagiarized his work, while simultaneously also rejecting the socialism of Looking Backward. But it was not merely Macnie who opportunistically responded to the enormous readership Looking Backward had attracted. In the 1890s, dozens of speculations about the future electrical home and society flowed from the pens of engineers, journalists and literary writers. Their efforts to construct attractive future worlds drew upon electrical technologies that were by then starting to flourish – owing to newly favourable and technical conditions – generating further interest in those very products of electrical development.

William Stead’s Critical Advocacy of Bellamyan Electrical Futurism What the revival of learning was to the Renaissance, what the discovery of the new world was to the Elizabethans, what the steam-engine was to the century of the Revolution, the application of electricity is to the New Generation. We are standing at the day-dawn of the Electric Age… There is an electric thrill in the air which is affecting

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Following the broadly positive American response to the publication of Bellamy’s Looking Backward in 1888, the first sustained production of futurist writing on electricity developed in the USA. These writers aimed to attract a readership for their work by extrapolating a plausible Bellamyan utopian future from contemporary novelties in electrical science and technology. As William Stead was founding an American version of the Review of Reviews at the same time as the British edition in late 1889, he had unique access to transatlantic journalism. Stead in turn reproduced, in summary form, some of these writings in early issues of the Review of Reviews, thus bringing into one periodical otherwise disparate and dispersed electricity-centred responses to Looking Backward. To understand why he did this we should note both Stead’s political sympathy for Bellamy’s representation of the year 2000 as a Christian world of social justice, facilitated by nationalized technologies of communication and transport and Stead’s shrewd recognition of the great popularity of Looking Backward in the United Kingdom. Stead’s anthologizing of futurist writing thus showed the tens of thousands who were to read the Review of Reviews how present-day developments in electrical technology could plausibly realize Bellamy’s egalitarian vision of life a little more than a century in the future. At the same time, Stead was by no means an uncritical cut-and-paste purveyor of futurist writings. His editorial interventions frequently passed harsh judgment on self-indulgent or ill-composed journalism, especially gadget-based fantasies that failed to conform to his sober Congregationalist ethic.63 In its very first issue of January 1890, the British Review of Reviews abstracted Park Benjamin’s ‘The miracles of electricity’ from the American engineering journal Forum. Stead’s criticism of its implausibility and literary merits was characteristic of his moralism. Benjamin blithely forecast the arrival of electric light without heat; instant photography across continents; electric trains travelling at three-hundred miles an hour; the telegraphing of tastes and smells for remote medical diagnosis; telegraphic and telephonic transmissions without wires and the use of electrical heating for welding, cookery and institutional warmth. Noting the sybaritic possibility of ‘music on tap’ in every dwelling, the sceptical Review of Reviews noted with astonishment Benjamin’s intimation that wallpaper might soon be electrically illuminated. As if to counter these excesses, the article on electrical miracles was immediately followed by an abstract of ‘Electricity in the household’ that originally had been published by A. E. Kennelly, Thomas Edison’s senior electrician, in Scribner’s Magazine for 1889. This ‘interesting’ and generally demure paper offered the more immediate utilitarian

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prospect of using electricity in a burglar alarm service; to regulate domestic temperature; keep clocks on time; power carpet-sweepers; operate a table train to serve meals and heat large quantities of coffee.64 Although neither Benjamin nor Kennelly explicitly mentioned Bellamy, Stead’s abstracting and republication of their writings was clearly part of his quasi-Bellamyan agenda as editor-proprietor. A few pages later in the same issue we find an abstract of an ‘admirable’ piece from the Contemporary Review on ‘Two New Utopias’. This article offered readers a history of philosophical utopianism from Plato to Bellamy, commented on Peruvian state socialism and featured a review of ‘Mon utopie’ by an eminent French professor of philosophy. Significantly, Stead placed immediately after this article some highlights from an interview with the author of Looking Backward drawn from the American Our Day. Stead’s editing reveals a striking commonality between his wholesome interests and Edward Bellamy’s. Much is made of how Bellamy’s novel promoted marital equity, state ownership of principal technologies (especially those of transportation and telegraphic communication) and the religious praxis of working collectively towards a peacefully-built utopia. Of the widespread organization of activist clubs formed to enact his goals, Bellamy is reported as saying: ‘Christians form the best class in society, but they have lacked a practical working plan, and our movement supplies that lack.’65 By his detailed and sympathetic reporting of Bellamy’s plan, Stead effectively endorsed an active form of devout technological egalitarianism, enabling readers of the Review of Reviews to see how a utopia could be created in their lifetime. Wherever possible, Stead’s editing of electrical futurist writing highlighted the distinctly theological concomitants of electrical innovation. An adulatory piece from Harper’s Magazine, ‘The Genius of this Electric Age’, in the February 1890 issue of Review of Reviews, closed with Thomas Edison’s reply to questions about an Intelligent Creator: ‘The existence of such a God, can to my mind, almost be proved from chemistry’.66 Nevertheless, Stead’s ecumenical editorial policy could also accommodate less reverent visions of an electrical world to come. That same issue republished, from the North American Review, an article on ‘The Future and What Hides in it – a scientific prophesy by Professor Thurston’. This broadranging narrative examined the wider possibilities of human development and technologically-induced harmony, focusing on the probable impact of electrical agency in global transmission of power, voices and pictures: Nothing is more probable than that in the next few years the triumphs of electricity will be extended from the earth to the air, and a flying machine will be as common in the twentieth century as an electric tramcar is to-day. It is only a question of the number of years that must pass before we are able to emulate the angels, if not in their virtues, at least in the matter of their locomotion.67

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Indeed, with an eye to maintaining the circulation figures needed for profitability, Stead was tactical in choosing to republish the racier and more imaginative sources – especially given the prosaically unliterary qualities of Looking Backward. As Stead noted in an editorial piece from March 1890: The great success which has attended Mr. Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward,’ a prophetico-realist romance of an American idealist is a welcome sign of the times. ‘Looking Backward’ as a story is as dull as ditchwater. It is only because it is a kind of apocalyptic vision, if not of the new heaven, then of the new earth, for which the hearts of men and women are longing all over the world, that 200,000 copies have been sold in the America, and the sale in this country in the last few months has mounted up to 100,000. The success of “Looking Backward” has naturally stimulated the tendency of a certain class of theorists to resort to the historico-prophetic form of romance as a popular vehicle for infusing these ideas into the public mind […].

Not only did Stead seek out livelier writing than Bellamy’s to capture popular literary taste, he also pinpointed narratives that placed the most plausible means for bringing his utopia into existence at centre stage. Electricity, Stead contended, was the ‘most puissant of all the servants of man’, no less than the ‘destined agent’ that would banish war from the world by making next-door neighbours of nations in all continents.68 Such was the editorial flourish with which he introduced his condensed version of Looking Forward as a ‘romance of the electrical age’.69 Stead explained that this book was among the best of such contemporary romances since it offered an ingenious speculation upon the probable political and social results which were to be expected from harnessing the ‘universal force’ of electricity. Stead noted approvingly the author’s claim that this forecast was drawn from present conditions and tendencies framed within the bounds of ‘sober reason’, in contrast to the wild fancifulness of some futurist writing surveyed in previous months.70 Tellingly, though, Stead took no notice of the anti-socialist preface that ‘Ismar Thiusen’ included in the 1889 edition of his work.71 Politics aside, the commonality of themes between Looking Forward and Looking Backward explains why Stead found the former a useful vehicle for re-articulating Bellamy’s programme. A mesmerically induced sleep takes the narrator of Looking Forward to an egalitarian and cooperative ninety-sixth century world, characterized (not unlike Bellamy’s) by a three-hour working day for all men and women. The ubiquitous electric light and the phonograph sustain a high quality of domestic life and an automated food service obviates the need for servants but not the obligation for a prayer of thanks before each meal. The modernity of global life is further characterized by the abolition of the papacy and the free availability of intercontinental electric transportation and telecommunication. Stead spares his readers the central love-story (advising them to

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purchase the complete novel) but not the narrator’s tragic ineptitude in handling a ninety-sixth-century battery-powered boat.72 This genre of cautious technological extrapolation, framed in an egalitarian utopia and narrated as populist romance was calculated, as Stead noted, to reinvigorate the imaginations of readers in order to see how electricity could ‘reenergize’ the world to reform. Accordingly both he and his staff of writers on the Review of Reviews were critical of any subsequent popular writing on electrical futurism which failed to meet these demanding moral standards. In the final section, I consider their critical response to electrical writing in a highbrow, liberal monthly, entire issues of which were regularly abstracted in a section entitled ‘The Reviews Reviewed’.

Electrical Futurism Critiqued: William Crookes, Stead and the Spectator The scientific authorities of today have fallen into a rather provoking and tantalising habit of taking the public into their confidence, making known to it discoveries that are as yet only half known to themselves, and building upon them the basis of those discoveries a bewildering fabric of conjectural possibilities […]. ‘Science and conjecture’, the Spectator, 1891.73

Symptomatic of the literary response to Bellamy’s millennial bestseller, there was extensive discussion in a range of periodicals concerning the future possibilities and possible futures engendered by science in general but electricity in particular; such speculation was often aided and abetted by technical experts, who welcomed such congenial debates. Between spring 1890 and 1892 the ‘future’ featured as a central motif in the titles of eight Fortnightly Review pieces on subjects as varied as warfare, religion, marriage, American literature, geography, cosmology and art.74 Two of the three articles on electricity published by the Fortnightly in this period borrowed from the futurist genre popularized by Stead in the widely-read Review of Reviews. A third, ‘Human Electricity’, by Professor John McKendrick of Glasgow University showed, however, the resilience of the didactic mode of writing among the academic fraternity,75 elements of which were also apparent in William Crookes’s February 1892 article ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’. Nevertheless, substantial portions of Crookes’s writing epitomize the tendency of expert electrical writers to borrow from the imaginative literature of the future – a trend illustrated earlier by J. E. H. Gordon’s article, ‘The Latest Electrical Discovery’, published in the Nineteenth Century one month before that of Crooke. ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’ by Alice (Mrs J. E. H.) Gordon appeared in the February 1891 issue of the Fortnightly. As I discuss in Chapter 6,

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this article was written concurrently with her book on the same subject.76 Both works presented the prospect of men and women in the wealthier middle classes enjoying the results of electric light, tastefully installed to modernize their home comforts. In commenting on Mrs Gordon’s article in the Fortnightly, the Review of Reviews presented it as contributing to the discourse of electrical prophesy, summarizing her principal claim: ‘In the drawing-room the light of the future will be a reflected light.’ Nevertheless, like other periodical critics, scepticism was expressed about her wanton use of the ‘scientific imagination’ to propose the placing of electrical cigar-lighters near everyone’s front door, and the indulgent installation of electric lamps in the obscurity of cupboards, cellars and housemaids’ closets. At best her suggestions were ‘interesting’ but were ultimately judged by the moralistic narrator of the Review of Reviews to constitute a project of gratuitous luxury.77 William Crookes’s ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’ was a distinct departure in style from his previous quasi-didactic expositions. In his Presidential address to the Institution of Electrical Engineers a year earlier, he had presented ‘pure research’ as the all-important seed to be scattered in the hope of attaining beneficial results in the future.78 In a passing remark at the IEE dinner on 19 November 1891, Crookes took Nikola Tesla’s thoughts on the possible future use of the ether for wireless lighting as the cue for indulging in futurist speculation. Crookes suggested that 10,000 foot-tons of energy were locked up in each cubic foot of universal ether, and the exploitation of this source would be the province of the ‘electrician of the future’.79 The Spectator, characteristically sceptical of ‘fairy-tales’ from ambitious scientists, dwelt at length on the apparent similarities between Crookes’s outlandish claim and the dubious pronouncements of contemporary charlatans who inspired similarly regrettable credulity among the ‘unscientific host’.80 In an editorial comment, the Tory magazine immediately responded that Crookes had gone too far, complaining that the ‘scientific authorities’ of the day had fallen into the rather provocative habit of taking the public into their confidence, only to announce a ‘bewildering’ fabric of conjectural possibilities from uncompleted discoveries: What, for instance, may we believe from Prof. Crookes’ speech before the Institution of Electrical Engineers on Friday last. Here is an undoubted scientific authority; and yet - and yet, it is really difficult to know whether we should understand him literally, and take all his statements as the latest scientific truths […].81

The brain of the ‘unscientific man’ reeled before claims that the ordinary room contained thousands of foot-tons of energy per cubic foot; he could only wait until the day arrives to ‘summon up sufficient energy to believe it’. Archly, the Spectator invited Crookes to consider the case of the young Mrs Abbott who – the very day after his lecture – had entranced audiences at the Alhambra Theatre with

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uncanny displays of physical strength. As no strongmen had been able to wrest a billiard cue from her hand all evening, the Spectator threw down the gauntlet to Crookes, well known for his interest in the opportunities of spiritualism: [… I]s it not the plain duty of Professor Crookes to discover whether or not that lady has been poaching on the preserves of electricity, and has filched the aethereal energy which he had reserved for the future electrician? In the mean time, the mind of the sober and unscientific person swings uncomfortably between credulity and incredulity, and finds no rest in either.

In the view of the Spectator, Crookes’ expertise was not licensed to offer such conjectural claims to the public, nor should he expect the public to accept them merely on his word. Most revealingly, here is figured the expertise of a wryly styled ‘sober and unscientific person’. It was evidently within the prerogative of such members of the laity to question the judgement of ‘scientific authority’; indeed the putatively ‘unscientific’ mind was actually quite ‘scientific’ enough to detect flagrant implausibility in the utterances of supposed authorities. Crookes was thus somewhat more circumspect when, in February 1892, he published a refined and reworked version of his view in the Fortnightly Review, entitled cautiously, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’. For this he cast expert electrical researchers as heroes of the coming generation. Undeterred by the resiliently mysterious nature of electricity, their task was to imagine and instantiate practical possibilities for the future utilitarian application of electricity. Alluding, perhaps, to one of the ‘miracles’ of electricity forecast by Park Benjamin two years earlier, Crookes articulated, in considerable detail, the possible operation of a system of telegraphy which dispensed with the expensive and inconvenient encumbrance of wires. Establishing his authority for Fortnightly Review readers by using the didactic mode of exegesis for several paragraphs, Crookes then distanced this account from the more fantastical electrical journalism of the non-expert, by emphasizing the informed modesty of his extrapolation: This is no dream of a visionary philosopher. All the requisites needed to bring it within the grasp of daily life are well within the possibilities of discovery, and are so reasonable and so clearly in the path of researches which are now being actively prosecuted in every capital of Europe that we may any day expect to hear that they have emerged from the realms of speculation into those of sober fact.

Such communication, Crookes emphasized, was already possible within a distance of a few-hundred yards and he himself could claim credibility for having participated in similar experiments several years earlier.82 Indeed, it was not just long-distance communication that could take place through the ether in an electrified future. Like Gordon, writing for the Nineteenth Century, Crookes quoted intensively from Tesla’s recent, dazzling theatrical display which illustrated how

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vacuum tubes could be made incandescent without recourse to ungainly connecting wires. These tubes, Crookes noted, would be the ‘ideal way’ of lighting a room; such was the intrinsic beauty of the coloured light that even Mrs Gordon’s elaborate aesthetic of lampshades might prove useless. Drawing inspiration from the imminent prospects of success in these two familiar technological enterprises, Crookes then undertook a considerable departure from his own area of expertise. In the latter part of his article, he adopted the imaginative rather than didactic mode, speculating on the future application of electricity to public services: the enhancement of agricultural productivity, the treatment of sewage, the destruction of disease, the elimination of London fogs, and the control of rainfall. These might yet be attempted, he suggested, by exploiting the electrical mechanism responsible for their particular operations. Recognizing that such optimistic speculations might arouse derision, Crookes reflected that he would ‘perhaps, be styled a dreamer, or something worse, if I remotely hint at still further amending the ways of Nature’. To curtail such thoughts, he reminded readers of their non-expert status by suggesting that such matters could safely be left to the devices and ‘inspirations’ of electrical engineers. ‘Sufficient for this generation are the wonders thereof !’ exclaimed Crookes in closing.83 Some fellow electricians took up this mode of speaking, albeit in mock irony. Crookes’ successor as President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, William Ayrton, borrowed wryly from Crookes’ idiom in early February 1892 at the ten year anniversary dinner of the 1882 Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition. Alluding to the extraordinary phenomenon of the Tesla vacuum tube, which fluoresced when held (wirelessly) in an alternating electromagnetic field, Ayrton explained how: It was impossible to imagine what progress would be made in electricity in another ten years […] It might be that in ten years street lamps would be no longer necessary, as vacuum tubes would be used for walking sticks (laughter). The smoke plague and fog would no longer trouble us, for there would be no coal fires when we could bask in the rays of the electric field, repose in the genial warmth of an equipotential surface, and put our feet on a fender composed of horizontal lines of force (loud laughter). One suggestion he would make - that the electric light might be introduced into the [gas-lit] room for the warmth they had borne during the dinner had been surpassed only by the warmth of their reception by the Directors of the Crystal Place (laughter).84

In the ‘Reviews Reviewed’ section of the Review of Reviews in February 1892, Stead was less kindly about Crookes’s piece, somewhat archly characterizing it as the ‘most interesting’ in that month’s issue of the Fortnightly. Indeed, the article was ‘sufficient to take away one’s breath’ for its indulgent futurism, beyond what might have been warranted by contemporary accomplishments:

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The writer maintains that there is no reason to doubt that, in a short time, we shall be able to telegraph without wires in any direction. As we have to telegraph without wires, so we shall have electric light without connecting the lamp to any current. Professor Crookes gives a clear run to his fancy, and thinks that we may, by electrical action, rout the parasitical insects and fungi which in some seasons rob us of no less than the tenth of our crops. At present there is 796,800 horse-power of the sun’s rays wasted on our land. If it could be yoked by electricity, what could not be done? Electricians, he thinks, should aim at nothing less than the control of the weather, and always make it wet at night time and sunshiny all the day; and when it was to rain, rain a downpour never a drizzle. Incidentally he would abolish London fogs and sterilise all germs in the water supply.85

This sardonic response to Crookes shows us clearly that, despite being a convenient part of the rhetorical weaponry employed by the youthful electrical industry to win the confidence of potential consumers and investors, the legitimacy of electrical futurism could be contested in a variety of ways.86 For Stead, Crookes’s undisciplined conjectures were symptomatic of the unenlightened worldly hubris of electricians. Stead’s critique, in such a high-circulation monthly as the Review of Reviews, served to undermine Crookes’s status as an electrical expert of the highest rank. The problematic position of futurist writing by experts was recognized elsewhere in the periodical world by an electrical journal that had eulogized Crookes as President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in the previous year. In commenting on Crookes’s piece, the Electrician of 5 February 1892 referred its readers back to its discussion of the Spectator’s comments the previous November on the humbug of scientific conjecture: If the science, so far as it goes, is correct, and the conjectures which go beyond are fairly logical, such dissertations have a JULES VERNE-like romance, and harmlessly amuse the public with ideas of these “half-baked” notions with which some thinkers are busying themselves.87

The technical-professional journal Electrician similarly judged Crookes’s ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’ to be a contribution to this kind of fanciful literature noting, indeed, that its speculative nature had allowed Crookes to drift into ‘slips’ which would be spotted by the ‘initiated’. Even whilst sharing Crooke’s interest in promoting an electricity-dominated future, the Electrician warned its readers of the perils of undisciplined forecasting. The authority of electricians was not only made vulnerable by engaging in utopian futurism outside the conventional prerogatives of technical wisdom, but could be made potentially risible when unconstrained by the engineers’ critical eye for practical knowledge of what electricity could and could not do. However, as we shall see in the final section, although the technical press might fulminate that technical prophecy stretched electricians’ authority well beyond conventional limits, such writing become popular in the wider sphere.

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The consequence of the popularity of such writing with the general public was a rendering of such journalistic critique somewhat otiose.

Electrical Futures That Never Were “Electricity,” said the old gentleman sagely, “is destined to become the motive power of the world. The future advance of civilization will be along electrical lines. Our boy may become a great inventor and astonish the world with his wonderful creations.” “And in the meantime,” said the mother, despairingly, “we shall all be electrocuted, or the house burned down by crossed wires, or we shall be blown into eternity by an explosion of chemicals!” L. Frank Baum, The Master Key: an electrical fairy tale, 1901.88

A fascination with an electrical future, nurtured by the Bellamy phenomenon, seems to have taken both British and American culture by storm in the 1890s. In so doing, the interest distracted attention – intentionally or otherwise – away from awkward questions about the troubled past of electricity, as well as its contested present. Following the precedent of Lane Fox and Edison ten years earlier, narratives outlining a safe, clean, and prosperous future were deployed regularly by electricians to counter important anxieties about the threatened disorder which electricity might bring to the domestic sphere. This is evident in the account of ‘Electricity in the Household’ written in 1889 by Edison’s assistant, A. E. Kennelly, precisely at the time when the US debate about the hazards of both accidental and judicial electrocution was at its height. The fantasy presented by Kennelly, of a future rendered comfortable and secure by the sole agency of judiciously installed electricity, was one which Stead uncritically communicated to both UK and US readers of the Review of Reviews in January 1890 (see above). Ever since Stead’s endeavours in the 1890s, experts in science and technology have enjoyed the benefits of the precedents he created. Experts have profited from being enabled to speculate about the future implications of their work, without the fear that they would be seen as breaching the boundaries of professional decorum. Indeed, the boundaries between prophesy and the newly emerging genre of ‘scientific romance’ were barely detectable, and expertise in appearing to be able to forecast the future easily, was easily elided into expertise for analysing the specific technical details. Conveniently, the non-occurrence of the posited futures was not necessarily a problem for either mode of expertise, since the projected utopias were often forecast either without a specific timeline or so far in the future that readers could not demand instant results.89 Although this allowed a literary proliferation of many electrical futures, their popularisation was not an entirely straightforward matter, with recurrent ambiguities over two matters: who or what was responsible for bringing these futures into

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being? Could electricity alone be trusted to exert its own moral force to bring about a good future? This was the hint in the deterministic rhetoric adopted by electric popularizer-entrepreneurs. Or was it instead the contingent agency and expertise of particular men and women that would make the crucial difference in launching society on a course towards electrical utopia? As we shall see in the next two chapters, the human agency involved was crucial, albeit often played down by male contemporaries who implicitly declined to acknowledge the key role of women in promoting electricity. Moreover, we can ask, were the revolutionary transformations of electricity destined to bring liberty for both men and women equally freed from the burdens of labour? Or would it bring benefits to some only at the expense of others? The two examples discussed below illustrate the tensions within some of the quasi-prophetic master narratives of the electrical future. To see an indication of these ambiguities in post-Bellamy phenomenon discourse on the electrically wrought future, consider the changing themata of Lord Salisbury’s public oratory. As seen in preceding chapters, Salisbury was the most politically eminent of the ‘amateur electricians’ noted by William Preece to have helped brought electricity to the home. In early November 1889, Salisbury was toasted by the UK’s electrical community at an IEE dinner for overseeing the congenial 1888 electrical lighting legislation, which had greatly improved the industry’s prospects. At that 1889 dinner, the Conservative Prime Minister, responding to the toast raised to him, commented cautiously on his variant of a favourite Tory fantasy: the restitution and maintenance of a lost world order. He opined that the ‘force’ of electricity might enable a return to the integrity of the working class household disrupted by the rise of the morally corrupting factory system: I do not despair of the result that this distribution of force may scatter those aggregations of humanity, which, I think, it is not one of the highest merits of the steam engine to have produced (hear, hear). If it ever shall happen that in the house of the artisan you can turn on power as now you can turn on gas … you will then see men and women able to pursue in their own houses many industries which now require the aggregation of the factory. You may, above all, see women and children pursue those industries without that disruption of the family which is one of the most unhappy results of the present requirements of industries.90

Thus, for Salisbury in 1889, it was possible – but by no means inevitable – that electricity could enable a return to the wholesome past; restoring the working class family to its rightful place as the bedrock of the ‘moral hopes of our race’. By 1893, briefly out of office in Opposition, Salisbury’s rhetoric had changed in emphasis to signal a greater certainty in the transformative power of electricity. This shift is apparent in his speech at the opening in Liverpool of England’s first-ever overhead electrical railway. Reporting effulgently of his reputation as

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an ‘enthusiastic student of electricity’, the Liverpool Mercury described Salisbury as being much heightened in confidence with regards to the inevitability of wide ranging transformations enacted by the anthropomorphized power of electricity: It is hardly possible to think that an element with such a vast distributive capacity in its character [as electricity] will not exercise a great influence over the condition of human affairs and the relation of human beings to each other… This power of electricity seems designed to do enormous things. We have not yet explored all its capacities, we hardly can explain its most elementary phenomenon, its very nature is a subject of dispute to scientific men, but we feel that whatever the phase of formula or scientific theory that is to express its character, there lies in it a force by which every human relation will be powerfully affected.91

Yet for all this apparent deterministic acquiescence in the revolutions doubtless to be wrought by electricity, some observed a troubling element of humbug in Salisbury’s prophetic visions: the responsibility for implementing this transformation lay with him as Britain’s leading politician, not with an abstract force of nature. Five years later, this point was subject to some rather haughty comments from William Stead in a character sketch of Salisbury for the Review of Reviews. This piece contrasted Salisbury’s unwillingness to extend the full force of electrical experiments undertaken in his Hatfield home even to the capital with the manifest reforming zeal of chief Liberal adversary: It is very odd to notice in what different way the desire for change or the interest in change affects different men... In Mr Gladstone’s case the revolutionary element that is most to his taste is that of Political Reform, promoted by parliamentary and platform agitation. Other men prefer Insurrections. Lord Salisbury prefers Electricity, and who can deny that this revolutionist is the most subtle, the most far-reaching of all? That undoubtedly at least is Lord Salisbury’s own opinion. When he went down to Liverpool some years ago to open the overhead electric railway along the docks, he frankly acknowledged that it was the revolutionary side of electricity which fascinated him most.

Yet, as Stead lamented in 1898, the Thames Embankment, the ‘noblest riverfront in the world’, was not yet lighted with electricity, and the use of electricity as a motor for tramcars was still strictly forbidden. If only Lord Salisbury’s party would ‘consent to be as progressive in London as their chief is in Hatfield’! But that, alas, Stead laconically concluded, seems to be ‘past praying for’.92 The conservative scruples of this Tory political authority was not such as to trouble himself to bring of the great electrical revolution into civic effect.93 Such masculine complacency in proclaiming electrical futures was not necessarily shared by female commentators, and such differences can be found in the scientific romance culture that accompanied the wave of futurism on both sides of the Atlantic. As noted in the epigraph above, Frank Baum dramatized such a

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gendered exchange between the parents of Rob Joslyn, the boy-hero of The Master Key of 1901 – a book described as ‘an electrical fairy tale founded upon the mysteries of electricity and the optimism of its devotees’, which, it was tellingly added, was ‘written for boys but others may read it’. Whereas Mr Joslyn declared that the ‘future advance of civilization will be along electrical lines’, his spouse predicted dolefully that the future was much more likely to consist of electrocution, conflagration from crossed-wires, or explosion from electro-chemicals.94 As shown in the last chapter, and explored again in the next chapter, women were often much less sympathetic to the notion of an electrically-determined future than the more credulous menfolk. And it was to win over such key female audiences that much effort had to be directed towards making fantastical futures seem even plausible. Thus, another unlikely revolutionary who indulged in unfulfilled speculation about the revolutionary status of electricity for women was Thomas Edison. In an interview for the US magazine Good Housekeeping for October 1912, Edison took a very different tack, presenting electricity as the key agent in making ‘The Woman of the Future’ attain her hitherto latent potential. It began with his (somewhat self-serving) prophecy that: The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be a rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman’s world that the large portion of the aggregate of women’s energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields.

Yet, from this point onward, rather than presenting the agency of electricity as mediated by a benign feminized ‘handmaiden’, it was anthropomorphized instead as a male Wizard – a point about the gendered ambiguity of electricity that I explore further in chapter seven. The elfin progeny of Edison, who had happily fashioned himself as ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’, was shown in the central illustration as a bespectacled and bearded male imp, rushing around the house wearing an Edison light bulb as a luminous top hat, whilst undertaking all the work of washing, ironing, laundering and cooking. Thus relieved of her main household drudgery, the woman of the future is presented in a posture of leisurely reading, pressing occasionally on an array of two-dozen buttons, to summon the imp to do any mundane domestic task. Indeed, the caption reads: ‘Woman presses the button, and the Wizard of Electricity does her bidding’. This release of women from manual labour in the home was not merely possible in Edison’s prophesy; given the state of technological development, it was also necessary for women to attain their destiny, for, in terms Edison himself

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acknowledged controversial, he maintained that ‘Electricity’ would not only permit women to exercise ‘their mental force’ but compel them to do so: It will develop women to that point where she can think straight. Direct thought is not at present an attribute of femininity. In this woman is now centuries, ages, even epochs behind man. That it is true is not her fault, but her misfortune, and the misfortune of the race. Man must accept responsibility for it [… N]ow she is emerging into real sex independence, and the resulting outlook is a dazzling one.95

However much such publicity might have helped switch some women’s imagination to the prospects of a new electrically-defined future for them, the benignly fictitious agency of the fairy or wizard of electricity had in, the longer term, little effect in enhancing her socio-political position. As we know from the work of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the introduction of electrical gadgetry to the American home was by no means the advent of liberation; far from it, the female homemaker of the future turned out to be as busy as the Edisonian imp.96 In the British context, it was not difficult to find evidence of post-suffragette women, such as the fictional ‘Miss Magnet’, in the kitchen surrounded with every imaginable household gadget to occupy her daytime hours, strangely un-liberated by the electric imp.97 So much, then, for fantasies of electricity as the revolutionary bringer of equality for women. Perhaps the most revealing point about the fantasy worlds of unsubstantiated futures, inspired by enthusiasm about domestic electrical technology, was that it informed the peculiarly masculine cultures of building radio sets and early science fiction. Until the majority of households had electricity, and while the threat of ultra-economic gas lighting (especially from the Welsbach mantle available in the 1890s) loomed large to scare electricity suppliers, futurist writing was an effective means of inspiring the imaginations of prospective electricity users. Indeed, it became a principal feature of the journal Modern Electrics, which US radio engineer Hugo Gernsback ran from 1908 to promote sales of his company’s self-assembly radio kits. It was in this famous magazine that Gernsback first experimented with ‘scientifiction’ to forecast the gadgetry which would be used by electrically-powered superheroes of the future. Most famously, in his 1911 story, later ‘novel’, Ralph 124C 41+, Thrilling Adventures in the Year 2660, Gernsback is sometimes said to have prophesied the technologies, amongst others, of radar, tape recorders, loudspeakers, solar power and microfilm.98 Gernsback’s futurist writing reputedly inspired many aspiring engineers in the USA to develop just these sorts of technologies in the twentieth century - the very paradigm of self-fulfilling prophecy. Since then, and notwithstanding the occasional protest, the capacity to imagine futures, rendered utopian by widespread adoption of their own innovations,

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has become an integral part of the expertise not just of electrical engineers, but also of all other branches of technology.

Conclusion Electric lighting can no longer be spoken of as the “light of the future,” it is the light of today, and the demand is, at the present moment, greater than the skilled supply. As many of my correspondents have recently been seeking practical details as to the installation, switches, fire risks , glow lighting &c., I am sure they will cordially welcome the delightful little book that Mrs J.E.H. Gordon has just published…. No one can close Mrs Gordon’s fascinating book without being convinced of the beauty, economy, safety and decorative joys which await the happy owners of houses lighted by electricity. Charlotte Robinson, ‘Decorative Electricity’, Queen, Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle, 1891.99

In this chapter, I have charted how the futurist speculation long associated with technological innovation was transformed in the wake of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. From offering a romantic hostage to prophetic fortune it became an integral part of the electrician’s expertise by the last decade of the nineteenth century. Displacing the more conventional didacticism of respectable pronouncements on electricity, prophesies of electrical civilizations were designed to be self-fulfilling; if only enough people believed and acted upon them, they would become true. In focusing on the future, they could distract attention away from the many more immediate troubles of electricity explored in previous chapters. Necessarily, adoption of futurism involved a broadening of expertise, since late Victorian electricians could no more claim any certain knowledge of the unfolding destiny of humankind than any other contemporaries. Thus, there were major criticisms of the outrageous extrapolation from authoritative knowledge of present technology to certainties of its prospects; with William Crookes being the chief target of such critiques in 1890–1. Although never entirely uncontroversial, it became a kind of cliché in the rhetoric of practitioners that electricity would somehow bring about its own destiny, if it were only allowed to do so. The expertise of its human practitioners would thus be rendered invisible, a key point if the transition to an electrical future was to be seen as both natural and inevitable. Thus, we see that the anthropomorphized representation of electricity as a benign autonomous force served the purpose of electrical futurism well. Following the logic of Edison’s associate, A. E. Kennelly, all one had to do was to wait for the readily controlled Ariel to ‘cross the threshold’ of the home and enter into household life to the extent that it became ‘indispensable’. Yet, in the next chapter, we shall find an important counterpoint to such fantasies, showing how

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the development of electric lighting, especially in its decorative forms, was not a product of inevitable destiny, but the hard work of women such as Alice Gordon in overcoming the scepticism and indifference of female householders. It was through her work that electric lighting was the ‘light of the future’ that had already become the light of the present.

6 AESTHETICIZING ELECTRICITY: GENDERED CULTURES OF DOMESTIC ILLUMINATION

BRIGHTNESS The “incandescence” light is white, soft and brilliant, but not necessarily dazzling. BEAUTY An “incandescence” lamp, being in itself a beautiful object, requires no external decoration. Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, The Electric Light Brought Home To Us, 1885.1 The master wishes to get all the light possible, and the mistress to have the light as becoming and pleasant as possible. It is rather difficult to reconcile these two wishes, and after much discussion the master testily exclaims: “My dear, what is the good of going to all this expense if you will tie the light up in bags?” Mrs. J. E. H. [Alice] Gordon, Decorative Electricity, 1891.2

Apart from the unlucky recipients of electric shock documented in Chapter 3 and patients of electrotherapists, the primary encounter with electricity in the late nineteenth century was visual: the electric light. Yet, in more than one sense, early electric lighting caused major headaches for many of those who first encountered it and for reasons quite unlike those commonly attributed to coal gas illumination (Chapter 4). The aesthetic problems of electric lighting touched on by previous historians were not merely transitory inconveniences, they were serious enough to become a real challenge to those seeking to domesticate electricity.3 A related problem was that, for more than a decade after the public debut of Swan and Edison domestic lamps in 1880–1, electric light was so expensive that it could only be construed as a luxury affordable by the uppermiddle classes and aristocracy; only the most optimistic projectors argued that it was a viable economic competitor to gas or candle lighting. In order to be represented as a luxurious commodity for the upper classes to consume, and for the rest of the population to aspire to, the electric light had to be represented within the aesthetic framework of luxury consumption as a (potentially) pleasant, even – 153 –

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indulgent, experience. But for many women encountering the electric light for the first time, this was evidently not their experience. In ways understated by previous historians, the troubled aesthetics of electric light were a distinctly gendered issue. A crude stereotype that I shall present is that men typically relished brightness and directness whilst women generally favoured muted elegance, as illustrated in the epigraphs above. The Brush Company policy appealed to male householders that the electric light so intrinsically beautiful as to render shading superfluous, whereas the ‘mistress’ in Mrs Gordon’s account advocated silk wrapping to render incandescent illumination as ‘becoming’ as possible. Since decisions about domestic management were largely the responsibility of female householders, women will feature prominently in the story below about how gendered conflict over the electric light was resolved in order for it to become part of the conventional domestic order. More specifically, we shall see that the way in which electric light was domesticated was more on women’s terms than historians such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch have hitherto admitted.4 The subsequent atypical nature of direct unshielded electric lighting in the household can only be explained by the project of ‘Decorative Electricity’, promoted by Alice (‘Mrs J. E. H.’) Gordon in the early 1890s, to ensure that the incandescent lamp was domesticated on aesthetic terms acceptable to women; that is as a subtle integral feature, not as a garish spectacle.5 In the first section, I show that electric light was first encountered by many in the form of the dazzling arc lamp. Triumphantly brilliant to some and grotesquely harsh to others, the arc light was widely used in public settings well before Edison’s and Swan’s incandescent lamps became purchasable in 1881–2 but only a handful of intrepid experimenters, such as Lord Salisbury, dared to try it in an indoor domestic setting. Given the hiatus between Edison’s and Swan’s announcements of their electric filament lamps in 1878–9 and their public arrival three years later, I suggest that the qualities of arc illumination set expectations for electrical illumination of all subsequent sorts, with many men indulging in its showy spectacle, whilst women typically felt deeply uncomfortable beneath it. When the incandescent light was finally available from 1881 it was, as I discuss in the second section, hailed by many as the solution to the problem of ‘subdividing’ the glaring arc light into acceptably softer units of illumination. And yet, as is clear in the third section, very soon it became obvious that – pace the Brush Company propaganda – the incandescent lamp did not supply the solution to all problems of electric lighting. Women were overtly involved either in denouncing its ‘unbecoming’ qualities or, as in the case of Lady Thomson, became committed to developing techniques of shading the light with judicious applications of decorative silk. The fourth section introduces the partnership of James and Alice Gordon in electrical engineering and examines how the latter’s attempts to develop the

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art of decorative lighting, in an article for the Fortnightly Review and her book Decorative Electricity (1891), was not simply a product of her husband’s formal consulting business, but a response both to women’s rejection of electric light and her criticisms of the crudeness of ‘artistic’ light fittings commercially available. The following section examines how her book was very widely reviewed, with general acceptance of the importance of the project but strongly divergent gendered interpretations of the relative expertise of Alice and James in developing the art of ‘decorative electricity’. The final section looks at how, even beyond Mrs Gordon’s career, the promotion of various different ‘artistic’ forms of electric lighting to women only partially conformed to Mrs Gordon’s recommendations in the popular journal Lightning, the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1892 and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The lattermost reveals how ‘decorative’ electricity took on somewhat different material and gendered connotations in the USA, while back in Britain we see how ‘artistic’ assimilation of electricity was substantially altered from Mrs Gordon’s project by women promoting electric light not as a luxury, but as an integral feature of even ordinary domestic environments.

An ‘Objectionable Concentration of Light’: the Dazzling Electrical Arc Lamp Electric lighting would never have achieved the popularity and success which it at present enjoys, if it had been confined to the arc lamp. As a matter of fact, the arc light did a great deal in the earlier days to render electric lighting unpopular. People felt that so glaring a light could never displace the soft and mellow glow of gas or candles to which they were accustomed and that unless some form of electric lamp were devised to satisfactorily replace these, and be conveniently introduced into houses, electricity would never be generally adopted. John Verity, Electricity up To Date, 1891.6

After Humphry Davy’s demonstration of the electric arc light at the Royal Institution in London early in the nineteenth century, dwellers in industrial metropolises across Europe and America became familiar with the dazzlingly bright light on show at lectures and theatrical displays.7 The spark (or ‘arc’) drawn from two oppositely charged carbon rods at a very high potential difference was tricky to manage, not least because a workman had to intervene regularly to readjust the positions of the evaporating carbon rods in order to prevent the light being extinguished; otherwise combusted carbons were automatically replaced by clockwork regulator or moderator, a notoriously unreliable technique. Unlike gaslight, which could be left to burn unattended all day or all evening once lit, this meant that early arc lights were typically only used in lighthouses or temporary installations such as in exhibitions or one-off public theatre. While there was no suggestion that the arc light could be domesticated

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for household use (subject to considerations of economy and maintenance), the Serrin light in the early to mid-1870s offered a possible electrical alternative to gaslight for urban and civic purposes, especially for public displays in which brilliance and spectacle were at a premium, indeed, particularly where the arc light was the central feature of attention.8 Yet the arc lamp was still thought by many to be too powerful a form of radiation, especially when supplied by one central lamp. By contrast, gas lighting was ‘subdivided’ into a greater number of much less intense sources of illumination, as was in that form typically used in the home. In the long period between Edison’s announcement of electric incandescent lighting in September 1878 and the final delivery of working, mass-production models by Edison and Swan in 1881, it was these new sorts of ‘undivided’ arc lamps that grabbed the headlines and preoccupied those prognosticating on the future of electricity in civilization. Such was the significance of these challenges to the desideratum of ‘subdivision’, that both technical and financial issued were debated in the columns of The Times at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1878. As an editorial in The Times observed in early June 1878 concerning the aesthetic problems posed by the arc light and the economically unattractive trade-offs involved in attempting to solve this ‘grave defect’ by simply shading a central light: We have an objectionable concentration of light which is dazzling to the eye and which produces intensely dark shadows. It is true that by means of reflectors, tone glass shades, and other arrangements, a more diffused and softened light is obtained, but, inasmuch as this means the destruction or waste of a portion of the light produced, it is evidently not an economical method of using it. Moreover... it is not possible to illuminate a large space from a single point in a satisfactory manner. The subdivision of the light is a sine quâ non.9

The Serrin light could not, in practice, be subdivided, as any attempt to add a second light to a generator could not produce a stable lighting configuration. In early 1878, however, a new electrical lighting phenomenon grabbed attention on the streets of Europe and America. It was not the Edison or Swan incandescent lamp, unavailable in public for over three years (see next section) but a new kind of arc light: the ‘Jablochkoff candle’, produced in early 1878 by Paul Jablochkoff, one of five Russian experimenters to have addressed the problem. In contrast to previous arc lights, the Jablochkoff device could be subdivided and, moreover, did not require a clockwork mechanism but used an alternating (reversing) current and an insulation between the two carbon rods that evaporated in balance with them; this reduced at least part the ‘screaming’ effect.10 Jablochkoff won considerable publicity for his installations in his Paris workshops, Marengo Hall in the Magasins du Louvre and on a portion of the East and West India Docks

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on the banks of the Thames. Indeed, such was their success that portions of London’s Embankment were lit at night by a series of Jablochkoff lights between December 1878 and 1879, their comparative reliability prompting further installation, notwithstanding some extensive discussion amongst Times correspondents about this allegedly idiosyncratic choice of test location.11 Typically evaluative and prescriptive in electrical matters, The Times was critical of the Jablochkoff light, suggesting that the kaolin insulation which kept the carbon rods apart seemed to diminish the light, and alleged that a chain of Jablochkoff lights was difficult to restore once put out. Given the fertile possibilities for electric lighting while the world waited for Edison to deliver, the Jablochkoff candle was soon followed by other rival forms of (patented) selfregulating arc lights. Notable among these were the Rapieff light, adopted by The Times for its printing office in late October 1878,12 and that produced by the Brush Company in the USA and sold in Britain by the Anglo-American Brush Company.13 Soon public, competitive displays of electric arc lighting became visible across the city of London, and presentations of rival forms due to Gramme, Jablochkoff, Loutin, Rapieff, Siemens, Wallace-Farmer, and Wilde, took place at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1879, with a demonstration lecture by Post Office Electrician, William Preece, and with enthusiastic Royal patronage from the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales.14 Even from the earliest days of the subdivided arc light, there were recurrent critics, not just amongst gas shareholders,15 but also from those who saw aesthetic demerits in the arc light compared to the many virtues of the gaslight. They must therefore, argued a Times leader, submit their concerns to empirical test: We shall still hear, no doubt, as we have already heard, a good deal to the discredit of the new illuminant. It is costly, it is ghastly, it is intermittent, it is excessive – in fact it is not wanted at all. The only effective answer to all these objections, some of which, at least, for all we know at present, may be well-founded, is the experimental one. Let us try the light for ourselves, and see how we like it, and whether it suits our purposes.

Alluding to a display in London’s elegant Strand as indicating that ‘the future of street lighting now belongs to electricity’, it enjoined sceptical readers to await the twenty arc lamps of the Metropolitan Board of Works that should soon emit a ‘mild and colourless daylight’ along the Victoria Embankment. For the purposes of lighting at least, surmised The Times, the population would soon turn its backs on the ‘feeble and muddy illumination’ of gas and ‘worship the rising sun of electricity’.16 Indeed, even critics of the particularities of the Jablochkoff candle could agree with The Times that the light it produced was ‘very pretty’.17

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Such was the great public interest in electric lighting that, by the spring of 1879, not only were all the rival manufacturers of arc lights happy to demonstrate their technologies in competitive display in London’s Royal Albert Hall but the British Government appointed a Select Committee to investigate the future prospects of the electric arc light, under the chairmanship of chemistturned-Liberal politician, Lyon Playfair. Professor John Tyndall of the Royal Institution was the committee’s first interviewee on 25 April 1879, and his discussion noted the unresolved aesthetic debate about the arc lamps. Newspaper criticism of the arc light’s ‘unpleasant bluish tinge’ he explained away as a consequence of the blue spark between the two carbons, readily cured by housing the lamp in a yellow tinged opalescent shade.18 In a similarly favourable evaluation, he attributed recent changes in the Jablochkoff candle display on the Embankment – from a rosy pink colour to white – to readily eliminable impurities in the carbon, although Tyndall judged this variation not merely to be unobjectionable for the ‘public’ consumption of illumination, but indeed ‘very beautiful’.19 Revealingly, however, Tyndall admitted that such judgements were contingent on individual experience, and indeed gendered by differential engagement with electrical lighting: […] nothing is more unpleasant to the eye than fluctuations of intensity, although it is a physiological effect which would perhaps be different in the case of different individuals. I went sometime ago to the British Museum Library and observed the lights there; my wife accompanied me, and there were slight changes of colour that were unpleasant to her, but which affected me very little. Perhaps it is that, owing to my long practice with this electric light, the optic nerve has become a little blunter in my case than in hers.20

In its continued coverage of the Select Committee’s deliberations that October, the ever electrophilic Times newspaper agreed that some of the problems of electric lighting could be cured by judicious use of shading, whilst conceding that trade-offs were always involved between pleasant appearance and penetrative power.21 Overall, however, both imagined the inevitable success of electric arc lighting in the public domain, this technology simply marking ‘another era in the progressive history of the practical application of electricity to illuminating purposes in public thoroughfares’.22 Soon, the arc light was being tried in some public indoor settings (such as libraries and museums) with transformative effects most immediately praised by male observers. Thus the male readers in the British Museum library reading room were reported to respond with great enthusiasm to the new illuminant when faced with a situation in which the absence of natural sunshine would have entailed the cessation of all reading and writing. Since late October 1879, an arc light had been used continuously so that more than 200 students and ‘literary

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men’ could proceed with their research until 7p.m. instead of being obliged to leave when the ‘shades of evening fell’. Of an especially foggy Saturday a month later, The Times reported the ‘practical utility’ of electric arc lighting was given an even more startling test: For more than a century, readers at the British Museum have been compelled to suspend work on the occasion of a fog, and to leave the reading room; but on Saturday morning shortly after 10 o’clock, when many readers, unmindful of the improvements of the age, were about to quit with their papers, the electric light was turned on, and, without any apparent preparation, the spacious room was suddenly illuminated as by a magic ray of sunshine to the satisfaction of all present. There was a murmur of applause.23

Thus set up, the light was judged to be ‘about as good a substitute for sunlight as can yet be desired’. And, in the face of continued anxiety about the health disadvantages posed by this artificial mode of light, staff at the British Museum sought to establish the harmlessness of this mode of illumination. One (a Mr Nichols) had elected to work closely by the arc light for two hours per day for two weeks, and found reportedly that there was not only ‘no inconvenience’; it was even alleged that the optic nerve was strengthened, and protective glasses judged quite unnecessary for preventing injury to the eyes.24 However, female observers, whose views were not discussed in The Times report, did not necessarily feel so enthusiastic about arc lighting in museums. A year later Mrs Caroline Jebb, American spouse of Cambridge Classics don Richard Jebb, reported to her sister in the USA the advice she had received from a female friend already familiar with the new indoor beacon: On Wednesday, we are all asked to see the Museum lit up for the Conversazione with electrical light. Mrs Brownlow asked me yesterday what she should wear. I told her if we consulted our best interests, we should wrap our faces up in some kind of head covering and look out on the world with one eye. Nothing more frightfully unbecoming than the glare of electricity having ever been discovered […].25

It was thus in the context of arc lamp usage indoors that electric light was first judged ‘unbecoming’ by female observers; specifically that it was not merely unpleasant to look at, but also uncomfortable to be seen underneath. This first phase of a gendered battle developed over whether the electric light in the domestic realm should be shaded for convenience of viewing (as women preferred), or left unshielded and as brilliant as possible, with women obliged to cover themselves up to protect against the harshness of its glare (the default position wittingly or otherwise adopted by male observers). As we shall see, this was not the uniform response of all women. While the most explicit condemnation of the electric light in general came from British women in the upper social echelons unconnected with the electrical industry, spouses of British electrical

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engineers were important in promoting the appreciation of ameliorated forms of electric light. It can certainly be said of both sides of the Atlantic that it is much easier to find evidence of male enthusiasm for the electric arc light than female enthusiasm. During the very earliest phases of electrical lighting, it was only the very wealthiest individuals – aristocrats and industrial/business moguls – who could afford personalized experiments investigating the very expensive luxury of electric lighting from a private electrical supply. Thus, it was an extremely wealthy and indulgent male who first tried the experiment of using arc lighting in the domestic environment. As noted in Chapter 3, one famous aristocratic experimenter with the electric light was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury, a leading Conservative politician and gentleman FRS.26 Out of political office after his party’s electoral defeat in 1880, Salisbury found time to add electric light to his extant pursuits in photography, chemistry and telephony at Hatfield House.27 Having already tried the arc lights to illuminate the exterior of Hatfield House in 1878, he tried to extend its usage indoors. But, even as Lord of the Manor and a distinguished former Foreign Secretary (1878–80), the women had the final say in whether or not he could get away with imposing the harsh brilliance of the Jablochkoff arc light on the influential dinner parties organized by the Marchioness, Georgina. As their daughter, Lady Gwendolyn Cecil, later recorded of a period around the autumn of 1880: For a brief period [Salisbury’s] family and guests were compelled to eat their dinners under the vibrating glare of one of these lamps in the centre of the dining hall ceiling. No exertion of goodwill or courtesy could silence the plaintive protests of his lady visitors, and he would gird with growing despondency at the obstructions which feminine vanity offered to the conquests of science.28

Before long, Salisbury was obliged to abandon this experiment, and in the next section we will see how an alternative kind of electric lighting spared Salisbury the ‘humiliation’ (as his daughter put it) of having to concede complete defeat in this matter of domesticating the electric light. While inside the home women had the power to refuse electricity in the domestic domain, the growing adoption of electric arc lighting in the City of London during the spring of 1881 brought out expectations that the decision about the matter should be the prerogative of the professional male workers in the area. In early April of that year, a ‘City Merchant’ wrote to The Times to complain about the testing of electric lighting in the City of London after 7p.m., when the majority of the 800,000-strong working population had left. When the lights were switched on: ‘The experiment is to be submitted to the appreciation of a few old housekeepers and to a large number of City cats, while nearly 700,000 people whose happiness next winter will depend upon it, are sit-

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Figure 6.1. (Clockwise from top left): 1. Effect on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral (Brush). – 2. The Great Brush Light as seen from the Thames Embankment, near Northumberland Avenue. – 3. The Royal Exchange and the Mansion House (Siemens). – 4. London Bridge (Siemens) – 5. At the Guildhall Siemens. Graphic, April 9 1881, p.348. Source: William J. Hammer Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Series 3, Box 48, folder 5.

ting at home many miles way’. “Was this common sense?” asked the outraged merchant.29 The merchant’s complaint was bypassed, however, by the City of London’s cultivation of experimental schemes of the Brush and Siemens arc lights as an entertaining spectacle for the population of London to visit after dinner, and consume as forms of free theatre, as depicted in the Graphic of 9 April 1881.30 Nevertheless, critical voices remained. Even dignified meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were not spared the complexities. When the BAAS met in York in 1881, many of its streets were lit by electric arc lights. Some of these were supplied by Robert Hammond, who complained that city officials had forced him to relocate his generator to an unhelpfully remote location. Hammond later noted that Sir John Lubbock would probably remember the delivery of his Presidential Address with a ‘very sad recollection of the unsteady working of those arc lights’, especially given that Sir John was also infelicitously the chairman of the UK Edison Company, and seeking to promote the general public’s future interest in the newer form of electric light.31 And it would seem that the genteel populace of certain London districts never quite reconciled themselves to the sheer physical presence of the arc light peering into their domestic residences. Continued revulsion towards arc light-

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ing was revealed in the following ‘Lines to the Electric Light at the G.W. Railway Terminus’, published in 1888 by the St James Gazette. This was an arc light associated with J. E. H. Gordon’s first public alternate current installation in London at the Paddington terminus of the Great Western Railway; the irony of Gordon’s involvement in this will soon be apparent: Twinkle, twinkle, little Arc, Sickly, blue uncertain spark; Up above my head you swing, Ugly, strange, expensive thing. Now the flaring gas is gone. From the realms of Paddington, You must show your quivering light, Twinkle, blinkle, left and right. Cold, unlovely, blinding star, I’ve no notion what you are, How your wondrous “system” works, Who controls its jumps and jerks Though your light perchance surpass, Homely oil or vulgar gas, Still, (I close with this remark), I detest you, little Arc.32

In The Electric Light Up to Date of 1891, the engineer-popularizer John Verity noted that, in the USA, street arc lighting was employed ‘much more extensively than in this country’ in almost every ‘city and town of importance’. While many in the UK might have concurred with him that the arc light could not be incorporated into the domestic setting, we see from the poem above that others shared neither his view that street lighting and railway stations could readily be included in the arc lamp’s ‘proper sphere’ of operation, nor that in public exhibits its glaring rays could be ‘dispersed without an unpleasantly dazzling effect’.33 Thus they would certainly have agreed with Verity that the electric light could never have been accepted into the home, had only the arc lamp been available (see epigraph above). But what then do we make of his claim that the incandescent lamp newly available in 1881–2 ‘solved all the difficulties’?34 The following sections will be devoted to considering that point.

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The Incandescent Lamp: the Domestic Solution to the Problems of Arc and Gas Light? The light itself has recently undergone an important change for the better. People speaking of it hitherto have usually supposed it to have certain inalienable qualities, and some of them very bad ones. They have supposed it to be brilliant, dazzling, flickering, changeful of hue and intensity, unbecoming to the complexion, and so on; in fact to have many qualities making it unsuitable, for not for signalling or wide open spaces, yet for domestic use. But in so describing the light they have I think, had in their minds, the so-called “arc” light only. Now the arc light has done much for the progress of electric lighting, and what I am about to say may seem strange and ungracious, but it is, I believe nevertheless true, that in a short time the arc light will be altogether superseded by the more modern and much more convenient “incandescent” light. […] the so-called “incandescent” light has none of the disagreeable characteristics of the “arc” light. It is not too brilliant not too dazzling; it requires no shade to temper its use; it is neither flickering nor changeful of hue or intensity, and it is not unbecoming to the complexion. St George Lane-Fox, The Future of Electric Lighting, lecture delivered at the Royal United Services Institution, May 1882.35

In the midst of all the excitement and controversy surrounding the arc lamp, interest in the possibility of incandescent lighting for domestic usage had already peaked when, in September 1878, US and British audiences first heard Edison’s claim to be on the verge of a ‘cheap and practical substitute’ for household gaslight; with the future of electric lighting apparently imminent the price of gas shares plummeted accordingly (see Chapter 5).36 Two years later, Edison had to write somewhat humbly in the North American Review, explaining why the incandescent light still had not been delivered, showing a discomfited acknowledgement of the American public’s legitimate criticisms of his broken promises in the (ironically titled) piece, ‘Success of the Electric Light’ from October 1880.37 Among many devices employed by Edison to maintain public sympathy for his endeavours was a speculative claim about the comparative aesthetic merits of the white light of the future as being superior to those of the glaring street arc light and the allegedly ‘impure’ domestic gas light. Unlike the arc lamp: The [incandescent] light is designed to serve precisely the same purpose in domestic use as gaslights. It requires no shades, no screen of ground glass to modify its intensity, but can be gazed at without dazzling the eyes. The amount of light is equal to that give by the gas-jets in common use; but the light is steadier, and consequently less trying to the eyes. It is also a purer light than gas, being white, while gaslight is yellow.38

In both the USA and the UK, Edison and his team of assistants certainly worked hard to persuade the public to adopt his form of electric light; indeed, as David Nye has noted, Edison’s own secretary, Samuel Insull, referred to Edison’s writ-

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ing as ‘propaganda’, designed to promote the merits of electric over gas lighting, a clear indication that Edison did not treat the wide-scale domestication of the electrical culture as a foregone conclusion.39 While Edison did indeed finally produce a public display of incandescent lighting at Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve 1880, Joseph Swan in England beat him to this feat by nearly five weeks. As The Times reported on this new ‘subdivision of the electric light’, two days after the key lecture to the Society of Telegraph Engineers on 24 November 1880, the Newcastle creator of the British incandescent lamps, Joseph Swan, claimed a ‘perfectly steady and brilliant light’ of practically unlimited durability. The meeting room used (the main hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers) was reported by The Times to have borne a ‘large number’ of lamps which produced a ‘very splendid effect’ when lighted, eliciting ‘great applause from what may perhaps be taken as a critical audience’.40 Swan was at least as astute a publicist as Edison, and had already arranged for his incandescent lighting system to be adopted by local north-eastern manufacturer Sir William Armstrong for the purpose of electrifying his north-eastern gun-making factories, as well as his own mansion, Cragside at Rothbury, County Durham. The illustration from the Graphic of 2 April 1882 shows this installation of the

Figure 6.2. (Clockwise from top left): 1. View of Cragside. – 2. The Living Room – 3. The staircase – 4. The bay window in the library – 5. The Library. Original title ‘Electric Lighting by the Swan system at Sir William Armstrong’s residence, Cragside’, Graphic 2 April (1882) p. 332. Note the use of the translucent glass cover over the Swan lamp. Source: William J. Hammer Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Series 3, Box 48, folder 5.

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Swan system. Armstrong adopted the same form of spherical ground glass globes as used in contemporary arc lights, otherwise unshaded from the human eye. Patronage by the wealthy and aristocratic was a key feature of electric lighting in Britain, and it was arguably essential to its success as a glamorous (if not uncontentious) feature of the respectable home; Swan certainly knew how to attract the interest of aristocrats (see Chapter 3). While Edison was writing for the North American Review to maintain his struggling enterprise in October 1880, Lord Salisbury was failing in his attempts to persuade his family to accept the arc light in the dining room. Lady Gwendolyn Cecil records that her father was ‘saved from humiliating defeat’ in his social faux pas at Hatfield House by installing Swan’s filament lamp on the advice of mutual Newcastle friend Sir William Armstrong.41 The aesthetic results of her father’s continued experimentation with Swan lamps were not entirely straightforward, however. Lady Gwendolyn Cecil recalled wryly that the ‘monotony’ of domestic life at Hatfield House from 1881–3 was often relieved when the household had to ‘grope about in semi-darkness’, illuminated only by a dim red glow from the fading Swan lamps. On other occasions, a ‘perilous brilliancy’ in the same lamps when overloaded culminated in ‘miniature storms of lightning’ and then a complete disappearance of the much heralded incandescence. Either way, the evening’s entertainment had to be concluded by the older, standby illuminating technology of candlelight – an experience far from unfamiliar to many an early user of the (not entirely) domesticated electric light.42 Those who could neither afford the extravagance of electric light, nor expect to be on the guest list at Hatfield House, were soon able to enjoy the displays of electric light in London’s public places. The House of Commons was lit incandescently from winter 1881, with the Savoy Theatre and Royal Academy following soon after.43 One of the major players in promoting the Swan light was Essex-based electrical entrepreneur and Indian colonial veteran Rookes E. B. Crompton, who had soon learned to supplement his public installations of arc lighting with domestic displays of incandescent Swan lamps. Indeed, Crompton enticed his wealthier audience with free installations in politically expedient and conspicuously metropolitan locations. For example, in 1883, the Crompton Company offered a system gratis to Lord and Lady Randoph Churchill at their London home in Marble Arch, calculating that his company would benefit greatly from the publicity. As Lady Churchill, the American-born Jennie Jermaine, later recalled: [Ours], by the way, was the first private house in London to have electric lights. We had a small dynamo in a cellar underneath the street, and the noise of it greatly excited all the horses as they approached our door. The light was such an innovation that much curiosity and interest were evinced to see it, and people used to ask for permission to come to the house.44

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Such was the success of the public display and the electrically-lit dinner parties hosted by Lady Churchill that a clear demand for the Swan light emerged among London’s upper-middle classes: Crompton’s customers soon afterwards included William and Ellen Crookes and the dramatist William Schwenk Gilbert.45 While the visible performance of congenial electrical lighting was thus undeniably a key factor to both the commercial viability of, and popular interest in, electricity,46 it was also apparent that the newfound elegance of electric light had to be supplemented in the Churchill home, as much as in Hatfield House, by older lighting technologies: I remember the fiasco of a dinner-party we gave to show it off, when the light went out in the middle of the feast, just as we were expatiating on its beauties, our guests having to remain in utter darkness until the [oil] lamps and candles, which had been relegated to the lower regions, were unearthed.47

Lady Churchill’s overt enthusiasm for the electric light was perhaps a little unusual among the well-to-do ladies who encountered the Swan lamp, especially those still inclined to associate the electric light with the obtrusive and invasive beams of the arc lamp. As engineer-entrepreneur James Gordon had noted in an anonymous review piece for the upper class, Tory Quarterly Review in autumn 1881, the questions most frequently asked of him by the public, concerning the viability of the electric light, were firstly: ‘can the glare be got rid of ?’ and secondly: ‘what is the cost compared to gas?’ As he saw it, there was no intrinsic glare associated with electric light. Rather, the problem was simply that householders used to having 40- or 50-candle power gaslight in their drawing rooms were not satisfied unless they could show a great improvement in illumination by installing electric lights of up to 700- or 800-candle power. Then, of course, a glare arose which was ‘extremely trying both to the eyesight and to ladies’ complexions’. He thus advised that if they installed only an 80- to 90-candlepower electric light, they would have a ‘beautiful soft white light’; and if the shape of the lamp was hidden by a shade, the only distinguishable difference from a gas lamp would be the absence of both flickering and air pollution. His mention of a congenial shade for the electric lamp is significant, for at this stage Gordon did not see the shading of the electric light as necessary for the domestic installation of Swan lamps. Alluding to a visit (implicitly with his spouse Alice) to a rural mansion, Gordon recorded that: We had lately an opportunity of seeing the incandescent light in actual use in the drawing room of a country house which was lighted by thirty Swan lamps. They were unshaded, and hung equidistant from one another all around the room, about two feet from the walls, and one foot from the ceiling. There was no glare and no consciousness for any particular lamp, but it was possible to read comfortably in any chair in any position in the room.48

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Yet, despite such upbeat representations of the inherent beauty of the electric light, and repeated in St George Lane Fox’s lecture of 1881 on The Future of Electric Lighting, many clearly saw the incandescent lamp as cold and clinical in comparison to the warm, gentle flicker of the gas lamp. For those who could afford the electric light in the home, the aesthetic challenge was to reconcile visual sensibilities accustomed to the soft glow of gaslight or candle, with the sharp and unvarying beam of the filament lamp. A variety of approaches were possible, only one of which is discussed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in Disenchanted Night: namely, an advisory literature to help householders adapt their domestic décor to suit the new illuminant. Schivelbusch cites the example of James Facey’s Practical House Decoration (1886), which explained to householders that, since the filament lamp brought ‘cold tones’ and rays of ‘uncompromisingly searching brilliancy’ to furniture and art, householders should redecorate the houses in tones better calculated to deal with these penetrating rays. An alternative approach, recommended by other authorities, was to decorate the incandescent lamp with shades to ensure that less direct light reached the eye of the beholder; the Tiffany glassware that borrowed kaleidoscopic designs from William Morris’s Gothic revivalism was only the most famous instance of this approach to ‘decorative’ illumination.49 This was a very important approach, especially for female householders, in ways barely registered at all in Disenchanted Night. Probably the first British home to be fitted with such decorative covering to incandescent light fittings was the rural Scottish retreat of Sir William and Lady Thomson house, ‘Netherhall’ at Largs, in early 1882. Writing to William Preece on 13 February 1882, Thomson declared that he had won the race to install a full suite of Swan lamps, having installed electric lights around the entire house ‘from attics to kitchen, including every lobby and closet’, even in a trunk room under the stairs and the ‘boot-cleaning closet’. With the explicit collaboration of Lady Thomson, the lights on show in the main living areas were domesticated with an improvised decorative covering of silk, designed to lessen the incandescent glare that even the electrophilic Thomson could not dispute: I had had dining room and drawing room lighted for two or three evenings when we had friends with us and the results was greatly admired. The high incandescence required for good economy is too dazzling and I believe would be injurious to the eyes if unmitigated.50 I have found that very fine silk paper round the little globe spreads out the light quite sufficiently to make it perfectly comfortable to the eye while consuming but a small percentage of the light, and Lady Thomson has accordingly made little silk-paper globes, already for nearly all our lights (112 in all), some of them for the drawing room slightly coloured red and yellow and green and blue gray [sic], all very faint, which look very pretty when lighted at night.51

When the ‘beautifully incandescent’ Edison lights became available the following month, they were subjected to the same decorative treatment by Lady

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Thomson. Sir William reported from the University of Glasgow to Edison’s British agent, Edward H. Johnson, on 9 March 1882 that the Edison electric lamps were ‘greatly admired’ with their added ‘fine silk paper hoods’ of pale amber, blue and pink. Looking ‘exceedingly pretty’, three of these thirteen Edison lamps had been given the ‘place of honour’ next to Lady Thomson’s writing table, indicating again her active participation in the experiment of domestic installation, and aesthetic approval of it.52 Attempts to promote the aesthetic integrity of the tastefully presented incandescent lamp were a broad feature of the entrepreneurial advocacy of the new mode of illumination, complementing the forms of consumer adaptation pursued by the Thomsons.53 At the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition, held in London from January to May 1882, various forms of ‘artistic’ incandescent lighting – notably electric light chandeliers or ‘electroliers’ – were on display from specialist London companies, including Faraday and Son of Berners Street, and the ‘art metal workers’, B. Verity and Sons of Covent Garden. The Exhibition Catalogue even indicated (with a note personally authorized by Edward H. Johnson) that the latter company had even collaborated on ‘novel and chaste’ fittings specifically for Edison incandescent lamps.54 But, significantly, these were only metalwork fittings that gave the electric light a luxuriant context of installation, rather than fabric shields to modulate its unwonted brightness. Other incandescent lighting companies advertising in the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition catalogue – Swan, Hammond and the Domestic Electric Lighting Company made no mention at all of special provisions for artistic effects. This is in keeping with the persistent message in several contemporary promotions of the incandescent electric lamp that – by implicit comparison with the arc light – there were simply no aesthetic problems to be overcome; claims made by St George Lane Fox in 1882 and again in 1885 by the Brush Company prospectuses (see epigraphs above). Thus, in the Swan Company’s advertising for the Crystal Palace Catalogue (printed before the Thomson’s installation) it was instead asserted that its light was a ‘beautifully, steady, soft and pleasant white light’, not quite the Thomsons’ experience of it. As if to reinforce the substantial support for this aesthetic judgment, it listed the number of distinguished clients in ‘gentlemen’s mansions’, public buildings and businesses that had installed the Swan light, as if this were evidence of its social acceptability. These locations, listed apparently in order of rank, started with Hatfield House as the seat of the Marquis of Salisbury and descended through Cragside as the residence of Sir William Armstrong; Combe Bank, the residence of William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society) and then mentioned a variety of key public buildings including the Royal Academy; the British Museum; the Savoy Theatre; the Times Office and ended with a range of steamship companies that used Swan lights such as Cunard, Orient, and British India Steam Navigation.55

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From this we can see that the advocacy of the aristocracy and leading figures in science and engineering organizations and commerce was the main strategy by which the Swan company targeted affluent male consumers who had both the funds and discretion to install the electric light. Yet within a few years, the Swan Company was adapting its product to the aesthetic mode as part of a broader trend towards offering decorative forms of illumination in the electric light industry. In 1888 the English translation of Edmund Hospitalier’s work on domestic electricity recommended the Swan light as lending itself to more ‘elaborate and artistic fittings’ than prototypes displayed at the Paris exhibition in 1881. As this type of electric light lent itself to ‘decorative effect’, many and varied forms were available. Significantly, not only plain and ornamental designs were offered, but also dual forms, allowing the cautious to maintain gaslight or even candle lights readily available in case their electrical supply failed them; a point overlooked by previous historians of electric light.56 Only later, when electric supply was sufficiently reliable in the early twentieth century, did incandescent lighting become specialized in the elegance of the Swan lamp as seen deployed in the Swans’ own

Figure 6.3. American conservatory c.1889 lit by a multitude of unshaded incandescent lamps. Notice the men enjoying the effect of the bright illumination, while the woman sits very formally underneath the glare of the lamps. A. E. Kennelly ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribners Magazine, 1889. Source: author’s own copy.

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home post-1900 below. From this we can see that the bare bulb shown in several early depictions of the Swan lamp at the Paris Exhibition, in Scribner’s Magazine for winter 1889 and at William Hammer’s dinner for the one-year-old Franklin Experimental Club in 1891, had disappeared, to be replaced by decorative and shaded forms of incandescent lighting. Yet this was not an easy accomplishment, for the shift towards this mode of lighting was by no means consensual – a distinct gendered conflict being involved. This conflict will be the subject of the next two sections.

The Troubled Aesthetics of Electricity: the ‘Unbecoming’ Incandescent Lamp Most of the electric light found at present in dining rooms, is very glaring and disagreeable, and fully justifies the remark I so often hear made by ladies, “I never will have the electric light in my house as it gives me a headache whenever I dine by it;” and I am not surprised if they have been accustomed to a light similar to that by which we ate our dinner and tried to converse a short time ago. There was a round table seating ten guests, and ten lamps with lemon-yellow shades were hung just above their eyes, so that the light was focussed into the eyes and face of everyone sitting at the table, like a horrid detective little bull’s eye, showing up every wrinkle and line in the face. Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, 1891.57

Sue Bowden and Avner Offer have claimed that the consumption of electric lighting in Edwardian Britain was a gender-neutral activity.58 Looking at the early part of this period and immediately preceding decades – when the electric light was still a comparative novelty in the home – I suggest that this was certainly not the case. Claims by many women that they felt intensely uncomfortable under this novel form of illumination received various responses from men who rarely ever claimed such discomfort, ranging from indifference to puzzlement and irritability to outright satire. For example, in Electric Light for the Million: a Handbook for the Uninitiated, of Concise Practical Information on Electrical Lighting and its Cost, published in by 1889 Arthur Frederick Guy AIEE, Guy maintained, without differentiation of gender, that there was ‘always an indescribable charm’ about the electric light. In contrast to the views of women reported by Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, this new technology typically produced a ‘flood of rich mellow light’ at the flick of the switch that – so he alleged – entirely obviated the irritation to the eye and headaches that were allegedly ‘so prevalent’ in the use of gaslight.59 More overtly male-centred were Linley Sambourne’s representations of men and women encountering electric light in the late nineteenth century. His highly stylized caricatures in Punch suggest gender asymmetries in social resistance to

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electric light that are consistent with the testimony given by Alice Gordon in Decorative Electricity, whilst also embodying Sambourne’s own particular malecentred view of prerogatives in domestic illumination.60 While men standing in “‘Happy Thought’ a Sambourne Punch cartoon from 1889” seem unperturbed by the dazzling glare of the electric light that whitens their faces, the women present – both the singer and seated female audience – are obviously uncomfortable under the harsh brilliance of the artificial illumination. They are even forced to adorn themselves further with the exotic fashion accessory of Japanese sunshades in order to prevent the aesthetically displeasing installation from damaging their delicate eyes and skin. The titular ‘Happy Thought’ can thus only have been entertained from the perspective of the masculine gaze.61 While Sambourne, as a Punch humorist, could afford to exploit female discomfort in electrical lighting, those who actually sold incandescent illumination to householders had to be much more sensitive to women’s distinctive concerns. For example, by 1891 Verity and Sons produced not only ‘high class’ metallic fittings for electrical light but, had also appointed a ‘lady’ with the specific responsibility for designing and making up ‘dainty silk shades’, implicitly for female customers. This clearly acknowledged not only the significance of wom-

Figure 6.4. Advertising in the front matter from Mrs Gordon, Decorative Electricity, 1st edn, 1891. Source: Mrs. J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity. Source: author’s own copy.

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en’s discretion in purchasing electric light according to their own preferences, but also the gender-specific expertise of the female role in promoting the electric light for home consumption. This gendered complexity of domestic electric light was, however, also undercut by the presumption that the male householder was the principal client for the installation – see the second page of advertising below. Mrs Gordon’s article and book publications on ‘decorative electricity’ (discussed further below) appeared in print just as major questions were being raised by the technical-professional journal Electrician about precisely whose expertise was relevant to resolving the aesthetic issues of electric lighting. Under the heading ‘Problems Connected with Indoor Illumination’, an editorial on 20 February 1891 suggested that while it was rare for physiological questions to preoccupy the electrical engineer, it had to be admitted that the whole point of electric lighting was to ‘stimulate the optic nerves’ of those who used it. Since optic nerves had been stimulated ‘not wisely but too well by naked arcs and badly arranged glow-lamps’, it was not surprising that electric light has been widely condemned as being injurious to eyesight and – it added somewhat archly – what was far worse, ‘unbecoming’ to ladies’ dresses and complexions. This would not be a problem for electrical engineers if they simply had to supply electrical energy to householders; but since they were also called upon to supply customers with their glow-lamps too, the community of electrical engineers really did have to ‘step out of their legitimate work’ and address aesthetic matters not selfevidently within their domain of expertise. The Electrician identified three well-defined different approaches to the ‘aesthetic side of the question’. The most ‘luxurious and expensive’ method was indirect illumination that cast rays of light upon walls or ceiling to be reflected over the room. This was costly since not only was much of the light absorbed and thus unavoidably ‘wasted’, but the overall effect was ‘not good unless a considerable number of lamps’ were used. Indeed, considerable care was required to arrange the lamps, shades and reflectors in order to accomplish appropriate uniformity of effect such that visitors to a home would not realize that electric light was being used and thus raise no doubts that this lighting was in fact ‘becoming’. For specialized purposes such as lighting pictures, the key thing was to situate lamps to obtain uniform illumination without the lamp itself becoming visible in the reflection. For the third and most common case, when lamps were themselves directly visible, the question arose: ‘shall they be subdued by more or less translucent shades, or shall they be allowed to shed their light direct’? On the grounds of economy, this was the formulation of the problem likely to be raised by most consumers and thus to impinge on most engineers but it was also the one that had been least fairly considered, suggested the Electrician editorial team. While a gas or oil burner was rarely seen in any situation where

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comfort and appearances are studied ‘without some shade to soften the light’, it was ‘strange’ that electric lights were ‘too frequently used without any attempt whatever to diffuse the rays emitted by them’. Giving such consideration to comfort indeed took engineers to the verge of, or even perhaps beyond, ‘the limits of the business’. Perhaps expressing the irritation felt by many engineers at being forced to address aesthetic matters, the editorial ended dismissively by alleging that silk shades tended to get ‘dusty’ and fancy glass à la Tiffany looked ‘tawdry by daylight’. But indeed anything was better than a ‘naked 16-candle lamp, backed perhaps, by some glaring copper or ormolu [gold-effect] fitting’. The whole subject, it suggested, fell outside the expertise of the electrical engineer and ought really to be taken up an architect: Members of this kindred profession have done great service by the design of original and convenient fittings, and useful mouldings and casings. Engineers will do all they can to make electric light safe and cheap; let some artistic genius make it comfortable and beautiful. Few statements are so detrimental to the progress of the industry as the half-truth – electric light is bad for the eyes.62

This contentious editorial evinced three letters in response a week later under the heading ‘Indoor Illumination’. The first was sent on 25 February 1891 from ‘J.B.V.’ of 31 King Street, Covent Garden, London; in other words John Verity, eldest son of B. Verity and Sons. Clearly taking exception to the comment about the ‘naked 16-candle lamp’ backed by glaring fitting, and more generally to the suggestion that more had to be done in order to realize the potential beauty of electrical illumination, Verity complained that this editorial was simply an instance of cacoethes scribendi – the compulsive urge of journalists to scribble: Nowhere in the world has electric lighting, in all its artistic and charming effects, been brought to such perfection as in large numbers of London houses, and yet the writer of this somewhat discursive article holds up his hands imploringly for some artistic genius to make electric light comfortable and beautiful. Artistic genius, indeed! what about all those who have been toiling in the field while this carping critic has possibly been engaged in arc lighting among the Cimmerii […]. I trust some kind friend who has time, or who devotes special attention to the study of backward youths, will show the writer of “Problems…” the different works that have been done in London during the last five years [...] Our critic will thus have a better opportunity of considering the “physiological questions” that “do not often come into the work of an electrical engineer,” as I am afraid his present knowledge of the subject is not much greater than the Marchioness’s acquaintance with beer.63

While thus simultaneously critiquing the ignorance of the Electrician’s editorialist and defending his company’s metal-working as the frontline of artistry in the domestication of electric light, Verity did not mention how his company’s

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beautification of electric light had partly been accomplished with the assistance of a female employee specially dedicated to the development of silk shades. To this ‘very amusing’ tirade the Electrician editorial team replied in ‘Notes’ in the same issue of 27 February 1891 that (the semi-anonymous) Verity had missed the point about the need for more than just metalwork: He is thoroughly justified in being satisfied with his own work; but a little more originality in arrangement, distribution, and diffusion of light for domestic purposes is what was suggested [in the original editorial]; and no amount of pretty metal work tacked on to the lamp and its wires will make it comfortable, and will only contribute in a secondary way to its beauty.64

Verity responded by writing his own work on the subject, Electricity Up to Date in November 1891, discussed elsewhere in this chapter, which made no mention of ‘artistic’ electricity, or the role of women in its establishment, presumably to avoid further criticism of his writing as being self-serving promotion of his company’s products. By contrast, Mrs Gordon’s book Decorative Electricity, published in spring of that year, had focused almost exclusively on precisely these aspects, and this won her book a very broad-ranging readership indeed. The complex gendered origins of her project are discussed in the following section.

The Gordon Partnership and the Genesis of Decorative Electricity By the artistic gourmet of both, dinner and conversation are enjoyed with far more relish by a bright though softened light, and the pleasing acidity of our modern good talkers is the better appreciated by our minds, when our bodies are comfortably seated and fed, and our sense attuned by harmonious surroundings. Alice Gordon, ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 1891.65

Alice Gordon’s uniquely vigorous promotion of the art of ‘decorative electricity’ was the result of a substantial collaboration with her spouse, the Cambridgeeducated Maxwell-scholar-turned-electrical engineer, James Edward Henry Gordon. Although his 1881 piece for the Quarterly Review had observed that women often found the glare of the incandescent lamp objectionably ‘unbecoming’, at that stage he had argued that a tolerable electric light (implicitly for both sexes) could be obtained without shading or ornamentation. However, over the following decade this area of expertise initially presumed by James Gordon was taken over by Alice Gordon and pursued by her in a radically different direction. Speaking primarily to the wealthier household, she explicitly promoted the most expensive and luxuriant solution to problems in electric lighting identified by the Electrician. Indeed, we will see in this section that Mrs Gordon’s own elevated social sphere intersected as much with the networks of electric technology

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in which her husband was firmly entrenched as with the milieu world of wellconnected women in the aristocracy and fin de siècle high society. Accordingly, her book Decorative Electricity – including a chapter on the fire risks of electric light authored by James Gordon – was reviewed by an extraordinarily wide spectrum of the contemporary press. Without claiming that her work was the only important publication in the promotion of decorative electricity, I suggest that the gendering of her work and its reception reveals the ambivalent and diverse notions among contemporaries concerning the forms of expertise involved in the domestication of electricity. Alice Mary Brandreth was born in the 1850s to a well-to-do London family that entertained both the Spottiswoodes and Sylvesters from the scientific community and such literati as George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. Having no scientific education beyond such contacts, Alice only became involved in electrical matters after marrying her cousin James Gordon in 1878, soon after he completed his researches under Maxwell at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In autobiographical comments at the end of Decorative Electricity, she reports that the couple lived for about four years just outside Dorking where, as she put it, ‘we owned a large laboratory and a small house attached’.66 There Alice not infrequently acted as domestic peacemaker, notably placating the cook when Mr Gordon appropriated one too many kitchen utensils for use in the laboratory, and assisted him in researches on an iridium-based incandescent lamp that were abandoned after the public successes of Edison and Swan in 1880–1 with much cheaper carbon filaments. Thereafter, the Gordons sought a broader involvement in the technology and politics of the nascent electrical industry, hosting parties in their home to follow up the interest sparked by the Paris 1881 Exposition. These were attended by, amongst others, William Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society; the editor of The Times; two of the Balfour brothers (cousins of Lord Salisbury); George Meredith and his son, R. E. B. Crompton and one of The Times’s lawyers, John G. Butcher, later Alice’s second spouse.67 When James Gordon was hired by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon) in 1882 on their new venture into electrical lighting schemes, the Gordons moved to London. On 1 May that year Alice was presented to Queen Victoria at Court as ‘Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’, thereby entering the orbit of such influential figures as Charlotte Robinson, the monarch’s personal decorations adviser and columnist for that domain for The Queen.68 The first major commercial project which James Gordon undertook was to develop an alternate current supply system for Paddington railway station (West London) in 1886, the first such public installation in Britain. From the autobiographical chapter at the close of Decorative Electricity, we know that Alice acted as assistant, deputy, secretary, translator and confidante in this project, shar-

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ing with her husband’s many tribulations and occasional successes. This form of collaboration continued after the Paddington installation when James Gordon became a consulting engineer for the construction of the first generation of London’s electrical power stations.69 As noted in Chapter 4, this was particularly important work after 1888 when new supplier-friendly legislation stimulated the formation of several new companies to initiate power supply to wealthy London districts – James was closely associated with the Metropolitan Electric Supply Company until at least mid-1891.70 Alice’s activities as public relations adviser and social ambassador then became the most commercially important feature of her work in the Gordon’s electric lighting business, as she sought to persuade the affluent trendsetters in London and beyond that electric lighting need be neither impossibly expensive nor aesthetically objectionable in comparison to gaslight. Alice sought to cultivate a demand for domestic electricity somewhat along the lines of Lady Churchill earlier in the decade by throwing dinner parties at which she introduced friends and acquaintances to the extraordinarily lavish electric lighting that adorned the Gordons’ London home; over 120 lamps were installed, with the dining room alone boasting sixteen, only four of which were for regular, daily use. Clearly, though, Alice’s aim was to build up a potential consumer base for electric light beyond her extensive network of friends and, given her literary connections, it is not surprising that she soon turned to publishing to reach a wider audience. In her writings we see specifically how she took it upon herself to address the substantial scepticism and dislike of electric lighting manifested by many women in the wake of their early encounters with arc lighting. Her first publication was an article on ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’ that echoed the title given by James Gordon to his first pieces on the subject ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’. Her article appeared in the February 1891 issue of the Fortnightly Review, the upmarket highbrow periodical for which George Meredith had written since its foundation in 1865. With Meredith’s assistance, Alice reached out to the substantial readership that read her work alongside that of Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, as well as from Lord Kelvin, William Crookes, T.H. Huxley, John Tyndall and Alfred Russel Wallace.71 Under the editorship of Frank Harris (1886–94), women’s concerns were regularly represented in the Fortnightly, lending Alice’s writing a distinctly progressivist context. Indeed, she fashioned her authorial identity without marital signifier as ‘Alice M. Gordon’, and addressed female readers on the importance of women’s education and the responsibility of housewives for planning and arranging electrical installations.72 With a nod to sybaritic Fortnightly readers already acquainted with early versions of Wilde’s Dorian Grey, Mrs Gordon also contended that the acidic ‘modern’ conversationalist was best appreciated in a

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dining room subtly illuminated by electricity.73 Since the responsibility for maintaining an appropriate domestic atmosphere fell principally to women, Alice’s chief message concerned the means by which female Fortnightly readers could achieve the desired ‘bright though softened light’; cost was treated as a subordinate theme: decorations, advised Mrs Gordon, should be the measure of ‘the owner’s taste and imagination’, not of the male householder’s purse. The problem with achieving the appropriate conversational illumination that she identified was that the ‘unsympathetic glare’ of many existing unimaginative installations hindered conversation by shedding light too directly onto the countenance. Rays softly reflected or filtered through shades would, she suggested, fall rather ‘more kindly’ on tired eyes and bodies of those past the ‘half-way house of life’. A subtle sensitivity towards context and user was thus central to the art of ‘decorative electricity’; while in the dining room a relatively bright light should fall on the food and silver as the focus of attention, all else should be illuminated using shades of a subdued hue, taking judicious hints ‘from Nature herself ’.74 Whilst much of Alice’s narrative concerns the comfort of men in their favoured rooms, the main advice was addressed to the female reader whose presumptive role it was to run a household to such male-centred purposes as ensuring that sockets and such handy gadgets as an electric cigar-lighter were conveniently installed. The ‘dingy little hole’ that typically served as library, den and smoking room for the ‘master’ could be improved, she suggested, by covering pendant and standard lamps with red silk (a stronger coloration than used by Lady Thomson) to give them a ‘bright and cosy look when the master returns’. Moreover a ‘delightful’ nook for reading could be contrived by fixing an electric light to a high-backed chair with a switch located so that ‘master’ could dim or extinguish the light if he wished to meditate or doze. Alice warned, however, that such womanly ingenuity and empathy was not always appreciated, so she advised women to exercise discretion and sympathy in discovering what their husbands wanted, even if the electrician had to be called back several times to achieve this.75 While this particular instance of gender prerogatives in tension did not in her account generate questions of expense, it was a different matter when the mistress’s plan to use decorative shades to subdue lighting elsewhere in the home came into conflict with the male householder’s pursuit of value for money: The master generally wishes to get all the light possible, and the mistress to have the light as becoming and pleasant as possible. It is rather difficult to reconcile these two wishes; and after some discussion the master testily exclaims: “My dear, what is the good of going to all this expense if you will tie the light up in bags?” 76

Alice here relates a scene putatively familiar to households awaiting the arrival of the electrician, in which an exasperated husband resents the cost implication

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of making light more congenial to female interests, using humorous anecdotes to play down the inevitable tensions attending a woman’s attempt to reconcile her divergent responsibilities towards high-quality decoration and budgetary constraints. While this is Alice’s only explicit recognition in the Fortnightly that women’s concerns about electric lighting might conflict with the priorities of male householders, in her monograph published only a few weeks later in March 1891,77 we find a much more specific reference to women’s interests. After finding advertising for ‘artistic’ light fittings from Verity, and Faraday and Sons, readers of Decorative Electricity encounter a preface explaining the book’s provenance in the Fortnightly article with many additional practical details intended to be ‘of some slight assistance’ to householders planning to install electric light. Offering many illustrations of her own home (drawn by Herbert Fell), Alice Gordon modestly presents herself as intimately experienced in the art of decorative electricity, alluding occasionally to consultative collaboration with James Gordon. The book opens with a chapter on ‘the installation’, in which Mrs Gordon augments material from her article – including the gendered conflict over expense versus aesthetics – with advice on estimates, the shortcomings of ‘plumber-electricians’, advice on wiring, and the strategic placing of switches both for theatrical effect and to pre-empt servant misuse. Following her husband’s brief chapter dedicated to fire risks, Mrs Gordon takes her readers around the entire home from hall and staircase, dining-room, library, boudoir, drawing room, bedrooms, school-room and nursery, through to servant quarters and cupboards. Before rounding off the work with an appendix on the enormous number of lights in their family home in Kensington, Alice concludes more assertively by discussing the electric lighting of shops and concert halls,78 and her revealing autobiographical chapter: ‘Some personal experiences’. While initially modest in presentation, it is quickly clear that Mrs Gordon was as critical as the Electrician had been of decorative lighting that relied on shining metal work and bare bulbs, as epitomized in some of Verity’s products. Antiquity, feigned or otherwise, was preferable: Modern bright brass-work should be avoided. I have seen a great deal of it used with electric light, but never with success. Old brass lamps are beautiful, and so are good copies of them. Modern French “old lamps”, with their glaring machine-made brasswork and round dabs of common coloured glass, are also to be avoided.79

Her approach was to domesticate the electric light by embedding it in traditional and contemporary aesthetic forms that disguised the electrical form of the lighting, thus maintaining the continuity of ocular experience. Pace Schivelbusch, the introduction of electricity into the home was not an extension of the industrialization of lighting from the factory to the home; rather it offered a romantic blend of atavistic, quasi-Georgian aesthetics with French, Japanese and Egyptian

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exoticism, designed to accomplish comfort and elegance as opposed to centralized efficiency and economy. Overall, the specific qualities of the electric light were to be erased rather than celebrated, a move that reveals the traditionalism of progressive electric lighting in the early 1890s, rather than any suggestion of thrusting modernity.80 Although an admirer of modern ‘acidic’ conversation, Alice lamented the graceless and heavy modern designs that predominated in much hall and staircase lighting. She suggested instead – especially for the ‘slender purse’ – various nostalgic adaptations of the simple string and pendant.81 Unlike many installers (implicitly male), Alice generally judged an electric light dangling from a wire in the centre of a room – even with a glass shade – to be an ugly ‘hard little light’ that emitted only ‘unsympathetic rays’. But this proved unavoidable due to constraints of space and finance and she recommended the ‘least objectionable pendant’ to be a glass cone cover for the light, held by a piece of decorative beaten iron and suspended from a black cord ornamented with iron bosses (see illustration). By contrast with hanging pendants, among the ‘most beautiful’ decorative hallway lights she had seen was an old-style Venetian church-lamp turned upside down, with a ‘narrow frill of laburnum coloured silk’ fastened around the electric lamp inside. As if countering the Electrician’s complaints about the dust gathered by such objects, Alice suggested that this decorative silk was very easily removed and cleaned or ‘renewed by the housemaid every month, if necessary.’ Similarly decorative, but with up to six independently operated lights, she also

Figure 6.5. Dining room decorations, Decorative Electricity, p. 53.

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recommended an imitation ‘old Cairo lamp’, again with soft silk shades to ‘hide’ lamps not in use and to ‘soften’ the light of those that were.82 Extending the illustrations from older forms of illumination, Alice recommended the Pompeian lamp for use on staircases as a ‘happy combination of the

Figure 6.6. Drawing room decoration, Decorative Electricity, pp. 95, 103–9.

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modern light with antique grace of form’, its unshaded spiral bulb imitating the flame of an oil lamp. On upper landings, Mrs Gordon recommended simple, easy-to-clean electric lamp fittings such as an example made out of an adapted candle-brackets with a ground-glass lamp and mirror to ‘aid’ illumination. 83 For the dining room, Mrs Gordon recommended that a movable pendant lamp should be the major illumination over the centre of the table, with a veil of thin silk or gauze to ‘hide the shape and the glare’ of the bulbs. This should be accompanied by two small standard lamps, such as a silver female figure that the Gordons had adapted from a fragile, mothballed candle-holder, accompanied by the familiar Mercury. Alice advocated heavy (but inexpensive) brass work designs of dragons, dolphins and griffins for wall fitting, advising that they should always be fixed with the lamp hanging downwards, not ‘crawling up the wall like poor over-laden insects carrying luminous eggs.’ Notwithstanding her condemnation of Verity’s installations, here she advocated the merits of unshaded lights with heavy brass work.84 For the drawing room, Mrs Gordon’s scheme drew on both Venetian-style glass standard lamps, and Japanese-inspired fashion for decorating with stylized bronze storks or cranes. Holding a silk-shaded light from their beaks like fish, these birds were ‘very convenient’ creatures, especially for guarding over a comfortable armchair or writing-table.85 While much of Decorative Electricity was taken up with pre-formulated solutions to the problems of domestic lighting, in two significant cases Alice Gordon reveals how she and James improvised to redeem their drawing room from aesthetic fiasco. The summertime plan of electrically lighting the fireplace with two lamps and reflectors on a brass tray, ferns, palms and metallic dogs had been ‘contrived’ by Mr Gordon as they lamented the ‘heavy, dismal look’ of the unlit fireplace just minutes before an evening party was due to begin. In the same vein, Alice found that a new, four-bulb ceiling fitting produced a pleasant light while itself looking ‘most hideous’. After much unsuccessful improvisation with ironmongery and avian taxidermy, she was inspired by reading Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the ‘Swan Princes’ to her children to shop for a ‘carriage full of storks and a heap of soft-coloured silks’; after telegraphing her electrician they arranged the five-stork ceiling and sheet configuration seen illustrated. Given time, experience and many electrical sockets, Mrs Gordon assured her readers that they too could develop such impromptu and ‘delightful electrical decorations’.86 The remaining chapters of the book showed how ‘decorative’ electricity could become a fabulously self-indulgent and yet ubiquitous art form, with the lighting of servants’ quarters, attics, cellars, cupboards, larders, sinks; even a bracketed light on the kitchen grate was proposed so that no saucepan would suffer its contents to be invisibly polluted.87 Yet, among all this minutely detailed

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prescription, we find this comment about the gendered and discretionary responsibility for installation: […] the best thing for the master and mistress, after reading and duly studying this book, and seeing all the electrical decorations in their friends’ houses and in the shops, so that they may have something to judge from, is to order just what they like and admire themselves, and not be guided too much by what I, or other people like and admire.88

The nuanced and contingently self-represented gendering of the authoring and reading of the book was mirrored – but not entirely congruently – in the reviews of Decorative Electricity. From this we will see how nonconsensual were the judgments about the actual and appropriate expertise involved in electrical lighting.

Gendering Electrical Expertise: the Diverse Reviews of Decorative Electricity Persons about to have electric light put into their homes, who happen to have read a paper on the subject in a recent number of the Fortnightly Review by Mrs J.E.H. Gordon, will hasten to provide themselves with this little volume; and if they do not happen to have read the article, they are hereby strongly recommended to lose no time in getting the book. Review of Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity in St James Gazette, 1891.89 [Decorative Electricity] is a little book which can hardly be read without profit by any one who is about to “install” electric light in his or her house. It is natural that Mr. J.E.H. Gordon, the well-known electrical engineer, should have electrically lighted his own house, and he seems from this volume to have done so in a singularly complete and careful way. Mrs. Gordon’s advice has therefore the great advantage of being entirely founded upon experience of the most practical kind. She conducts us from the basement floor to the attic ceiling, not missing a place where light ought to be, and making divers digressions into places, such as the insides of cupboards and saucepans, which an inexperienced person would never have thought of lighting at all. ‘Domestic Electric Light’, The Saturday Review, 1891.90

Her decision to publish a periodical article and book on the ‘decorative’ use of electric lighting concurrently in 1891 certainly got Alice Gordon’s work noticed. The extensive commercial advertising in the book’s end leaves of ready-to-purchase ‘artistic’ forms of electric lighting in the volume indicates that purveyors of readymade (putative) solutions to the aesthetic problems of electric lighting were keen to advertise their wares to readers of Decorative Electricity.91 Indeed, the widespread significance of, and interest in, these aesthetic problems won

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this book reviews in a remarkably wide array of periodicals. In dozens of notices that it received in the electrical engineering press, general highbrow and upperclass society monthlies and specialist women’s journals in the UK and USA, the subject of electrical aesthetics was treated as neither superfluous nor of minor interest. For example, the British Daily News maintained that the book’s hints for making electric lights ‘attractive to the eye’ would be found ‘widely useful’, while the American Electrical World held that Mrs Gordon’s suggestions would bring ‘perfection of lighting’ to parlours and dining rooms, leaving householders ‘conscious of agreeable illuminations’, that is, spared the all-too characteristic intrusive glare.92 Apart from indicating the contemporary recognition given to Alice Gordon’s endeavours in Decorative Electricity, the many reviews of this book reveal also the diverse gendered interpretations of the expertise involved in electrical aesthetics. The divergent evaluation of the specific details of Decorative Electricity – including the extent and ways in which the book was read as the product of marital collaboration – reveal to us broader, nonconsensual expectations of the likely relative expertise of women and men in the domestication of electricity. What was at stake in the success or otherwise of her writings among male and female audiences is evident in the sardonic reaction that Decorative Electricity aroused in the weekly Journal of Gas Lighting. Its regular, polemical column ‘Electrical Lighting Memoranda’ sniped a little disingenuously that the electrical press did ‘not seem to think much’ of it; as if to signal the obvious self-interest of this judgment, Mrs Gordon mischievously cited it alongside extracts of fifteen rather more flattering critiques in the front cover of the second edition of Decorative Electricity (see below).93 Some reviewers took the near typographic parity given to ‘Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’ and ‘J. E. H. Gordon’ on the title page to indicate the book was literally joint-authored throughout. This was the inference drawn by the Journal of Gas Lighting, and the sceptical columnist for the Electrical Review archly inferred that the book should have been titled ‘A few chapters from the Autobiography of Mr and Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’.94 The Saturday Review accepted her authorial claims but chauvinistically attributed the value of the book to Mrs Gordon’s experience of her husband’s ‘singularly complete and careful’ electrification of ‘his own house’.95 By contrast, given the character of the audience of specialist women’s publication such as Queen and the Ladies Pictorial, their reviewers were quick to acknowledge the authorship and authority of Decorative Electricity to be primarily Alice’s. As the reviewer for the Ladies Pictorial gushed of this ‘comprehensive and reliable guide’ to the art of decorative electricity: It would be difficult to over-rate the fascination of the art of electric lighting in its application to beautiful rooms, as exemplified in Mrs J.E.H. Gordon’s charming little volume on “Decorative Electricity” […] Everything that Mrs. Gordon describes with

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While the conservative Spectator’s review showed no compunction in recognizing female authority in the field, noting that ‘Mrs Gordon can speak with more experience than perhaps any other lady on the domestic applications of electricity’, some responses revealed a distinctly condescending masculine perspective.96 The Saturday Review admitted that Mrs Gordon’s book would be a ‘handbook for practical reference’ useful to anyone installing electric light in ‘his or her house’. But it also criticized her for using such technical jargon as ‘standards’ to describe portable standing lamps and ridiculed her recommendation for electric lamps to illuminate the insides of cupboards and saucepans – which an ‘inexperienced person would never have thought of lighting at all’.97 Even those periodicals which treated Decorative Electricity as drawing on the authority and expertise of both members of the Gordon partnership allowed that it was the responsibility of the ‘authoress’ to make claims about the comparative economy of gas and electricity; these were recognized as within the province of women skilled at domestic budgetary management, even if the substance of her claims on matters of economics was widely disputed. Alice argued, for example, that since an electric lamp could be switched off on leaving a room whereas gas light had to be left on continuously until the householder retired to bed, by her calculations, electric lighting bills need not be more than twenty per cent greater than those for gas. In her weekly column on ‘Home Decoration’ for Queen, Charlotte Robinson was more sympathetic than many, agreeing with Alice that the ‘great point’ with electric light was to extinguish it on leaving the room.98 Most commentators disputed the argument, though: the Electrical Review reported data from a correspondent showing the discrepancy to be nine times greater than Mrs Gordon’s figure, a point seized upon with gleeful alacrity by the Journal of Gas Lighting. While the genteel Black and White conceded to Mrs Gordon her main point that the electric light was more amenable to artistic arrangement than any other illuminant, the great expense of installing and running it would allow gas shareholders to ‘preserve their equanimity’. But for those affluent householders who could afford the ‘luxury of the electric light’, Black and White recommended that they should certainly read Decorative Electricity before commencing installation.99 Whatever judgments were made about Mrs Gordon’s financial evaluations of electric light, almost all reviewers treated Decorative Electricity as essential reading for those considering the possible ways in which to electrify their home. While a number of readers were clearly most interested in the economy of electric light as a key issue relating to its widespread uptake, this was evidently

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not Alice’s main concern in Decorative Electricity. The principal issue was visual luxury, just as it had been in her Fortnightly piece; electric light was certainly not a mundane commodity to be compared to gas, but now an integral part of a whole aesthetic schema for domestic enhancement. It was, after all, the ugliness not the expense of the electric light which was the greatest threat to attempts at electrifying the home. But Alice treated the interests of women much more explicitly in her book than in her periodical article, placing greater emphasis in Decorative Electricity on women as discretionary agents who could veto plans to electrify the home irrespective of cost. Reviewers in two very different weekly periodicals, the Electrician and Queen, treated women’s suffering in the glare of ill-arranged dinner table lamps views with great sympathy, quoting verbatim Alice’s anecdotes of ladies’ headaches from glaring dinner table lights. The Electrician reviewer gave the ‘utmost publicity’ to these quotations so that greater ‘gracefulness and simplicity’ in fittings might prevent such ‘abuse’ in future. The writer did not merely promote Mrs Gordon’s ‘much needed’ book out of deference to the interests of the electric lighting industry, one of the Electrician’s main readership bases; her stipulations were also presented as a resolution to a dispute about the allegedly ‘unbecoming’ effect of electric light on appearance and dress that had run through its pages since February – see above.100 The officially appointed ‘Home Art Decorator to her Majesty’ was unusually well disposed to agree with Alice’s judgment on economy: she had visited the Gordon’s house in Queensgate Gardens and admired in person the ‘cleverly arranged’ electrical fittings that Alice had proposed and which James had ‘practically carried out’.101 Yet Charlotte Robinson’s favourable review for Queen should be seen not simply in terms of her personal acquaintance with Alice Gordon, but also as a result of the useful purposes which the book served for her advice column. She regularly invited lady readers to ask advice about how to decorate their homes, and next to each weekly article she replied to dozens of selected pseudonymous enquiries from ‘Brittania’, ‘Harmony’, ‘Hepatica’, ‘Colon’ and so forth, who had sought the guidance of Queen Victoria’s personal advisor. Although hitherto unable to give expert replies to enquiries on electrical lighting, she now advised the many correspondents who had requested ‘practical details’ on electrical decoration that they should consult Mrs Gordon’s ‘delightful little book’ as an authority on the main questions: As many correspondents have recently been seeking practical details as to the installation, switches, fire risks, glow lighting, &c., I am sure they will welcome the delightful little book Mrs J.E.H. Gordon has just published […]. The artistic possibilities of this illuminant seem almost limitless, and no-one can close Mrs Gordon’s fascinating book without being convinced of the beauty, economy, safety, and decorative joys which await the happy owners of houses lighted by electricity.102

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No other reviewer echoed Mrs Gordon’s sentiments so thoroughly – nor, correlatively, did any other admit to having visited the Gordons’ house to see the fittings in person. Axiomatically, the wide popularity anticipated by both the Ladies Pictorial and Queen for this ‘practical, reliable, and artistic’ work was among a female audience. Other periodicals such as World anticipated a principally female readership for Decorative Electricity without evincing a similar sympathy for women’s autonomous concerns, as did the Electrical Review in judging that Decorative Electricity would ‘be read with interest by ladies who are thinking of adopting the electric light’, whilst otherwise being very critical of the work. World differentiated the gendering of the readership and purchasing by presenting the key phenomenon of the day as the world ‘proceeding to light his [sic] house with electricity’; accordingly, so this strain went, ‘his wife will be made very happy by being presented with the pretty little handbook to [the art of ] “Decorative Electricity” just published’. Other publications bore less explicit gender analyses of men’s and women’s respective prerogatives in domestic electrification, the St James Gazette describing Decorative Electricity as addressed to ‘persons’ about to install electrical lighting. The Saturday Review presented the terms of the book as convenient for the male reader, arguing that her observations would profit him ‘whether he shares her taste in decorative upholstery or not’, although it did mock Mrs Gordon’s inconveniently sketchy proposal for an electric cigar lighter to sustain the masculine pastime of after-dinner smoking.103 Finally, we should note that the Punch reviewer jovially rendered the entire content of Decorative Electricity as an all-male fantasy in which the male householder, cast as a ‘modern Aladdin’, could summon the exotic ‘slave of the Lamp’ to present ‘himself in a variety of pleasing and fantastic shapes’ – a male personification of electricity further explored in Chapter 7.104 Given the great popularity of the book, a second and explicitly cheaper edition in Decorative Electricity was published in 1892 (with preface dated 3 November 1891), bearing carefully selected extracts from reviews cited above and from the Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and Irish Times. The only substantial alteration was a new preface in which Mrs Gordon argued that developments in electrical supply in the six months since the first edition had been so rapid that electrical lighting had ‘ceased to be the luxury of the rich’. A rather frugal installation of just five lamps – much less extravagant than the 129 documented in the Gordon’s house – had, she suggested, become an economically viable proposition for suppliers.105 It should be noted that this second edition was published just in time for the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition, launched in January 1892, for which James Gordon arranged part of the power supply and served on the Honorary Council of Advice, reprising something of his role of the first such exhibit in 1882 (see Chapter 2).106

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Alice Gordon’s co-promotion of women’s expertise and decorative electricity did not end with the second edition of Decorative Electricity. In early January 1893 Alice Gordon collaborated with such fellow luminaries as astronomer Agnes Clerke and science writer Mrs Humphry Ward to form a committee that would ensure proper international representation of female British authors at the Women’s Building at the upcoming Chicago Exhibition. By the time that Mrs Gordon’s celebrated book went on show there, however, her husband James was dead following an accidental fall from his horse in South London. This broke her direct spousal connection with the electrical industry and forced her involuntary withdrawal from the field of ‘decorative’ electricity; her writing activities shifted thereafter to educational aspects of women’s lives.107 As we shall see in the next section, other female voices promoted artistic lighting in the cause of domestic electrification.

The Artistic Domestication of Electricity Everybody probably knows by this time that the new illuminant – if we may call “new” that which has become in so many thousand houses an old familiar friend – lends itself more than other modes of lighting to domestic decoration of the most pleasing and various character. The possibilities of it, however, will only be fully realised by a visit to the [Crystal] Palace […] Some of the rooms have been prepared and upholstered in quite a lavish manner so as to do full justice to the decorative effects to be wrought by electricity. What a pity it seems to us that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan could not have had incandescents and “small arcs” to render still more entrancingly beautiful that “stately pleasure dome” of his. ‘The Light in London: the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition’, Sunday Times, 1892.108

To put Alice Gordon’s Decorative Electricity into context, we need to see how her brand of electrical propaganda was only one of a variety of voices with which women’s and men’s expertise spoke on the importance of what was known – in diverse interpretations – as ‘decorative’ electricity. It must be emphasized that her prescription that electric light should only ever be seen through shading or reflection was neither hailed immediately by all as a major candidate solution for the problematically ‘unbecoming’ character of the electric light, nor were her recommendations accepted uniformly thereafter for domestic purposes. That being said, her primary, but far from exclusive, focus on women as both the chief agents and recipients of domesticated electricity, was a generic feature of the vigorous British literature on domestic electricity if not in the USA. These points are evident, for example, in the epistolary ‘Ladies Column’ run by Lightning: the popular and business review of electricity for the first five months after its launch on 22 October 1891.

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Unlike the conventional journalistic reportage, commentary and gossip on electrical development that filled the other pages of Lightning until 17 March 1892, this column consisted of a fictionalized correspondence between the wellto-do Bess and May.109 This literary contrivance recounted their experiences of electrifying their respective homes in consort with their spouses: ‘Henry’ and ‘Dick’. In their letters the women were depicted as taking the decision to electrify their homes, as well as being responsible for the decorative aspects of so doing, while their husbands dealt with financial and abstruse technical matters. The exchange commenced with Bess writing to May: ‘I am delighted to hear that you have at last prevailed on Henry to adopt the electric light, the only artificial light to my mind worth having’.110 Bess received the benefit of May’s experiences of her own prior domestic electrification, the general aesthetic principles of electric illumination, and of the pitfalls of inept installations that she had seen, such as the dreary plain-ness in an aristocratic hall near Chester installed with electricity ‘when the art of decorative lighting had not been brought to its current state of perfection’. Looking to the future, it concluded by quoting from a recent issue of Invention the character of the light which May was about to install in her home:

Figure 6.7. Illustrations drawn from Electric Lighting applied to Decorative Art by Messrs G. Statter and Co, published in the first issue of Lightning on 22 October 1891 in Bess’s first letter to May. While in the main illustration a man sits alone enjoying a central light, with a female figure (presumably his spouse) sitting deferentially in the shadows, the circular inset shows how rays from unshielded bulbs somewhat glaringly illuminate the faces of diners. Source: ‘The Ladies Column’, Lightning, 1 (1891–2) p. 21. By permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

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A cascade of brilliant rays radiating from flowers of fabulously wondrous beauty, with incandescent lamps in their interior, falling on facets of crystal glass, on mirrors, on gold frames, on marble, statuary, and porcelain figures, covering them all with a halo of splendour.111

The emphasis on ‘brilliant rays’ and ‘halos of splendour’, coupled with illustrations of heavy metallic fittings with openly visible light bulbs so excoriated by Alice indicate that Decorative Electricity was not Bess’s authority. Indeed the advisory text cited in Bess’s first letter was the trade catalogue Electric Lighting applied to Decorative Art by Messrs G. Statter & Co.,112 with an illustration showing the sort of dinner table scene of glaring eye-level lighting that had convinced some of Alice’s friends never to allow electric light in their homes (see below). Two months later, on 17 December 1891, and presumably in response to the publication of the second, ‘cheaper’ edition of Decorative Electricity, illustrations from it appeared in Bess’s letter to May. Although mostly discussing a visit to the artistic lighting specialist Rashleigh Phipps and Dawson, Bess did indirectly report Alice’s recommendations for the use of woven silk and reflectors to produce only indirect illumination. Commenting on the bronze bird lamp-holders so beloved by Mrs Gordon, Bess confesses that she does not care for ‘direct imitations of Nature’, adding archly that nevertheless many still admired ‘an enormous stork in the act of swallowing an electric light in the shape of a fish’s head.’ May’s reply later similarly alludes to Mrs Gordon, agreeing with Bess that that a ‘pretty light’ from an invisible source ‘must be almost the perfection of lighting’. Yet again the messages are mixed; somewhat at odds with May’s express admiration of an electric lamp by Rashleigh, Phipps and Dawson in which the light source was invisible, readers saw on the same page of Lightning one of that company’s snaking table standard lamps in which the bulb was all too obviously on display. Apart from representing product placement as part of the periodical’s systematic policy of mentioning and illustrating several major artistic lighting manufacturer in this column, this is perhaps also a sign of incongruous (male) editorial intervention in choice of illustrations for the Ladies’ column.113 Visiting the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition soon after it opened on 9 January 1892, Bess and May found many unfinished displays to complain about but relished opportunities to see completed room fittings by the full range of artistic manufacturers, some of whose shop displays they had painstakingly profiled in the Ladies’ column. Although no other display was as physically dominant as that of the Edison Company’s huge fountain extravaganza utilizing over 10,000 incandescent lights,114 British-based companies made a point of contextualizing their light fitting in lushly furnished room-sized displays to illustrate a luxuriant domestic form of artistic electrical illumination. Only a handful of displays were near completion at the opening date and, as a Times preview somewhat

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delicately put the problem about the few exhibits in these special galleries that could be commented upon in full: This is a series of rooms which have been erected and are being arranged [sic] to show the various styles of fittings for domestic electric lighting. Among the various exhibitors in this class are Messrs. Rashleigh, Phipps, and Dawson, who have a dining room fitted in the Italian style with lights to represent the solar system, a large light for the sun, and smaller lights for the planets. This firm also have a stand in the nave representing an Assyrian mosque in which are introduced various designed as used by the ancient Assyrians.115

Having evidently read the published exhibition catalogue more carefully than Bess, Dick is portrayed in Lightning as impressing his spouse with his discovery that an owl-shaped lighting bracket represented Minerva’s ‘wisdom though light’, and a monkey bracket represented the ‘dawn of intellect’ in a somewhat Darwinian vein.116

Figure 6.8. ‘Decorative Electricity’ is used as Lightning’s caption for the picture and to head the accompanying narrative about an (unidentified) room display at the end of the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition of 1892; the illumination is nevertheless direct rather than shaded or reflected (see main text for discussion). Source: ‘Decorative Electricity’, Lightning, 14 July (1892) p. 23. By permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

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After visiting the Crystal Palace exhibition, May and Bess’s exchanges reveals a range of different perspectives on how to undertake artistic electric lighting. Lightning’s editorial treatment of authorities in domestic electricity was distinctly pluralistic too, and certainly not restricted solely to female expertise. Responding to a reader’s letter in February 1892 seeking recommendation for books on electric lighting ‘as applicable to private or business houses’, the editor suggested a combination of Mrs Gordon’s Decorative Electricity and A. Bromley Holmes’s more technical engineering volume Practical Electric Lighting.117 But even after the ‘Ladies’ Column’ was dropped from volume 2 of Lightning in July 1892, the term ‘Decorative Electricity’ was one of a series of variants used by the editors as a subject header for (less obviously gender-specific) articles on aesthetic issues, though not necessarily carrying Alice Gordon’s meaning for the term (see illustration). The commentary to ‘Decorative Electricity’ in Lightning for 14 July 1892 suggested plausibly that domestic interior displays at the Crystal Palace Electric Exhibition were the parts most warmly appreciated by the general public and indeed this was where ‘especially the feminine part of it, really felt itself at home.’ Free from technicalities (a presumptively male province), they could compare the ‘highest artistic efforts’ of the leading suppliers of decorative fittings including a ‘hundred and one mysterious devices’ for concealing electric light in unexpected places so as to give ‘soft and novel effects’. Although perhaps implying that the room furnished in the illustration (from an unnamed supplier) met this description of Mrs Gordon’s interpretation of ‘Decorative Electricity’, the editorial criticized the pair of wall-brackets on either side of the fireplace as ‘relics of a pre-Wildean age of symmetry’. And as ‘mortals of ordinary calibre’ liked to sit with their faces towards the fire-place, the light ‘should always be so arranged as to come from behind’, ostensibly not the case with most lamps in this illustration.118 Another article entitled ‘Decorative Electricity’ on 22 September 1892 was similarly inflected with references to Wildean aesthetic critique, just as Alice Gordon’s Fortnightly article on ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’ had been in February 1891. Wilde’s famous remark that there was ‘nothing new under the sun’ epitomized the seemingly characteristic expression of early 1890s ‘English’ taste through the art of ancient Japan, India and Assyria, the ‘barbaric simplicity’ of Viking silver and the delicacy of Louis Quinze. It was the lattermost style that characterized the old French Brass and ormolu chandelier featured as a highlight of artistic lighting in ‘that magnificent abode of luxury’, 6 Carlton House Terrace in London. This was the newly acquired and recently redecorated home of the American hostess ‘Mrs [Louise] McKay’, and her Irish-American husband John McKay (1831–1902), the silver and telegraph magnate. Their elegant and lavish electric fittings were explored in rapturous

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terms in several ensuing articles under various headings pertaining to ‘art’ and ‘luxury’.119 Emphasizing the importance of aesthetic developments in the USA, Lightning reported that determined efforts were being made by New York’s Electric Construction and Supply Company to render ‘artistic’ forms of its Ward arc lamp, enjoining British readers to abandon their prejudice against the indoor usage of the arc lamp.120 Indeed, interest in ‘decorative’ electric lighting in the USA was developed by the General Electric Company for the Chicago Exhibition at which Mrs Gordon’s book was displayed. But the practice of ‘decorative’ lighting deployed was much broader and diverse, incorporating both spectacular multicolour displays highlighting the glory of the lamp as well as the luxuriant, pseudo-antiquarian devices recommended by Mrs Gordon. In this regard the elaborate twenty-four panelled leaflet issued by General Electric for the Chicago Columbia Exhibition (known also colloquially as the ‘World’s Fair’), the company claimed that it had ‘no rival’. Concocting a lineage for decorative illumination that extravagantly excluded the preceding fifteen years and the contributions of all but its own employee, Thomas Edison, General Electric announced that the ‘artistic luminous embellishment of interiors’ was only made possible by its ‘recent’ discovery of the sub-division of the electric light. But now this new element in the ‘art of the interior decorator’ transcended all things luminous: By means of our miniature lamps of variegated colors, highly ornate effects are now possible. The lamps may be sunk into the delicate architectural tracery of the ballroom wall, hidden in the foliage of its shrubs and plants, strewn among the ornaments of the drawing-room, or made to act the part of the wax candle and gas jet without their disadvantages. Arranged in letters they may be made up into mottoes, be worked into heraldic devices, or combined into magic patterns of bewildering splendor. Luminous columns, garlands of brilliancy, festoons and cascades of prismatic light, glorious vistas of lucent beauty, all are now possible with the miniature electric lamp.121

Accounts of the electricity on display at the Chicago World’s Fair indicated the demand for new luxurious forms of electrical illumination had been a significant stimulus to growth in the scale of electrical supply in the USA. J. R. Cravath suggested in the US Review of Reviews for spring 1893 that, per square foot to be lighted, the Exposition had a capacity for electrical illumination ‘undreamed of ’ a few years earlier, attributing this to the demand created by the quality and convenience of the electric light and its adaptability to decorative lighting.122 In response to the growing interest in decorative lighting nurtured by the Chicago Exhibition, the editor of New York’s Engineering Magazine wrote to Edison’s former assistant William J. Hammer on 5 June 1893, asking him to write a piece on ‘Decorative Electric Lighting: Artistic Possibilities of the Incandescent Lamp’. Although Hammer had been Edison’s celebrated implementer of this broader notion of decorative lighting at the greatest exhibitions during the pre-

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vious decade (Paris 1881, Crystal Palace 1882, Berlin 1884, Ohio 1888 and Paris 1889), Hammer evidently declined this invitation.123 Instead, in the August issue a piece appeared from the pen of Frederick A. Perrine entitled ‘Electricity in the Home and Office’ which discussed how ‘the housewife may delight her friends and family by her dainty conceits of decoration about her lamps and chandelier with no fear of fires.’124 While the interests and behaviour of the female homemaker seems nearly as central to American discussions of decorative electricity as those in Britain, expertise on this subject was less obviously spoken in the female voice. Indeed the term ‘decorative’ electric light was later re-appropriated at the ‘Golden Jubilee’ of Edison’s most famous innovation within the technological development of tantalum lamps and the Edison Mazda lamp (the artistic female iconography associated with the latter will be explored in Chapter 7). In Britain, while the focus on electric light as a luxury amenable to the decorative feminine arts helped to recruit important upper-middle-class and aristocratic consumers to domestic electric lighting in the early 1890s, the excitement about ‘decorative’ electricity did not long outlast Alice Gordon’s involvement in the field. To promote electric lighting as a domestic commodity affordable by all householders, her successors downplayed the luxuriant qualities of the electric light in order to represent it as being within the aspirations and budgets of the many. While this task became much easier in 1893 when the Swan-Edison patent expired, thus allowing competitors to sell much cheaper lamps, this mere economic fact did not compel all domestic consumers – especially women – to even want to adopt electric light in their homes.125 Recognizing this resilient challenge, female promoters of electricity emphasized the integral nature of electric lighting with the new economical modern home to discourage any sense that the decision about the new illuminant was a matter in which they had much free choice. Take, for example, the well-connected author Dorothy Constance Bayliff who followed the career of her sister, a columnist for Queen, in writing for Woman before adopting the publishing identity of ‘Mrs Peel’ upon marriage to the electrical engineer Charles Peel in 1894.126 As with Alice Gordon’s career, Mrs Peel’s enthusiastic patronage of domestic electrical light can only be explained by her marital connection to the electrical industry. Following her relatively penurious experiences of setting up home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire after the departure of the household servant, Dorothy became a specialist writer on domestic life for Constable’s New Home Series. In the preface to her first such work, The New Home: treating of the arrangement, decoration, and furnishing of a house, published in 1898, she responded to the great interest in the ‘house beautiful’ among the ‘furniture columns’ of contemporary ladies’ magazines by showing how such a house could be attained by ‘the average man and woman’ with a

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moderate income who desired ‘as healthy, comfortable and artistic a home’ as their means permitted.127 Treating the subject of lighting as being so important as to require a complete chapter, she allowed – unlike Mrs Gordon – that for many homes in the countryside or in urban areas where no supply company operated, the installation of electric light was not yet feasible. Thus she encouraged her readers to use older illuminants of gas and oil in wall-brackets of ‘artistic design’ and in ornamental standard lamps screwed to the floor to ‘diffuse a good light throughout the room’. Nevertheless Mrs Peel opined that in regard to health, safety, convenience, economy and protection of furnishing, there was ‘undoubtedly no light which in any way comes up to electric light’, even if her text explicitly showed unshaded lights as a commonplace feature of the home.128 When the second edition of The New Home appeared in 1903, Mrs Peel claimed that since consumption of electricity had increased greatly in the preceding five years, more attention was now given to fittings, noting that ‘some beautiful electroliers’ were now available in metal enriched with enamel. The problem of expense had not gone away though, and she encouraged readers to be frugal, even suggesting that servants should only be given gas-lighting in their quarters as they so exasperatingly failed to turn off electric lights when leaving a room. Although the arrival of the new, highefficiency Nernst lamp looked set to solve the economic challenges to the electric light, Mrs Peel warned that it produced a ‘rather glaring white light’. Echoing the words of Mrs Gordon, she warned that this required the use of ‘judicious shading’ in sitting rooms – matching the precautions already applied to older filament lighting, which she generally recommended be covered with a frosted glass globe to ensure that the brightly glowing filament was not visible to the eye.129 Evidently, however, the huge swathes of silk covering bare bulbs was no longer a feature of the artistic horizon for Mrs Peel’s electricity; both the sensibilities of lighting and furniture had moved on considerably by the dawning of the Edwardian era. Subsequent promotions of electric lighting devoted less attention to the ‘artistic’ placing and covering of the electric light as it became literally part of the furniture of the home: electric lighting took on a supporting role, displaced from the central position that it held in its first decade or so of domestic employment. Nevertheless, the issue of the artistic possibilities of electric light did not disappear in the twentieth century. Even while the campaign to persuade householders to adopt electricity in their homes broadened to the possibilities of labour-saving gadgets, home electrification was resisted by gas-users. The Electrical Development Association issued a generic lecture for all its female activists in the ‘home lighting campaign’, addressing gatherings of women in the early 1930s. This lecture listed the artistic advantages of electric light as at least on a par with its alleged greater economy, health benefits and all-round convenience;

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lantern slides accompanied this lecture giving detailed advice on the ‘prevention of glare and gloom’ by turning the ‘raw light’ of an incandescent lamp into an ‘attractive decorative scheme of the room’.130 In anonymizing their contribution, these later generations of industry campaigners did not acknowledge the genealogy of such expertise in the work of Mrs Gordon, Mrs Peel and their ilk: skills in decorative lighting were treated as part of a natural, un-authored evolution in lighting technology that dated back to cave-dwelling ancestors. But we need not repeat the erasure of women’s expertise; the fact that we do not now have bare light bulbs glaring at us from the ceiling is, at least to some identifiable extent, a result of the work of electrical engineers’ spouses. Insofar as the electric light has been fully domesticated within the household order since the disappearance of gas illumination in homes in the 1950s, we must recognize this as result of the expertise of Alice Gordon, Dorothy Peel and others. Before becoming a ubiquitous feature of the home, we must not forget that the domestication of electricity required the electric light first to be made an elegant luxury, then an elegant economy, before disappearing into the furniture of the home, and since then, barely being noticed at all – the ultimate success in domestication.

Conclusion When the business of electricity supply was represented by a dozen or a score of central stations, the British public but showed its usual conservative spirit by its unwillingness to adopt electric light. It was argued – and with justice at that time – that this form of light was a luxury when a similar amount of illumination could be obtained by other means at half the costs. It was contended, with too much insistence, it is true, but yet with some reason, that electric light as supplied from a central station was unreliable and finally the tale was hazarded in ignorance that the glare of electric lamps was bad for the eyesight, that it injured the complexion of the fairer sex temporarily if not permanently, and that it was dangerous to allow into one’s house a mysterious force concerning whose very nature those who had studied the matter were ignorant. In spite of these objections by cautious householders and their wives, the “infant” fought its way onward, and soon arrived at lusty manhood. ‘Popularity of the Electric Light’, Electrician, 1899.131

By the time that Mrs Peel published the second edition of her New Home the electric light in Britain was no longer merely an extravagance for the rich, foolish or adventurous. But even before then, the active role of women in promoting aestheticized versions of it was being erased by the electrical industry’s own in-house journalism. While the Electrician’s analysis of ‘Popularity of the Electric Light’ in 1899 recalled the difficult days when electric light was much more expensive than gas and evoked complaints of women due to its unbecom-

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ing qualities, it nevertheless sought to anthropomorphize the electric light as a self-sufficient ‘infant’ – doubtless a reference to Punch’s baby ‘Electricity’ from June 1882 (see Chapter 2)132 – inevitably moving towards successful maturity. By writing of the electric light as having ‘forced its way onward’, this editorial obscured the radical shift in the form and prospects of the technology in the transition from arc to incandescent lighting, accomplished by Edison, Swan etc., and the subsequent endeavours of Alice Gordon, Dorothy Peel and others in overcoming the aesthetic concerns of potential female consumers. By removing from the narrative of electric light the discretionary advocacy of such activities and by dismissing resistance to the electric light as an absurd anxiety, the success of the electric light was thereby presented as inevitable. We can thus see another way in which reference to human agency – in all its gendered complexity – was erased from the story of the domestication of the electric light. Yet as much as this tale of the ‘infant’ might appear to epitomize the modernist themes of the technologization of life by ubiquitous electricity, I suggest that such reliance on anthropomorphism of electricity to tell this tale is identifiable as a distinctly romantic phenomenon. In the next and final chapter, we will look at this phenomenon of anthropomorphism in a broader perspective and consider how male and female representations of electricity (and electric light) were deployed by a wide range of advocates of electrification to suggest – in a variety of ways – that the ambiguous character of electricity had been tamed (domesticated) into a form which was allegedly destined to create a form of convenient domestic servant and invisible source of domestic comfort. Ironically, as we shall see, such heavily aestheticized symbolic representations of electricity did not necessarily convince: the campaign by Maud Lancaster with her husband Edward in 1914 to allow the electrical fairy to do more than just light the lamps was rejected by many women who long continued to use the much-maligned ‘dirty’ technology of gas for cooking and heating.133 And even after then, those at the heart of the electrical industry were not all convinced that electric light was better for luxurious home life than more traditional forms. In 1921, electrical engineer Alexander Pelham Trotter admitted that, ‘for domestic lighting, nothing can compare for comfort, beauty and efficiency with good candles’. And since then the candle has indeed lingered indefinitely as the illumination of choice for many enjoying the post-Wildean delights of epicurean life in the metropolis and village alike. 134

7 PERSONIFYING ELECTRICITY: GENDERED ICONS OF UNCERTAIN IDENTITY

In the last seventy years or so […] the new facts discovered have been so numerous and remarkable, their applications so curious and important, that electricity has been compared to a kind fairy, of whom it was only necessary to ask miracles to have them realised. Edmund Atkinson, Natural Philosophy, 1872.1 …there are persons who will not fail to warn us that we shall be blown sky-high, or shrivelled up to a cinder some day, if once we let such a mysterious stranger into our houses. Ascott R. Hope, Wonders of Electricity, 1881.2

From the 1880s to the 1920s, electricity was personified in remarkable range of literary and iconographic forms in industrial cultures across Europe and North America. Just as the ‘what is electricity?’ debate was more or less coextensive with the arrival of electricity in everyday public life, the flourishing pictorial culture of anthropomorphized electricity was also more or less coextensive with attempts to domesticate electricity in the home. Just as there were many mutually incompatible answers to the question ‘what is electricity?’, the promoters and popularizers of the electrical life generated an extraordinarily diverse and dissonant array of quasi-human forms in which to present electricity. While indicative of the fertile yet elusive character of this mysterious agency, the more important point for this book is that the effort of producing recognizably human images of electricity in this period was clearly tied to the project of presenting electricity as a congenial presence in the home – rather than a perturbing ‘mysterious stranger’. This final chapter extends the theme of a gendered visual culture of electricity explored in the previous chapter by mapping the diverse sources and forms of electrical personification, both male and female. In contrast to much extant scholarship on this topic I show that this iconography was not necessarily dominated by female forms (fairies, angels, servants goddesses etc.), nor necessarily – 197 –

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always sexualized. The male images, much less studied hitherto, were available in various forms: benign or mischievous, mythological or comical, elfin or gigantic. Moreover the origins of these images lay in both Western and non-Western traditions ranging from Roman Catholicism and Shakespeare to Greek mythology and the ‘Arabian Nights’. Such was their cultural significance that they were nigh on ubiquitous. These anthropomorphizations of the electric agency showed up in a remarkably wide variety of places: not just advertising in handbooks of domestic electricity, such as Alice Gordon’s Decorative Electricity (1891) but also in engineering iconography, exhibition architecture, popular fiction and litigation literature. I will argue that that one point of commonality between them is that they served to depict electricity dedicated – if not necessarily completely tamed – to promoting the cultural benefits of electrical technology, as an agreeable and helpful associate in the domestic and public cultures of electrical life. For the suppliers of electrical equipment (for example the Edison companies) and for the promoters of domestic electricity (the Gordons and Lancasters) such depictions were, I suggest, valuable rhetorical tools in countering concerns that electricity might be a reckless villain or glaring interloper at loose in the home. To show the cultural-historical specificity of these issues I pinpoint the chronological range of visual depictions as starting with the rise of electric lighting in the 1880s and disappearing mostly by the 1930s when electricity had reached the point and desirability that it no longer needed to be actively promoted. We can also see that these personifications were not simply a cultural product of the process of electrification but partisanly associated with the electrical industry,3 especially those seeking to promote the widespread adoption of electricity in the home. It was conversely challenged by the rival gas industry in ways not previously acknowledged: electricity did not have a self-evident monopoly as the benign force of public and domestic life. With the exception of France,4 the international fading of this anthropomorphized iconography from adult culture left the human personification of electricity as a feature of children’s writing and comic-book culture.5 The first section considers the standard literature on personifications of electricity in the contexts of the international exhibitions at Chicago in 1893 and Paris in 1900 to place in an international context the peculiarly French tradition of la fée électricité and Julie Wosk’s historiography of electrical goddesses. I then move to considering the great international range of iconographies of electricity to show the heterogeneity of forms and agendas of female personification, linking these to diverse and changing cultural meanings of ‘electricity’. The fourth section considers the male manifestations of electricity rarely ever noted by historians to examine the distinctive purposes of granting electricity such forms as Ariel, Puck, wizard, imp, or Aladdin’s genie, noting also the popular Scottish writer Charles R. Gibson’s account of electricity as a ‘slave’ and ‘wizard’. This

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chapter finishes by comparing Edison’s male personification of electricity for women’s consumption in 1912 with the use of the ‘electric fairy’ in the collaboration of Maud Lancaster and her spouse, the power station engineer, Edward Lancaster in Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning (1914) to highlight the ways in which their ambitions for the domestication of electricity were not accomplished.6 For a final ironic touch, I relate this to Anne Clendinning’s evidence that contemporary gas companies, rather more successfully, used ‘Mr Therm’ to persuade women to cook and heat British homes by gas instead of electricity. To start with I discuss how two major depictions of electricity feature in the historical literature on electricity: the goddess and the fairy. Emanating from the USA and France but also apparent in the UK, these both gendered electricity with particular forms of ‘feminine’ identity.

Exhibiting Electricity: Gendered Ambiguity in Display Upon repairing to the parlour the guests saw Mr. Hammer’s little sister, May, dressed in white and mounted upon a pedestal, representing the ‘Goddess of Electricity’: tiny electric lamps hung in her hair, and were also suspended as earrings, while she held a wand surmounted by a star, and containing a very small electric lamp ‘Electrical Diablerie’, New York World, 3 January 1885.7 … a strange, crackling, condensed laughter resounded, the laughter of the Fairy Electricity. Just like morphine in the boudoirs of 1900, she triumphed at the Exposition; she was born of the heavens, like true kings. The public laughed at the words ‘Danger of Death’ written in the pylons; it knew that Electricity cured everything, even the ‘neuroses’ fashionable at the time. It was progress, the poetry of the rich and the poor; it bestowed light in abundance. Paul Morand, 1900, 1931.8

A significant body of literature on electrification in the nineteenth century, especially from France, alludes to the ubiquity of the electric fairy – la fée électricité. This genial fiction was anthropomorphically endowed with the capacity to enact, and metaphorically explain, the otherwise mysterious workings of electricity. Its origins are obscure, but reference to it in French sources is apparent from at least Adolphe Ganot’s Cours Elementaire de Physique (1859); the English translation of this as the good or kind ‘fairy of electricity’ is quoted in the epigraph that starts this chapter. The French historians Alain Beltran and Patrice Carré argue that la fée électricité was adopted as a sort of mascot by the French electrical industry in the various international (industrial) exhibitions at which electricity featured prominently from the 1870s onwards; especially at the 1881 Electrical Exhibition in Paris. Rather than examining the gendered assumptions underpinning

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this representation of electricity as la fée, however, Beltran and Carré characteristically treat this character is an unproblematic part of their historiography. Thus the fairy appears without irony in their title: La fée et la servante, and is to this day a relatively unremarkable reference point in French culture.9 This creature and variations upon it drew upon the new quasi-romantic iconography of industrial art between 1880 and 1914 as Europe and America flourished at the intersection of electrification and Art Nouveau (le Style Modern in France, Jugendstil in Germany). As Marina Warner points out the decorative and commercial arts adopted an iconography of sensuous and otherworldly female forms that revealed the ubiquitous assumption of the cultural availability of the female body for moulding into convenient iconic representation. Female personifications were created for a range of technologies intimately involved in the transformation of French culture. Thus Warner observes, for example, friezes on the fin-de-siècle Hotel de Ville in Paris deploying neoclassical female figures to represent gas (Le Gaz), photography, electricity and steam power.10 In this vein Philippe Julian has argued that la fée électricité was the presiding spirit of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, saturated as it was in the strongly female imagery of Art Nouveau. Visited by approximately forty-eightmillion people, the most spectacular feature of the Exposition was the Palais d’Electricité. Its fairyland wonders especially foregrounded the magic of the tamed natural force: at night it made a dazzling impression, illuminated by 5,000 multicoloured incandescent light bulbs.11 The French writer Paul Morand saw the exhibition as a twelve-year-old and three decades later recalled it being dominated by the ‘laughter of the Fairy Electricity’. Revealingly, however, in the principal statuary of the Exposition, neither of the two predominant personifications of electricity were fairy-like. Most obviously, the ‘Spirit of Electricity’ placed directly atop the Palace’s emblematic inscription of ‘1900’ was a dynamic female nude – a triumphant warrior princess not a benevolent pixie. She rode in a fiery chariot with raised arms holding the reins of a pair of hippogriffs (fantasy creatures that travelled at the speed of lightning), crowning the fairyland architecture in unworldly pure white, her dramatic figure projected showers of multicoloured flames visible far afield.12 In fact, not only was la fée électricité not an explicit feature of the Exhibition’s iconography, but the other personification of electricity on display was not even unambiguously female to all observers. A writer for the British Electrical Review in May 1900 reported that taking a most ‘prominent place’ among the Port Binet’s adornments was a statue of Electricity with regal headgear and metallic orientalized dress. On the right of the entrance, immediately within the arch, stands the statue which is intended to typify electricity… the presiding genius of the Exhibition. We feel bound to congratulate the artist on the result of his effort. The figures stand upon

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two immense electro-magnets representing the power which supports and animates it. The costume is a closely fitting tunic of Assyrian style which moulds itself closely to a body, of which the sex is doubtful...13

Indeed, a certain form of conventionalized statuesque androgyny might be seen in the body’s posture, and the positioning of its arms gave the observer the impression of ‘the stress of a galvanizing current’ acting through the body. Moreover, the ‘repose of the features and the sphinx-like calm of the whole face’ also gave the figure the ‘appearance of peaceful and reliant strength’.14 Revealingly, historians have not reached a definitive conclusion on the gender identity this figure although, in his account of the 1900 Exposition, Julian identifies the model for this statue as Salammbô, the virgin priestess of Carthage made famous by Flaubert’s eponymous novel of 1862.15 The reluctance of the Electrical Review columnist to concede a female identity to this personification of electricity’s benign power is indicative of the way in which British electrical culture did not presume that electricity necessarily had a feminine form. Indeed British visitors tended not to anthropomorphize electricity to the extent that native French commentators so readily did. The Times’ Paris correspondent admired the ‘fairyland’ qualities of the Palais and, on 9 June 1900 looked forward to seeing the ‘magical power’ of electricity in action, but passing no comment on the electrical figures on display let alone imputing any gender characteristics to them.16 In Henry Adams’s famous visit to the Paris 1900 Exposition, described in ‘the Dynamo and the Virgin’ similarly no mention is made of the fairy, warrior or guardian of electricity. Instead, he brought to bear his own personal obsessions with Marian imagery of French Catholic cathedrals and the antecedent pagan figure of Diana of Ephesus. At the Palace of Electricity, Adams lingered in the great hall of dynamos, mesmerized by the silently spinning, forty-foot generating machines that became a ‘moral force’ to which visitor might pray as to previous goddesses. Yet his growing interest in the hegemony of energy physics prompted him to declare that he ‘cared nothing for the sex of the dynamo until he could measure its energy’.17 Clearly Adams did not share Morand’s experience that the fairy of electricity dominated the exhibition. The Paris exposition was not Adams first encounter with the dynamo. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, he had already recorded how millions of visitors acquiesced stoically in the un-troubling mysteriousness of its operations.18 Others attending the 1893 exhibition would have been more keenly aware of the giant goddesses that permeated its statuary. As Serafina Bathrick notes, the Chicago exhibition was dominated by the monumental Woman, representing a ‘nurturant guardian’ whose symbolic presence served to root new industrial cities or exposition in the traditions of ancient cultures. Most famous among these goddess figures prior to the Chicago World’s Fair was the Statue of Liberty,

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designed in France by Auguste Bartholdi and installed in New York Harbour in 1886.19 This figure held a powerful electric light aloft in her right arm, redolent of the classical Greek allegory of the blazing torch that could represent either or both of the virtues of truth and justice.20 This moralized figure served as the apotheosis of progress through electricity and was interpreted in various ways across the USA and Europe in the late nineteenth century. The earliest such accounts in the USA pertain to social events staged to furnish publicity for electricity. In the fancy-dress element of such parties, it was not unusual for either an adult woman or a young girl to dress up as ‘electrical goddess’ – wearing electrical lights around the head, and sometimes adopting the posture of the Statue of Liberty, with an incandescent lamp held up in the right hand. As both Carolyn Marvin and Julie Wosk have observed, a very early display of this was a specially staged photograph of Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt at the glamorous Vanderbilt Ball in New York on 26 March 1883. 21 Another example of this is the famous dinner party of electrical ‘diablerie’ cited in the epigraph above. This was organized by Edison associate William Hammer on New Year’s Eve 1884 to impress his male colleagues with the comprehensive domestication of electricity for the purposes of cooking, lighting and entertainment, the only female presence being his sister obliged to dress up in the mode of a goddess. In this sort of context we can see that ‘goddess’ seems to have been used as a somewhat jesting or ironic appellation for male party conversation and fantasy. 22 In chapter 3 of Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, the historian of art Julie Wosk appeals in part to this goddess theme to articulate the nature of personified electricity in the nineteenth century. She argues that women appeared in emblematic roles both as ‘dazzling goddesses celebrating the emerging electric age’ and as ‘seductive sirens’ whose bodies and identities were wondrously and ‘sometimes frighteningly’ transformed through electricity. Certainly we can agree with Wosk that these contrasting images gave some useful shape to the century’s ‘hopes and fears about electricity’ and embodied ambivalent views about the status of women. While rightly hinting at tensions in the iconography between abstract idealized women and their material embodied counterparts, her account somewhat understates the sheer diversity of fantasy female identities involved.23 As we shall see in the next section, some such representations were closer to angels, while others were more easily-read amenable servants in the mould of la fée électricité , using magic powers to grant human requests. While there are – almost unavoidably – sexual symbols in the portrayal of these epitomes of electrical personification, by no means all appear as overtly seductive or sirenlike in luring users of electricity into their domain. As we shall see, some of these depictions indeed appear designed to allay fears about the potentially destructive nature of electricity, pointing viewers to utopian electrical futures towards

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which the citizens might legitimately aspire. While these images do capture an ambivalence about women, this is specifically from a male perspective; we will see next that female writers were by no means so readily inclined to attribute solely a female sex to electrical personifications.

Diverse Female Personifications of Electricity Now, do you believe in, and care for, my fairy-land? […] Can you picture tiny sunbeam-waves of light and heat travelling from the sun to the earth? Do you care to know how another strange fairy, ‘Electricity’, flings the lightning across the sky and causes the rumbling thunder? Arabella Buckley, The Fairy Land of Science, 1879.24

The use of female fantasy figures to help sell domestic commodities in late Victorian culture has been studied in detail.25 And certainly there is a cognate culture of magical figures (mostly female) in popular appreciations of late-nineteenth-century British science. Nicola Bown focuses particularly on the role of fairies in this context, arguing that these fictive figures played a crucial cultural role in relieving nineteenth-century anxiety of modernization. On her account, Victorians felt ‘oppressed by their responsibilities, fearful of the future, and doubtful of the unalloyed results of progress’ and so dreamed publicly of fairies who might use their charms to bring back the ‘wonder and mystery’ of the pre-industrial world.26 These little figures also served to re-enchant the process through which children could learn science, as is evident in the above quotation from Arabella Buckley’s The Fairy Land of Science (1879). In Buckley’s internationally-read work, all the operations of the natural world were represented as interventions by these charmingly benign creatures; even the ‘strange fairy’ of electricity who brought the scarier phenomena of outdoor electricity.27 But while such writings might have primed future household consumers to appreciate magical imagery in electricity in the 1880s and 1890s, there is no obvious link to be drawn from Buckley’s work to the domestication of technology in that later period. Not only is there no technological strand in Buckley’s natural historical work, but her fairies were both male and female, albeit verging on the androgynous and primly desexualized. A more obvious source for British, American and, indeed, French female electrical iconography is the continental art world mapped out by Monnier-Raball and others in Autour de l’électricité : un siecle d’affiche et de design. As indicated above, a key theme that they highlight is the neoclassical tradition of painting the ‘truth’ as a female nude or seminude, typically with right arm raised with an artificial light aloft to illuminate a scene with the moral virtues of truth and or justice. Late-eighteenth-century engravings by H. F. Gravelot depict a semi-clad ‘La Vérité’ raising her right arm towards the blazing, redemptive rays of the sun. This

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was reworked in Jules-Joseph Lefebvre’s 1870 celebrated oil painting of the same name, ‘La Verité’, featuring a naked woman who holds an illuminated circular mirror aloft in her right hand, shining a gaslight back into the eyes of the viewer. Monnier-Raball et al. draw attention to the obvious congruities of form between these neoclassical allegories and the earliest artwork epitomizing the advent of electric light. For example, a wood engraving, ‘Die Elektrische Licht’ (1881), by the German artist Ludwig Kandler28, depicts a goddess-like figure, classically clad but bare-breasted (implying a motherly role), floating at cloud-level with lightning beneath her and cherubs on clouds behind her playing with the telephone; both points were soon to be stock features of personified electricity. In her right hand she holds a brilliantly glowing electric light powered by a battery, almost like a halo above her head. Yet, soon afterwards, another quite different depiction of electricity can be found in summer 1883 on the front of a catalogue for the Internationale Elektrische Ausstellung in Vienna; rather than a floating Teutonic goddess, this winged angel is securely grounded, bearing a starlight on her head that signals kinship to the muse of astronomy, Urania. While she has cherubic figures and a motor at her feet, instead of holding up the light of truth, she carries the wire that passed electrical power from the dynamo to the exhibit.29 It was this Austrian model, complete with playful telephonic cherubs and head-star (but wingless) that was soon borrowed for the front material in La Lumière Electrique, a Paris-based electrical periodical produced for both popular readers and aspiring electrical specialists. As noted (without explanation)

Figure 7.1. This angelic muse figure appeared as the benign epitome of harnessed electricity from the January 1884 issue of this popular French periodical from January 1884. Source: Frontispiece for La Lumière Electrique, January 1884. T. du Moncel (ed.), La Lumière Electrique: Journal Universel d’Electricité (Paris: Aux Bureaux du Journal, 1884). By permission of Edward Boyle Library, University of Leeds.

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by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, early volumes of this journal from 1879 had only plain frontispieces or illustrations of electrically illuminated scenes.30 But, from January 1884, readers opening the front page of this journal were presented with a neoclassical image of a fully-clad female. She is clearly a divine servant, who calmly takes control of electricity drawn from a hydroelectric generator and also tamed from lightning. She mediates this power via the cable she stoically holds, transferring power to nearby industrial machinery and, implicitly, to the rest of the world, as epitomized by the globe under her feet. Trapped in place as the untiring servant available to serve human needs both day and night, this female figure is by no means the mysterious intercessionary fairy; indeed her upward turned face has echoes of the Virgin looking to heaven.31 One background detail of Lumière Electrique is worth noting: in the distance stands an early version of the Statue of Liberty, plans for which would have been well-publicized when the new frontispiece for the journal was being designed for the January 1884 issue.32 The inclusion of this vast, torch-bearing statue in the iconography staked a claim for electricity as the progressive agent of enlightened liberation. It also staked a claim for La Lumière Electrique to be a journal of transatlantic scope, bringing in a nationalist reference point of immediate relevance to American electrical practitioners, whilst reminding them of the statue’s origins in the design and technology of France. This is significant since, from January 1887, soon after the installation of the Bartholdi statue in New York Harbour, the Lumière Electrique frontispiece was transformed to

Figure 7.2. A newly bewinged fairy now serves as the personification of electricity, grasping tamed lightning in her left hand and holding up the torch of truth and justice in her right. Replacement frontispiece for La Lumière Electrique, January 1887. T. du Moncel (ed.), La Lumière Electrique: Journal Universel d’Electricité (Paris: Aux Bureaux du Journal, 1887). By permission of Edward Boyle Library, University of Leeds.

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show a new female figure: the winged fée électricité, floating liberated above the earth. While capturing a tamed force of lightning in her left hand, this figure borrows the torch motif from the Bartholdi statue by holding an electric light aloft in her right hand, symbolizing liberty, truth and freedom from danger: powerful associations for use in electrical futurism.33 In the following decade this generic image of the fairy of electricity was appropriated and reworked by electrical organizations in Britain, USA, France, Denmark and Germany. For example, advertising by the British ‘artistic’ light fittings company Faraday and Sons deployed the image of a classically-dressed, free-floating female bearing an electric light. This figure, symbolically illuminating the entire globe with her right hand with all hints of the dangers of lightning removed, adorns both the 1891 and 1892 editions of Alice Gordon’s Decorative Electricity (see Chapter 5).34 In the following decade, UK branches of General Electric adopted a more luxuriantly hedonistic manifestation of this to promote the Edison ‘Mazda Electric Light’ as the best illumination for homes; a vividly-clad figure holds the new lamp in both hands as the ‘Sun’s only rival’ for illuminating the earth. Some national stylization is evident in other appropriations of this figure. A more assertive valkyrie was used by the German branch of Edison in Berlin, the

Figure 7.3. A reworking of the electrical fairy by the British ‘artistic’ light fittings company Faraday and Sons. SOURCE: Mrs. Gordon, Decorative Electricity (1891), front matter (unpaginated).

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Allgemeines Elektricität Gesellschaft, circa 1893: this aggressively bare-breasted and laurel-clad figure rides the winged wheel of fortune looking the viewer straight in the eye, illuminating the night with a bare Edison bulb in her raised right arm.35 In Denmark a radically different version of this figure was deployed on the socialist red banner of the Copenhagen trades union of electrical workers in 1893. The red-caped goddess (not a winged fairy) with electrical light raised in her right hand and capturing lightning with her left hand proclaims ‘Kundskab er Magt’ (Knowledge is Power) to symbolize the radical ambitions of skilled electrical workers.36 In the same year some distinctly angelic, winged forms appeared in a US General Electric brochure to defend Edison’s proprietary rights as the allegedly ‘sole inventor’ of the electric incandescent lamp. A looserobed personification of electricity holds an Edison lamp to illuminate North America, assisted by a group of cherubs who hold battery cells and lift the laurels of victory over her starry head. This light of truth and justice causes two dark ugly ghouls – evidently Edison’s rival patent claimants – to retreat, defeated, into the dark shadows below.37 In surveying the extraordinarily protean moral character of this female personification of electricity, we should also note that neoclassical figures of truth and justice were not only used to resolve disputes within the electrical industry. As Monnier-Raball et al. observe, such female personifications were used to codify the rival response of the gas industry. For example, the French Société du Gaz Acétylène adopted a similar figure of liberty in 1895, brandishing aloft the new acetylene lamp in her right arm to despatch rival forms of electrical, coal gas and paraffin light into vanquished obscurity. By contrast with France, however, the gas industry in Britain did not use such figures until much later, and primarily to promote gas cookery rather than gas lighting. And as we shall see below, that personification was gendered as ‘Mr Therm’. And it is to the origins of male persona in electrical iconography – a topic barely touched upon by previous historians of electric fairies and goddesses – that I now turn.38

Male Personifications of Electricity: Infant, Sprite and Genie If this young spark, as is fancied by THOMSON, Turn out a true Titan-Ariel-Puck, Who, without mischief, will carry huge romps on, All I can say is, the world is in luck! ‘A Giant in Germ: what will he come to?’, Punch, 25 June 1881.39

Whereas in the Anglo-American visual culture of electro-industrial art, visual representations of electricity were for the most part personified, albeit somewhat diversely, as female such was not the case in textbooks and popular periodical

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writing. In contrast to the pervasiveness of la fée electricité’ in both French literary and visual cultures of electricity and the electrical goddess in the USA, we find much Anglophone literary narratives of electrical agency predominantly cast in male form. Some of the masculine counterparts of the electrical fairy, angel and goddess were the genie, imp and infant. We have, of course, already encountered the male personification of electricity before. We saw in Chapter 2 how Punch magazine created a resilient identity of electricity as infant male in June 1881, prompting King Coal and King Steam to wonder what his future as an adult would be. Direct reproductions of the Punch cartoon appeared in both English and French versions of Hospitalier’s Domestic Electricity for Amateurs.40. In addressing the International Health Exhibition conference on artificial lighting in 1884, Joseph Swan accused the much-criticized 1882 Electric Lighting Act of failing to recognize that electric lighting was an ‘infant and required nursing and not a dangerous adult’ in need of a restraint.41 And, as we saw in Chapter 6, by 1899 this infant was presented by the Electrician as having ‘fought its way onward’ to arrive at ‘lusty manhood’. On such a teleological anthropomorphizing of electricity as an organic male entity rested the journal’s deterministic historiography of electrification, which obscured the role of women in the process.42 In the Punch doggerel that accompanied the ‘Giant in Germ’ cartoon of June 1881, the new babe was presented satirically as a potentially growing to amalgamation not only of the pagan giant Titan, but of both Ariel and Puck too (see epigraph). As we saw in Chapter 5, the fleet character ‘Ariel’ from Shakespeare’s Tempest was frequently invoked by commentators on the speed of telegraphic communication; indeed Park Benjamin’s The Age of Electricity (1886) was inscribed to ‘Ariel and all his quality’.43 Similarly, the claim by the roguish Puck in a Midsummer Night’s Dream that he could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes was often employed by commentators on telegraphy.44 Evidently such literary allusion was intended to lend some cultural sophistication to the representation of electricity in ways that would have appealed to educated middle-class audiences targeted by the early electrical industry. To give popular appeal and metaphorical grip on the mysteries of electricity, the imagery of the male Shakespearean elfin servant was liberally adopted. But, lurking in other forms of male personification for electricity was a much more controlled – if equally mysterious – male servant from the ever popular Arabic-Syrian-Persian texts from Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.45 Comparisons had long been drawn between electrician’s capacity for wreaking miracles and Aladdin’s felicitous rubbing of the magic oil lamp to summon his obedient genie (or djinn). In meditating on the putative ‘The Fairy Land of Science’ for the Cornhill Magazine in 1862, James Hinton noted how ‘curiously the achievements of modern industry’ seemed even to surpass the imaginations of the youthful. Who, he asked rhetorically, had not been invited to compare the

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electric telegraph with the ring rubbed by Aladdin to communicate remotely and instantaneously with his genie?46 With the advent of domestic technology that could reap many more diverse marvels in the home two decades later, the comparison became all the more wide-ranging. In Electricity and Its Wonders (1881), popular writer Ascott R. Hope evoked some of the extraordinary feats attributable to electricity’s power: waking sleepers, taming horses, capturing whales, ‘ornamenting ladies with pocket batteries’, electric tricycles, hatching eggs, fostering fruit and even bringing rain. The analogy of electricity as a latterday ‘slave of the lamp’ was very close, and enhanced by one authentic analogy: ‘invisible till called upon’, he could endow human life with ‘real charms not less wonderful than those feigned in the Arabian Nights’.47 Park Benjamin’s The Age of Electricity, written for a popular audience in 1886, was as profligate in its use of metaphorical imagery as Punch. Not only did he dedicate the book to the spirit of Ariel, but appealed to his readers’ youthful experience of reading about the invocation of the ‘genie of gigantic size’ in the Arabian fables: O reader of maturer years, did not a ‘genie of gigantic size’ whom we have named Electricity, come to us - if not at the rubbing of a lamp, certainly at the rubbing of a bit of amber? And what did Aladdin’s genie do [that was] half as wonderful as ours has done? If Aladdin’s sprite could transport him from place to place, cannot ours do as much for us? and very much more, for it can carry our thoughts, even our spoken words, perhaps some day our faces. And as for the wealth it has showered upon us, who can estimate the value to humanity of the telegraph alone, all its other works aside?48

To appreciate how some readers had taken on board this quasi-exotic notion of electricity as the Arabian magical servant, Punch’s review of Mrs Gordon’s Decorative Electricity on 2 May 1891 revealed a masculine fantasy which took no cognizance of the feminine iconography of the book’s advertising discussed above: Before very long we shall all be modern Aladdins, and summon our Slave of the Lamp as a matter of course. But there is plenty of scope for imagination in devising the form of his appearance, notwithstanding, and Mrs. GORDON’s book shows us how the Genius may be compelled to present himself in a variety of pleasing and fantastic shapes.49

The notion of electricity being even more efficacious than the labours of Aladdin’s genie of the lamp was a hyperbole typically shared among numerous professionals concerned with the promotion of electricity. Such was the argument of R. Mullineux Walmsley’s 1894 semi-popular treatise on the electric current as servant that drew heavily on the work of such electrical authorities as William Ayrton, John Perry, Silvanus Thompson and William Preece. After detailing the

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industrial applications of electricity to factories, mines, workshops and building sites, he ended with the afterthought that ‘lady readers’ might be interested in learning about electrical sewing machines. Here, Walmsley wrote, we must stop and ponder instead the enduringly fascinating mystery of electricity that somehow lies unresolved, despite the manifest pliability of this ‘servant’ to serve human purposes. The orientalism of the Aladdin fable was indeed a congenial device for mitigating the strangely unknowable nature of electricity: Whether we consider the mysteries which still surround the simplest actions of this obedient servant, mysteries which have defied the searching enquiries of the subtlest intellects of our time; or turn to contemplate the marvellous range of its activities, from transmitting the feeblest whisper a thousand miles to whirling along the ponderous train on a railway; the human mind cannot but be lost in wonder and amazement, and must feel bound to confess that the servant, though willing and obedient beyond the dreams of the poet, still remains more mysterious and elusive than the magi and spirits of the Arabian nights.50

The ‘exotic’ cultural power of the Aladdin myth was profound, and developed into a visual iconography in the twentieth century. This is apparent in the illustrations for Frank Baum’s 1901 novel The Master-Key, an Aladdin-like story in which the precious boy-electrician, Rob, accidentally finds himself able to summon the ‘Demon of Electricity’; ironically the boy ends up rejecting the powers

Figure 7.4. Aladdin as the classic male personification of electricity as powerful yet obedient genie. Source: ‘Electricity: Man’s Mightiest and Readiest Servant’, a competition-winning advertisement for the Society for Electrical Development, Scientific American, 2 December 1916 (unpaginated advertising section). By permission of Edward Boyle Library, University of Leeds.

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that this supernatural being offers him since, in human hands, the advanced agency of electricity seemed conducive only to chaos and domestic strife.51 More benignly, the Aladdin motif appeared in advertising for America’s Electricity Week (2–9 December 1916), portraying electricity in the mode of gigantic subjugated colonial exotic as ‘man’s mightiest and readiest servant’.52 The motif of electricity as pliant genie was extendable further – albeit not without political and cultural difficulties – to the difficult domain of slavery. As Julie Wosk has shown, Edison used this theme in 1885 to promote claims that he had tamed electricity in popular writing for newspapers on electricity as ‘Man’s Slave.’ As David Nye has shown, the General Electric Company of the USA produced a poster for its electrical campaigning comparing the pyramid building of ancient Egypt to modern electro-technology ‘Slaves of Yesterday and Today’ circa1915.53 On the other side of the Atlantic, the popular Scottish science writer Charles Gibson, ever in need of fresh metaphors to explain the complex multifaceted nature of electricity to his diverse audiences adopted the same tactic to dramatize the idealized compliance and servitude of electricity.54 Taking the theme of domestication to its utmost extreme limits, he wrote his 1915 work Our Good Slave Electricity for both boys and girls in the nine-to-fourteen age group. This presented electricity only as the most obedient and untiring worker, completely at the behest of the human master.55 there is no question of kindness or cruelty in our picture of Electricity as a slave, for Electricity is not a living thing. Electricity is a real thing, although it is a very mysterious thing. In order to make our picture an interesting one we shall have to imagine our slave as though he had some sort of feeling. Our story will be imaginary only as regards these supposed feelings of Electricity… What then does this good slave do? Whenever you think of a slave, you think of work, and we shall see that Electricity is a very hard worker.56

Carefully distancing his fable from the horrors of the North American slave trade that were still in living memory for some, Gibson likened his electricity to Robinson Crusoe’s ‘black slave’ companion ‘Man Friday’. To show how well domesticated this masculine form of electricity he was, Gibson surveyed all the congenial wonders of the dutiful electricity in such diverse work as delicately communicating speech at a distance via the telephone, heaving electric trams along streets, lighting houses, heating rooms and even cooking food.57 Revealingly, however, while observing the male electric slave as a ‘good cook’, his anecdotes of electrical cookery extended to little more than a comment that there were some restaurants in which all cooking was done by electricity.58 In his final children’s work, Electricity as a wizard (1929), based upon his Christmas lectures under the auspices of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, Gibson returned to the theme of electricity’s identity by drawing upon

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his wartime experience in lecturing upon wireless telegraphy to both troops and civilians. The titular reference to wizardry suggested by Gibson’s brother-inlaw the Rev. W. J. Finlay Macguire of Belfast, enabled Gibson to focus on the spectacular display elements in electricity’s performance as ‘worker of wonders’ 59 However, Gibson was much more cautious in his use of anthropomorphist language than he had been in Our Good Slave Electricity, only returning to examine the wizard motif in the chapter boldly entitled ‘Aladdin’. But here Gibson’s invocation of the Arabian fable had a different message to the discussions we saw earlier: All boys and girls have been introduced to Aladdin in the Arabian Nights Tales, which, although not really “as old as the hills”, go back about one thousand years and probably further. You know the wonderful things Aladdin could do with the aid of his lamp, and the Wizard Electricity is not unlike Aladdin in that he can turn articles made of common metal into silver ones.60

This arresting chapter title belied a somewhat technical introduction to the arts of silver electroplating. It also cast the magician electricity now as Aladdin rather than his slavish genie, thus further perplexing any reader of the Gibson oeuvre seeking a definitive unitary identification of electricity with any one familiar male agency. Nevertheless in his conclusion, Gibson could but reassert: ‘Every boy and girl will surely admit that electricity is indeed a wizard.’61 The electricity industry could certainly not appropriate the Aladdin metaphor without a fight, however. During the 1930s, the use of Aladdin branding for a highly successful new generation of domestic paraffin lamps in the UK and USA was too obviously a counter-manoeuvre for the electrical industry ever to be able to monopolize symbolic domestication of the electric light through this motif.62 In the meantime, even the most avid popularizers of electricity could find themselves forced into a complicated pluralism concerning the male identity of electricity. After all, little about electricity was susceptible to a simple or consensual interpretation, sometimes not even in the works of a single author.

Electricity Incompletely Domesticated: the Wizard and Fairy that Never Came Woman presses the button and the Wizard Electricity does her bidding. Thomas Edison, ‘The Woman of the Future: a remarkable prophecy by the great inventor’, Good Housekeeping, 1912.63

As noted above, the most conspicuous attempt to harness the visual and literary culture of wizardry to the domestication of electricity was due to Thomas Edison and his associates. While often celebrating his early successes, historians have

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too often overlooked episodes in which his predictions were not fulfilled and his ambitions not substantiated. In chapter five I considered one such episode, pertaining to the interview that Edison gave to the US magazine Good Housekeeping for October 1912 about how electricity would help to make ‘The Woman of the Future’. That article contained an extraordinary double-gender identity for electricity that will usefully inform the final section of this chapter. In the interview, Edison himself explicitly referred to electricity in feminized terms as ‘the greatest of all handmaidens’, which would assist the ‘housewife’ in winning freedom from domestic chores. But this piece was accompanied by a vigorous imagery of tiny male Wizards, all running around to the woman’s command to iron, wash, cook and clean. From all the evidence in the article it would appear that these illustrations, as well as the caption: ‘Woman presses the button and the Wizard Electricity does her bidding’, are entirely due to intervention by the editorial staff. Within context, the politics of this fantasy element are clear: in order to fully persuade female Good Housekeeping readers of Edison’s message that women really could be liberated by electricity, it was crucial for them to see the domestic labour of using electrical gadgets transferred to a non-female. Edison’s identity as the saviour of women from household work was thus epitomized in microcosm of multiple mini-wizards. Clearly, personifications of domesticated electricity could have a gender identity somewhat contingent on the perspective of the writer and anticipated audience. We can now link the problematic substantiation of Edison’s radical forecast discussed in Chapter 5 to the complex gender politics of these personifications of electricity. In the earlier sections of this chapter we saw how, by the early 1900s, various versions of the ‘electrical fairy’ were deployed in advertising or professional iconography by electrical engineers to symbolize the promise that electricity would bring light, comfort and security to the domestic domain. The prospective utopia to be wrought by this electric fairy was not merely a distant possibility: a safe, clean and economic future – a domestic utopia – powered by electricity was available to those who wanted it. Electric cookers, washing machines, irons and vacuum cleaners could all now bring householders modern industrial efficiency and hygiene in the home. And yet, as we know from numerous studies, if the uptake of the electric light was far from enthusiastic in the UK, gas lighting long persisting into the 1940s, adoption of electrical technologies in the home was even less marked.64 Why was there such indifference to the charms of the electric fairy? Put another way, to whom was its symbolic appeal directed and with what (limited) efficacy? A useful case study of how the ‘electrical fairy’ was harnessed to this task of promoting household electricity as a benign agency can be found in a quasicoauthored work of an electrical engineer and spouse from 1914 that partially

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parallels the collaboration nearly two decades earlier between Alice and James Gordon. Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning: A Manual of Electricity in the Service of the Home was authored by Maud Lancaster and ‘edited’ by Edward W. Lancaster.65 Mr Lancaster (1859–1952) had started his career assisting Joseph Swan in demonstrating his electric lamps at the Paris Exhibition in 1881 and then bringing electrical light to railway stations in India. His first major encounter with the domestic electricity beyond lighting seems to have come in a lavish ‘banquet cooked by electricity’, organized by the City of London Electric Lighting Company in June 1894. The following year, as a widower, he married his cousin, Maud Lucas, who took on not only his three young children but also his advocacy of electricity in the home. According to one of her son’s biographers, Maud was fond of publicity, dividing her energies between philanthropic causes, Rosicrucianism and spiritualism, as well as cowriting the volume described rather dismissively as one that sold well as a ‘textbook for housewives’.66 The joint authorship of Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning – the Lancasters’ only such publication – is as mixed as its projected readership, and for important reasons. The authorship of British edition was identified quasi-pseudonymously as ‘Housewife (Maud Lancaster)’, whereas the US edition only identifies her as Maud Lancaster. In both editions Edward Lancaster is listed as the editor, along with his full professional membership credentials of the Institutions of Civil and Electrical Engineers. The most prominent authorial voice throughout the book is the female homemaker writing for women in a similar domestic situation about the delights and benefits concerning the many available domestic technologies for kitchen, dining room and general household use. In self-deprecating mode, Maud opens by downplaying any claim to (the male world of ) expertise, thereby appealing to a specifically female audience: The following pages are feeble efforts of mine to help my ‘sisters in distress’ and to convince them of the wonderful blessings provided for us by nature’s gift of Electricity which, aided by scientific research and inventions, is capable of doing so much toward bettering the home life.67.

She soon offers a brief explanation of electricity ‘from a woman’s point of view’, noting jauntily that it is ‘impossible for me to tell what Electricity is’ since not even the ‘greatest scientists’ could tell her how to deal with this matter. All these experts could do is explain the generation of electricity and the many methods of utilizing it for ‘the benefit of mankind’ – and indeed womankind. Significantly, juxtaposed on the opposing page is a picture with the caption ‘Electricity – the Good Fairy’, a terrestrially grounded young female figure engaging the viewer with a shy smile while pressing a light switch. By implication, the indeterminate identity of electricity – represented metaphorically as the ‘Good Fairy’ – need not be a worry to (female) readers. The

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important point was that this magical creature’s intercessionary power epitomized how householders could trust the mysterious force of electricity to supply safe and convenient forms of household technology. Yet it is not obviously Maud Lancaster who refers explicitly to the ‘good fairy of electricity’ in the narrative of Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning. It seems rather to have been a result of the editorial intervention of Edward Lancaster, whose interpolated contributions spoke to electrical power station engineers (incidentally lending professional credentials to the rest of the work). Characteristically of the genre, fantasy anthropomorphism appears primarily for male consumption in the section entitled: ‘The commercial aspect of electrical cooking’, which concerns the duty of the power station engineer to share the task of promoting electrical cooking along with manufacturers and trade journals. Lancaster opined that it now only remained for the supply engineer to open up a campaign of ‘publicity’ in favour of electricity for lighting, cooking, heating and the many other uses it could be given in every home: It is only a beginning to install lamps for lighting in a house, although an important step in the right direction, and what is wanted is an educational campaign to bring home to consumers who merely use their installation for lighting that the good fairy of electricity can do greater things than these for them.68

Contemporary reviews of the Lancasters’ book acknowledged that it had both ‘popular’ and technical dimensions – and was indeed the first serious work on the subject in English. A house writer for the Electrician observed that the ‘authoress’ had presented the material so as to ensure that the subject could be ‘thoroughly appreciated by lay readers’, while also supplying technical information for the specialist. While congratulating the ‘authoress’ for the book as a whole, criticism for unexamined citation of manufacturers’ data and the idiosyncratic calculations was directed at the editor who had palpably made ‘his influence felt’.69 Even after the First World War, the campaign to popularize the ‘all-electric kitchen’ thus advocated was re-launched several times without comprehensive success.70 Clearly the readers of the Lancasters’ Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning found it easy to resist the putatively expert recommendations of male and female authors and stuck with trusted gas – or coal – cooking technology instead. As Anne Clendinning has recently shown, the particular rise of the gas oven was accomplished by a pairing of female expertise and gendered iconography in the gas industry, mirroring that in the electrical industry from the 1890s to the 1930s. By mobilizing both a large number of female demonstrators – known colloquially as ‘demons’ – for gas cookery, Maude Brereton and her allies were able to persuade many housewives that the gas oven was a much more attractive option than the electric cooker. They were helped in this process by the cheerful androgynous iconography of Mr Therm, the ever-smiling elfin gas flame, cre-

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ated by the freelance commercial artist Eric Fraser to a commission from the gas industry, and used from the 1930s to the 1960s.71 Evidently borrowing from the same tradition of personification that previously brought the electric fairy to the home, Mr Therm helped to domesticate his own special brand of gas-powered modernity to such a degree that the electric fairy has only ever gained a limited foothold in some homes.

Conclusion The personification of electricity in human guise was a popular if rather heterogeneous strategy for promoting the consumption of electricity both in the home and on the page. The attribution of anthropomorphic forms to electricity correlates to the visual aspect of the domestication thesis that I explored in Chapter 1, showing how this powerful agency need not appear as a dangerous intruder but as a culturally familiar friend who could really be allowed into the home. It also links to the problematic identity of electricity that I discussed in Chapter 2: with so many different interpretations of what electricity might be, a visual depiction to some extent filled the void left by householders’ largely unanswered demands to know what it was that they would be consuming if they brought it into the home. In relation to Chapters 3 and 4 we see how, in most instances, such an iconography was a significant accompaniment to representations of electricity to a large range of audiences as sufficiently benign to be trusted to behave safely and obediently in the home without risk of death, damage or ill-health arising. Linking to Chapter 5 we see that the construction of futures for electrical cultures was readily supported by images of vigorous infants and progressive torch-bearing matriarchs that signalled a glorious future ahead. And finally in relation to Chapter 6, we see that there were strongly gendered aspects to the consumption of electric cultures: electricity could be represented as both male and female in different ways for both single- and mixed-sex audiences. And yet we can also see in chaos and cacophony of divergent representations of electricity, another reason why, although the luxurious electric light eventually displaced its gas rival, it did not do so in the more prosaic aspects of cooking and heating. While electrical promoters and popularizers offered a confusing array of different accounts of what electricity was as a prospective entrant to the home, their counterparts in gas could offer a much more coherent and monolithic demonstration of the identity of gas through both the well-coordinated work of the ‘gas demons’ and the single icon of ‘Mr Therm’. Thus it is that electricity has not yet been fully domesticated, and the putative ‘process of electrification’ may never yet be complete. Now la fée electricité lives on only in the uniquely powerful cultural memory of France, supported by Raoul Dufy’s extraordinarily vast (200 feet long and

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33 feet high) mural, La fée electricité. Especially commissioned by the French national electrical supply industry for the Pavilion de l’Électricité at the Paris Exposition Internationale in 1937, this depicted the benign fairy leading the progress of electricity into the future, trailing behind her a visual narrative of electricity in the preceding two-and-a-half millennia. She is assisted by floating mythological figures, with Neptune playing a key irenic role in overseeing the assimilation of electricity into history. A careful inspection of this picture reinforces the point that the history of electricity has both a strong gendered dimension and its taming involved the magic and mystery of romanticism in ways very far from narratives of the inevitable rise of electricity as a feature of modernity. At the same time, it reminds us that the free spirit of electricity was never quite fully domesticated. 72

CONCLUSION

In the foregoing pages I have explored the domestication of electricity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, comparing this experience to that of the USA. I have shown that the two-pronged process of domestication involved considerable efforts from popularizers and entrepreneurs to accomplish. This labour was required both to show the public that electricity and its lighting technologies could be both effectively understood and tamed so that householders could electrify their homes without fear, aesthetic objections or undue uncertainty about the future consequences of electrification. It is clear, however, that such enterprises were only partly successful. The attempt to find a stable characterization for electricity was most problematic of all; wide-ranging debate on the identity and behaviour of electricity lasted into the second decade of the twentieth century coexisting with anthropomorphism of electricity as a congenial agent of domestic progress. Those issues and debates disappeared from view eventually, however, as technocratic domestication brought a pragmatic solution: for those who allowed it into their home, daily consumption of electricity brought such a mundane familiarity to the mysterious agency that lingering concerns about its character and trustworthiness in the home fell away. Nevertheless there were some householders who lived out their days without adopting the new agency and its illuminating qualities, sticking loyally to gas and paraffin lamps instead until the day they died. For those sceptics who long continued to reject electricity and embrace gas for the purposes of cooking and heating, the structural domestication of electricity was never completed, and still is not complete in the fullest sense of the term. This uncompleted domestication of electricity raised some significant and interrelated questions about authority and in turn about gender. Given the pronouncements of technically expert males that electricity was more safe, reliable and pleasant to have in the home than gas, we need to ask why their judgments were only partially accepted by some householders, while others hardly accepted them at all. We thus need to understand the authority of popularizer-entrepreneurs in promoting electricity in the home as limited in scope, and indeed – 219 –

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perhaps audience-specific. One key issue here is that the presumption to authority of electrical promoters rested on more than just their technical knowledge of the relative advantages of electrical technology over gas. It was also grounded in very different forms of expertise, principally their capacity to plausibly represent gaslight as more dangerous, unhealthy and destructive of domestic furnishing than electric light and to represent possible futures of electricity that seemed to make its adoption, rather than that of gas, an inevitable route to domestic harmony. As I have shown, these claims were not taken entirely seriously by the contemporary press, let alone treated as infallible or trustworthy. Although we cannot recover the views of many householders, I have shown evidence that at least some of them shared such doubts about the prudence of electrifying the home. Most obviously for press and public alike, the testimony of electrical promoters was somewhat compromised by their partisan financial self-interest: Thomas Edison, James Gordon, Robert William Crookes, Edward Lancaster et al. were all too obviously directly trying to sell electricity to bring profit to their own commercial enterprises. However, those caught up in such endeavours through marital relations – Alice Gordon, Maud Lancaster and Constance Peel – were able at least to stand at a remove from such partisanship. That is at least one reason why they served in their own right as a source of authority on household electricity. Clearly this latter group were key agents of domesticating electricity since female householders’ discretion in such matters tended to follow the gender-specific authority of female writers with their (conventionally imputed) expert knowledge of the household sphere. Only they could have much prospect of authoritatively persuading other female home-makers that electricity really was the domestic luxury that they needed for aesthetically luxuriant lighting or as a domestic assistant for the chores of cooking and cleaning. Of course, not all their readers, whether male or female, were persuaded to adopt the project of domestic electricity from their writings. It is thus clear at least that among the many contingencies associated with the domestication of electricity, the gendering of authority, promotional work, audiences and consumer behaviour were all key issues. As such they deserve to be given further consideration in future studies of the domestication of technology. Yet in addition to further understanding of the complex and fallible nature of authority in relation to domestic techno-science, future scholarship might seek alternatives to that of domestication. While helping to articulate a twenty-firstcentury alternative to deterministic studies of the ‘impact’ of technology on the home, it is clear that the domestication analogy is strained somewhat in the case of technologies for lighting and cooking and does not fully address all the historical issues that need to be considered. Whereas domestication theory tends to pose the explanandum as individual householder’s decision on whether and how

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to tame individual artefacts to fit in to the (presumptively unchanged) domestic order, the historical cases of electricity and gas present us with a much more complex scenario. The complexities involved pertain both to the special case of electricity and to the more general historiography of technological change in the home. In symbolic terms, the introduction of electricity to the home involved householders encountering an abstract category – an invisible force, power or fluid – rather than a specific artefact. Hence electrical promoters had both to present it as an benign agency willing to do the consumer’s bidding and to preengineer the artefacts of domestic electricity to be as correlatively ‘tamed’ as possible. At the more technocratic level, electricity meant not just the agency but the paraphernalia of lighting, heating and cooking as well. Indeed electric light and gas light were not just individual artefacts but whole systems, even for those early electrical aficionados in the 1880s who dared to install a dynamo in their cellar. Incorporation into the home necessarily, therefore, meant an alteration in the domestic order to accommodate the system’s requirements. Moreover, just as for gas lighting, these externally driven supply systems were prone to unpredictable problems well beyond the control or preemptive powers of the individual; adopting electricity or gas thus tied the household to the less-than-fully orderly world of suppliers beyond its walls – in a sense a de-domestication of control over a household utility formerly handled by servants alone. Furthermore, the domestication of each technology was not just a matter of the householder disciplining a fixed technology into the domestic order: as social constructivists have pointed out, technologies could be changed in response to consumer needs. Alice Gordon’s campaign to promote decorative lighting through the use of lampshades and fittings prompted out an aesthetic transformation of the electric lighting industry’s main products so that what ended up being domesticated into the 1890s boudoir was a much more culturally assimilated artefact than the naked incandescent electric lamp originally produced by Edison and Swan. Thus, overall, the introduction of electricity to the home involved taming (if by no means completely) a whole system of technology not just by householders but by the designers and makers of electrical lighting and by power station suppliers. It also involved the realignment of socio-technical practices, so that householders rather than electrical engineers became jointly responsible for ensuring the safety of their domestic installation. It also involved consumers investing literally and metaphorically in the notion that electricity was at least part of the long-term future of their domestic life; once materially embedded in the home, a whole mode of electrical consumption could not readily be terminated or discarded as could the discrete gadgets of 21st century culture

222

Domesticating Electricity

Finally it is also important to bear in mind that, quite apart from the above considerations, the interpretive utility of domestication as an overarching historiographical theme can be overstated. Evidently we cannot take it for granted that domestication processes are ever completed; rather the limits to which domestication has taken place in any given context need to be mapped out to understand the wider cultural debates in which past householders and their prospective new technologies were located. We will thus see that domestication as a theme can usefully be subsumed within the wider theme of the communication of techno-science. By understanding how communication of novel forms of technology takes place in a multifaceted dialogue between aspiring ‘authorities’ and ordinary consumers, we will understand better how such figures respectively did – or did not – become recognized as authorities, and householders chose – or chose not – to become consumers of a new technology. From that we will surely see that the domestication of electricity was to some interesting extent at the discretion of household consumers themselves, not determined by the aims and fantasies of those promoting the domestication of electricity. So whatever else historians of electricity write about in future, they need to attend to the work of recovering more about the consumer of electricity that we have but glimpsed in this work. To interrogate once again the opening quotation of Chapter 1, I hope at least that I have shown – pace Edison’s associate A. E. Kennelly – how strange it must have been for the late Victorian consumer to be told that electricity was so ‘readily controlled’ an agent that it would swiftly cross the threshold of her home to become an indispensable element of household life.

NOTES

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

G. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 244–53. T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K. Ward (eds), Domestication of Media and Technology (Maidenhead and New York, NY: Open University Press, 2006). A. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity: Women and English Gas Industry, 1889–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). O. Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity, Nature Series (London and New York, NY: Macmillan and Co., 1889) A. Beltran and P. A. Carré, La Fée et la Servante: la Société Française Face à l’Électricité, XIXe–XXe Siècle, Histoire et Société. Modernités (Paris: Belin, 1991). Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity. For studies of gender and technology see: K. Grint and R. Gill (eds) The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research (London and Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1995); R. Horowitz and A. Mohun, (eds). His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998); N. E. Lerman, R. Oldenziel, and A. P. Mohun (eds) Gender and Technology: a reader (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). T. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 135–6, 150. C. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 137–8; W. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: the Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1988), p. 77. This was originally published in German as: Lichtblicke: Zur Geschichte der Künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (München and Wien: Hanser, 1983). For the original study of the complex complementaries of domestic/marital collaboration in see: H. Pycior, N. Slack and P. Abir-Am, (eds) Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). – 223 –

224

Notes to pages 9–13

1 Understanding the Domestication of Electricity 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

A. E. Kennelly, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribner’s Magazine, 7 (1890), p. 102. For more on the casting of electricity as Shakespeare’s speedy ethereal messenger, Ariel, see: I. R. Morus, ‘The Electric Ariel: Telegraphy and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 39 (1996), pp. 339 –78. ‘Electricity as Domestic Genie’, Review of Reviews, 32: 191 (1905), p. 523. This piece goes on to describe the Prometheus system, a ‘revolutionary triumph’ of domestic electricity reporting from World’s Work, a piece by Mr George Turnbull describing the electrical house. He extols electricity as a culinary agency, for the cleanliness which attends its use, the complete control over the amount of heat employed, and the rapid heating of ovens and utensils up to the point necessary for cooking. For the persistent thwarting of attempts to launch the electric automobile in the USA, see: D. Kirsh, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). For the ascendancy of early gas cookery see: Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity. For a major ‘received view’ of electrification, see Hughes, Networks of Power. For a revisionist approach that draws attention to the longer-term competition between electricity and gas lighting see: M. A. Hellrigel, ‘The Quest to be Modern: the evolutionary adoption of electricity in the United States, 1880s to 1920s’, in K. Plitzner (ed.), Elektrizität in der Geistesgeschichte (Bassum: GNT-Verlag, 1998), pp. 5–86. For a revisionist account that considers the importance of women’s discretion in accepting the electricity in the home (albeit not the all-electric home) see: C. Pursell, ‘Domesticating modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924–86’ British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999), pp. 47–67. M. Lie & K. Sørensen, Making Technology our Own: Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 2002); R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds), Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London: Routledge, 1992); T. Berker et al. (eds), The Domestication of Media and Technology (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006). D. E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Nye, Electrifying America, pp. 38–86. For Nye’s discussion of feminist writers see pp. 247–59. ibid. pp. ix–x, 133–7, 238–86. For the comparison with gas, see ibid. p. & p. 243. Nye identified the year 1910 as the threshold year: ‘for most Americans from 1880 until about 1910, electrification was almost exclusively a public, urban experience’, p. 382. For recent discussion of the importance of including nonusers in discussions of technological users, see: N. Oudshoorn and T. J. Pinch (eds), How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). Nye, Electrifying America, pp. 29–84. Ibid. p. 2, pp. 163–6. For more on electrotherapy, see Morus, ‘Electric Ariel’; L. Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2004), pp. 96–122, pp. 145–67. Nye, Electrifying America, pp. 138–84. Ibid., pp. 52–3, 322. Nye does, however, note with conspicuous respect the decision of the Amish people to refuse admission of electricity into their homes and that accordingly there was a clear

Notes to pages 13–17

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

225

element of choice about whether to electrify. Otherwise, Nye’s narrative focuses this theme of consumer discretion and contingency on which kinds of electrical technology to choose, not whether to give up gas and convert to electricity. Nye (1990), pp. xii, 231–2, 247–59. ‘Electricity as a factor in happiness’, Appleton’s Journal, 26 (1881), pp. 467–9. In 1884 the Scientific American tellingly reported a rather unimpressive display of electric lighting in a rainy Madison Square, New York that fluctuated from glowing flashes, through dull redness to total extinction. Simon observes that such palpably erratic displays did little to motivate the ordinary American to abandon the gaslight and replace it with its parvenu electrical rival: ‘Electric Lighting in New York’, Scientific American, 26 January 1884. See discussion in Simon Dark Light, pp. 92–3. See also C. Marvin, pp. 119–22. For a recent discussion on the intersection of these themes see: T. J. Misa, P. Brey and A. Feenberg (eds), Modernity and Technology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003). A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). A condition of industrialism is taken here to be ‘high technology’ settings in which ‘electricity is the only power source’, p. 56. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 50–2, 71. In chapters 3 and 4, Schivelbusch does explain how the coloured décor of both stage and drawing room had to be adapted to meet the new requirements of electrical illumination; however, this is presented deterministically as a matter of how decoration was functionally required to adapt to the new lighting (with cool-colour tones) rather than as a cultural problem for potential consumers of electric light to consider at their discretion. We can see in Britain, at least, that the gas industry fought back with its own marketing schemes to claim modernity for gas supply and later all gas kitchens. Clenndining, Demons of Domesticity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Hughes, Networks of Power. H. Platt, Electric City, Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 23–4; M. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 28. Such domestic installations could, however, cause great disturbance to neighbours in ways that did not endear the new technology to them. When Edison’s financier J. P. Morgan had electric lighting and a generator installed in his New York home in autumn 1882, the clanking noise of the boiler and steam engine in his garden apparently caused ‘great vexation’ to those nearby who were kept awake by the noise and vibration and who litigated accordingly. M. Josephson, Edison (New York, NY and London: McGrawHill, 1959), p. 261. Similar complaints were made about early public installations. As Mrs J.E.H. [Alice] Gordon recalled how London residents responded to her spouse’s engineering of the Paddington rail station installations in 1885–6: ‘After this came eight months of harassing litigation by occupants of houses near the works, to obtain an injunction to stop them. One ingenious gentleman swore an affidavit to the effect that the meat in his larder was turned bad by the electricity in the air! while every dish or jug, broken by a careless servant within a radius had been “jumped off the shelves by the vibration of the dynamos”’. Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, with a Chapter on Fire Risks by J.E.H. Gordon (London: Sampson and Low, 1891), p. 166.

226

Notes to pages 17–25

23. C. Geertz, Local knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (London: Fontana, 1993). See discussion of Geertz in: Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, p. 145 24. R. R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 19 and ‘Resisting Consumer Technology in Rural America: the telephone and electrification’ in Oudshoorn and Pinch How Users Matter, pp. 51–66. 25. M. A. Hellrigel, ‘Quest to Be Modern’, p. 2; Philadelphia Electric Company, ‘When Women Shop’, Bulletin of the Philadelphia Electric Company, 5: 4, 10 (December 1910), back inside cover. 26. Harrisburg Electric Light Advertisement, Star-Independent Co. 5 (November 1912) reproduced in Hellrigel ‘Quest to be Modern’, p. 3. 27. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 145. The debate over the question of what electricity was features in Chapter 2. 28. Preece quoted in T. Bolas, ‘The Fire Risks Incidental to Electric Lighting’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 30 (1882), pp. 663–72, 672. I have reconstructed Preece’s comments from the third person narrative reported in the Journal of the Society of Arts. 29. For examples of the unreliability of public electric lighting installations circa 1883 see R. Hammond, The Electric Light in our Homes (London: Warne, 1884), p. 201. 30. Yet complaints about poor workmanship in electrical installations continued for years thereafter. See: Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 3–4, 19–24. 31. See: W. H. Russell, The Atlantic Cable (London: Day & Son Ltd., 1865) on the previous, failed cable, drawing on his reports for The Times newspaper. 32. Mrs G. Cornwallis-West, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill (London: Edward Arnold, 1908). In discussing his gratis installation of a Swan-Crompton system in the Churchill household, Crompton declined to mention the occasional troublesome extinction precipitated by breakdown in the generating equipment. See R. E. B. Crompton, Reminiscences (London: Constable & Co., 1928), pp. 109–10. 33. See Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 153–54. 34. See P. Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1990). 35. W. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892). Tullius Hostilus was an early mythical Roman monarch. 36. E. E. Fournier D’Albe, The Life of Sir William Crookes, O.M., Fortnightly Review.S (London: T. F. Unwin, 1923), p. 310. 37. W. Thomson, ‘Electric Lighting and Public Safety’, North American Review, 150 (1890), pp. 190–6. 38. The Cromptons’ home in Porchester Gardens, Bayswater. See Reminiscences, p. 1. 39. J. Verity, Electricity Up to Date: for Light, Power, and Traction (London and New York, NY: Frederick Warne & Co., 1891), p. 34. 40. Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, The Electric Light Brought Home To Us (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1885), p. 13. S. P. Thompson Pamphlet Collection Vol. 85 Electric Lighting II No. 22, IET Archives. 41. F. Miller, The Man Who Tamed Lightning: Charles Proteus Steinmetz (New York, NY: Scholastic Book Services, 1965). 42. ‘But though the incandescent burners wreathed the palaces with rare splendour, it was the arc-light which gave to the illumination its peculiarly unearthly semblance. Everywhere within and without the buildings it shed its rays, soft, mysterious and benignant as of the harvest moon.’ Anon., ‘The opening of the world’s fair. Glimpses by a passing guest’, Review of Reviews, 7 (1893), pp. 656–9.

Notes to pages 25–31

227

43. ‘Man as a Creator of Worlds! Forecast by an Electrical Seer’, Review of Reviews, (August 1901), p. 178. This interview was originally published by the Humanitarian. For more on Tesla, see Chapters 2 and 5. See also a comment on this theme in relation to a Swedish hydroelectric power plant in: ‘The Torrent as Source of Tamed Lightning’, Review of Reviews, 39: 231 (March 1909), p. 241. 44. There is no discussion of electrical cooking methods in M. A. Fairclough, The Ideal Cookery Kook (London: Waverley Book Company Ltd., 1911). 45. G. Gooday, ‘Illuminating the Expert-Consumer Relationship in Domestic Electricity’ in A. Fyfe and B. Lightman (eds) Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 231–68, especially pp. 256–62; Clendinning Demons of Domesticity. 46. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Domestication of Media, pp. 2–3. 47. For the best discussion to date on the topic of technological determinism see M. Roe Smith and L. Marx (eds), Does Technology Drive History? : The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994). For a critique of the terminology of technological determinism see: D. Edgerton ‘Tilting at Paper Tigers’ British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), pp. 67–75. 48. Charles Perry, ‘The British Experience, 1876–1912: the Impact of the Telephone in the Years of Delay’, in Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 69–96. 49. D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1985), Roe, Smith and Marx (eds), Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technical Determinism (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1994).. 50. W. Bijker, T. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 51. Pinch and Oudshoorn How Users Matter. 52. Hartmann et al., Domestication of Media. 53. D. Gledhill, Gas Lighting (Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire: Shire Books, 1999), pp. 5–10. 54. ‘A Cork Leg’, Times, 1 September 1843, 5E. 55. Flanders reports that, by 1862 London (with a population of 3 million) was consuming as much coal gas as the entire Germanic confederation (which had a population of 47 million). J. Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childhood to Deathbed (London: Harper Perennial, 2003), pp. 66–7. 56. Flanders The Victorian House, pp. 66–71; M. Dillon, Artificial Sunshine: a Social History of Domestic Lighting (London: National Trust, 2002), pp. 26–59; William O’Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 3–6. 57. Dillon Artificial Sunshine, pp. 36–8. O’Shea (1958), pp. 61–3. 58. H. C. Davidson (ed.), The Book of the Home (1900) cited in: Dillon (2002), p. 127. 59. O’Dea Social History of Lighting, p. 62; Dillon Artificial Sunshine, pp. 140–2. 60. W. Preece, ‘Domestic Electric Lighting’, Electrician, 16 (1885–6), pp. 394–5, 394. 61. L. Hannah, Electricity before Nationalisation: a Study of the Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Britain to 1948 (Baltimore;, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); I. C. R. Byatt, The British Electrical Industry, 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 2–3.

228

Notes to pages 31–9

62. T. Stewart, ‘The Application Of Electricity For Domestic Purposes’, Chambers Journal, 3: 146 (1900), pp. 657–60, 659–60. 63. E. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity for Amateurs (London and New York: NY: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889); E. Hospitalier, L’Electricité dans la Maison (Paris: Masson, 1885). 64. ‘The Domestic Reformer, or How Mr Paterfamilias made home happy’, Punch, 26 (1854), pp. 4–7, pp. 12–13, 22–3, 32–3. See detailed discussion in G. Gooday, ‘”I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My House”: Alice Gordon and the gendered periodical representation of a contentious new technology’, in L. Henson (ed.), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 73–185, especially pp. 174–8. 65. ‘The Domestic Reformer’, Punch, op cit., pp. 22–3, 32–3. 66. A. Briggs, Victorian Things (London: Batsford, 1988), pp. 373–4, 389. 67. Hannah, Electricity before Nationalisation, p. 4. 68. Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, p. 102. 69. Crompton, Reminiscences, pp. 09–10. This evidence concerning the deployment of individual household dynamo installations as the root of successful electrical promotion contrasts strongly with Thomas Hughes’s emphasis on the importance of the large scale supply ‘system’ to facilitate domestic consumption. 70. ‘Minerva by Gaslight’, Household Words conducted by Charles Dickens, 19: 456 (December 1858), p. 8. Gledhill reproduces Thomas Rowlandson’s 1809 caricature of the public reactions to gas lighting in the street, suggesting that the female figure is a prostitute complaining that gaslight could ruin her business; Gledhill, Gas Lighting, p. 1. 71. Gordon, Domesticating Electricity, pp. 59–60, 146. 72. Davidson (1982), p. 9; Lancaster Electric Cooking, p. 8 73. Hellrigel ‘Quest to be Modern’; Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity; Pursell, ‘Domesticating Modernity’.

2 The Uncertain Identity of Electricity 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

The letter was published as: ‘The Accident at Hatfield’ [letter from James Humphrys to the Editor of the Electrician], Electrician, 8 (1881), p. 9, and summarized as: ‘The Accident at Hatfield’, Times, 19 December 1881, 9F. For discussion of this letter being sent to various daily papers, see: ‘The Dangers of Electric Lighting’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 10 (1882), p. 10. M. Lancaster [‘Housewife’], Electric Cooking Heating, Cleaning etc: Being a Manual of Electricity in the Service of the Home, ed. E. W. Lancaster (London: Constable, 1914), p. 7. Italics are given as in the original. For a discussion of this topic in the late early-modern period see: R. Seligardi, ‘What is Electricity? Some Chemical Answers’, in P. Bertucci and G. Pancaldi (eds), Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity (Bologna: CIS Universita di Bologna, 2001), pp. 81–208. Gooday, Morals of Measurement, pp. 244–53. B. Hunt, The Maxwellians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). John Trowbridge, What is Electricity? (New York, NY: D. Appleton & Co., 1896 and London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1897), p. 1. D. Nye, Electrifying America, p. 138. Nye entitles his fourth chapter ‘What was Electricity?’

Notes to pages 39–44 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

229

Cited in Nye, Electrifying America p. 56. This sardonic definition of electricity originally appeared in A. Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book (London and New York, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1906). Nye suggests that the conflicting attributions made to electricity ‘released electricity from specificity and made it into a universal sign of its age’ (ibid. p. 57); by contrast I argue that such conflicts rendered electricity a persistently problematic phenomenon in ways that contributed to its non-universalization. Nye Electrifying America, p. 138. This inscription was devised by Harvard president Charles William Eliot. For an example of this model of communication in the history of electrification, see: T. Hughes, Networks of Power and Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night For further details on the deficit model, see: Gregory and Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility (Plenum: New York, 1998), pp. 17, 89–90, 97, 213, 241, 247. See below for J.J. Thomson and Oliver Lodge’s distinctly Franklinian representation of the newly arrived corpuscle/electron in the early 1900s. Gooday, ‘Illuminating the expert-consumer’, pp. 231–68. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, pp. –13. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, p. 6. Marvin cites ‘What is Electricity?’, published in 1905 by US telephone inventor Amos Dolbear for the Chicago journal Telephony, outlining Dolbear’s suggestion that although this ‘all-embracing mystery of electricity’ still ‘befogged’ many, electricians nevertheless ‘knew pretty thoroughly what to expect from it.’ Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, p. 111. J. Trowbridge, ‘What is Electricity?’, Popular Science Monthly, 26 (1885), pp. 6–88, 76. A journalist’s summary of Trowbridge’s address was published anonymously as: ‘What is Electricity?’ Science, 4 (1884), pp. 232–4, reproduced in: ‘What is Electricity?’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 15 (1884), pp. 283–5. See brief comment in: ‘Association Notes’, Manufacturer and Builder, 16 (1884), p. 231. Trowbridge’s lecture ended thusly: ‘…you will perceive that I have not answered the question, which filled the mind of Franklin, and which fills men’s minds to day, “What is electricity?”. If I have succeeded in being suggestive, and in starting trains of thought in your minds which may enlighten us all upon this great question, I have indeed been fortunate.’ Trowbridge, ‘What is Electricity?’, p. 88. Trowbridge, What is Electricity?, pp. 1–3. Trowbridge returned to the principal question at the end of the book to ask rhetorically: ‘Must we reply, Ignoramus ignoramibus – (We are ignorant, and we shall remain ignorant)’. His distinctively Maxwellian response diverted attention away from electricity towards the ‘medium’ which conveyed electrical energy across space as electromagnetic waves; Trowbridge, What is Electricity?, pp. 305–9. But see also: J. Trowbridge, ‘What are the X-rays?’, The Century, 56 (1898), p. 128. ‘What is Electricity?’, Manufacturer and Builder, 25 (1893), p. 276, quoting from a discussion in the journal Electrical World. Trowbridge also sought to dismiss such considerations as ‘metaphysics’. J. A. Fleming, ‘The Electronic Theory of Electricity’, The Popular Science Monthly, 61 (1902), pp. 6–23. ‘If confined in an air-tight vessel, the molecules have their flights curtailed, and beat more and more violently against their prison walls, so that every square inch of the vessel is subjected to a rising pressure. We may compare the action of the steam molecules to that of bullets fired from a machine-gun at a plate mounted on a spring. The faster the

230

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

Notes to pages 44–5 bullets came, the greater would be the continuous compression of the spring.’ A. Williams, How it Works, (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, c.1920), pp. 13–14. Williams, How it Works, pp. 112–13. Gibson, Romance of Modern Electricity, pp. 3–14. In his first chapter ‘What is Electricity?’ Gibson advocated quasi-Maxwellian ‘etherial’ theories of electricity. Carolyn Marvin reports worries of excessive fluid being produced: ‘Fears that have not yet assumed a definite expression are entertained by many observing people to the effect that too much of the subtle fluid is being manufactured and kept in store to be consistent with the public safety. It is thought that much leakage is involved and that the earth, especially in the case of large cities, and the houses are being more or less saturated with it. It is time to call a halt before this thing goes any farther.’ [Editorial], New York World, March 1888, quoted in Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, p. 119. Anon., ‘The Electric Telegraph’, Edinburgh Review, 90 (1849), pp. 34–72, published in the USA by Littell’s Living Age (1849), pp. 433–80, 437. For discussion of this article, see: G. Foote, ‘Mechanism, Materialism, and Science in England, 1800–1850’, Annals of Science, 10 (1952), pp. 52–61, 159–60. For a recent overview of the history of telegraphy, see: G. Cookson, The Cable: the wire that changed the world (Stroud: Tempus Publishing Ltd, 2003). In fact there were two kinds of fluid theory of electricity in circulation in the nineteenth century: the single fluid theory typically associated with Benjamin Franklin, and the two-fluid theory typically associated with Abbé Nollet and Robert Symmer. For discussion of the eighteenth-century origins of these see J. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: a Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 1979). S. Stocklmayer and D. Treagust, ‘Historical Analysis of Electric Currents in Textbooks: a century of influence on physics education’, Science & Education, 3 (1994), pp. 131–154. J. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a late-nineteenth-century view of the multiplicity of theories available see: J. Angell, Elements of Magnetism and Electricity, with Practical Instructions for the Performance of Experiments, and the Construction of Cheap Apparatus 1st edn (London and Glasgow: William Collins, 1875) [2 ed. 1879]), pp. 71–4. ‘The Electric Telegraph’, Edinburgh Review, 437. For a later comment on the analogy of electrical flow with water, see: Verity, Electricity Up to Date, pp. 78–9. J. Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being a Course of Twelve Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the Season of 1862 (London: Longman Green, 1863); Heat: a Mode of Motion, 6th edn. (London: Longmans, 1880). In this context, James Clerk Maxwell wrote critically that the ‘use of the word Fluid has been apt to mislead the vulgar, including many men of science who are not natural philosophers, and who have seized on the word Fluid as the only term in the statement of the theory [of two electricities] which seemed intelligible to them.’ J. C. Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, ed. J. J. Thomson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), p. 40. See epigraph from Gibson, p. 13. [C. Field], Europe And America: Report Of The Proceedings At An Inauguration Banquet, Given By Mr. Cyrus W. Field, Of New York, At The Palace Hotel, Buckingham Gate, On Friday, The 15th April, 1864, In Commemoration Of The Renewal By The Atlantic Telegraph Company, (After A Lapse Of Six Years,) Of Their Efforts To Unite Ireland And

Notes to pages 45–8

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

231

Newfoundland, By Means Of A Submarine Electric Telegraph (London: William Brown & Co., 1864). H. Spencer ‘What Is Electricity?’ The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science and Art. 19 November 1864; republished with revisions and two appendixes in: H. Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols, (London: Williams and Norgate, 1874), vol. 3, pp. 189–203, with two postscripts pp. 203–11 and pp. 11–15. The American version was published in the Eclectic Magazine, 64 (1865), pp. 97–302, apparently at the instigation of his US sponsor E.L. Youmans. Spencer had shown interest in electricity in Chapter 3 of his Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: J. Chapman, 1851). On Spencer and Tyndall in the X-club see R. Barton, ‘“Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others”: Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–1864” Isis, 89 (1998): pp. 410–44; ‘“An Influential Set of Chaps”: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864–85’. British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), pp. 53–81. On electricity as a ‘mode of motion’, see: Angell, Elements of Magnetism and Electricity and Viscount Bury, ‘Electric Light and Force’, Nineteenth Century, 12 (1882), pp. 98–119. Spencer indicated that he consulted with a number of electricians about his theory and was implementing revisions even at the proof stage of producing his third volume of Essays in 1874 – see the second postscript cited above. For Spencer’s uncertainty about electricity, see J. M. Robertson, Modern Humanism Considered (London: Watts & Co., 1927), p. 69; I am grateful to Chris Renwick for this reference. There is no reference to either the writing or revision of ‘What is Electricity’ in Spencer’s An Autobiography (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904). For Tyndall’s continued use of a fluid theory, see Notes of a Course of Seven Lectures on Electrical Phenomena and Theories, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, April 28–June 9, 1870 1st edn (London: Longmans, [1870]), p. 11 (2nd edn 1876). L. Clark, Elementary Treatise on Electrical Measurement for the use of Telegraph Inspectors and Operators (London: E. & F. N. Spon Ltd.,1868), pp. vii–viii. F. Jenkin, Electricity and Magnetism (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1873), p. 1. ‘“The Application of Electricity to Lighting and Heating for Domestic Purposes” to the Society of Telegraph Engineers’, Times, 16 April 1881, 11F. J. Chamberlain et al., ‘Electric Lighting Act, 1882’. 45 & 46 VICT CH.56: ‘An Act to facilitate and regulate the supply of Electricity for Lighting and other purposes in Great Britain and Ireland [18 August 1882]’. The ‘Interpretation’ of the Act specified that the expression ‘electricity’ meant ‘electricity, electric current or any like agency’, Sections 23 and 32. Gibson, The Romance of Modern Electricity, pp. 13–14. In his first chapter ‘What is Electricity?’, Gibson advocated quasi-Maxwellian ‘etherial’ theories of electricity. Hunt, The Maxwellians G. Chrystal, ‘Clerk Maxwell’s “Electricity and Magnetism”’, Nature, 25 (1882), pp. 237– 40, 237. O. Heaviside, ‘Lightning Discharges etc.’, Electrician, 17 August (1888), p. 426; ‘Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation’, Electrician, 26 August (1887), p. 40. See discussion in: Hunt The Maxwellians, pp. 73, 132. See: Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity, pp. vii, ix, 9–26, 221–2. Reviewers picked up on this point somewhat critically: ‘SCIENCE: Modern Views of Electricity. By Oliver J. Lodge, LL.D., F.R.S. (Macmillan & Co.)’ Athenaeum, 3228 (7 September 1889), p.

232

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

Notes to pages 48–53 324 col. 2; Anon., ‘Modern Views of Electricity’, Nature, 41 (1889–90), pp. 5–6. Lodge wrote to Nature to deny that his account could be caricatured as ‘merely a case of reversion to an ancestral type’: ‘Lodge to editor of Nature’, Nature, 41 (1889–90), p. 80. Lodge’s book proved popular, staying in print with a second edition in 1902 and a third edition in 1907, a year after converting to the view that electrons were ‘negative electricity’. O. Lodge, Electrons, or, the nature and properties of negative electricity (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1906), p. 203. ‘If we regard Franklin’s electric fluid as a collection of negatively electrified corpuscles, the old one-fluid theory will, in many respects, express the results of the new.’ J. J. Thomson, ‘On Bodies Smaller than Atoms’, The Popular Science Monthly, 59 (1901), pp. 323–35, 327. As Lodge put it: ‘Undoubtedly we are at the present time nearer to the view of Benjamin Franklin than men have been at any intervening period between his time and our own’. Lodge, Electrons, p. 03. ‘Electro-magnetism as a Motive Power’, Times, 26 December 1857, 9D. For James Joule’s reply doubting the capacity of electromagnetic engines based on (expensive) zinc battery cells ever to supersede the economy of steam see: James Joule, letter to the Editor of The Times ‘Electro-magnetism as a Motive Power’, Times 31 December 1857, 5C. W. Ramsay, ‘What is Electricity?’, Essays, Biographical and Chemical (London: A. Constable & Co., 1908), p. 123. See, for example: ‘Faraday’, Times, 12 January 1870, 4A and ‘Magneto-Electric Machines’, Times, 13 June, 1882, 4E. ‘A Shower of Discoveries’, Punch, 16 (1849), p. 219. This reports satirically on the discovery of two ‘new motive powers’: Electro-Magnetism and Xyloidine [i.e. Gun Cotton], a power for stopping steam that will ‘drive every railway out of the country’. Nye does not explore a comparable phenomenon in the US case in Nye, Electrifying America, p. 38. ‘Paris Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 5 September 1881, 7A. ‘Paris Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 5 September 1881 7A. For information on the Faure and Plantécells see E. Hospitalier, pp. 98–110. ‘Storage of Electric Force’, Letter ‘FLRS’ to editor of The Times, Times, 16 May 1881, 13E. W. Thomson, letter ‘Electric Storage of Dynamical Energy’, Times, 9 June 1881, 8B. Letter from Osborne Reynolds to the Editor of the Times, Times 18 June 1881, 6F. S. P.. Thompson, Life of Lord Kelvin 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 765– 70. This Shakespearean imagery of electricity is akin to the (male) supernatural agencies of Ariel, the fleet-winged messenger of The Tempest or the mischievous trickster Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream will be further explored in Chapter 7. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity, pp. 211–12. ‘King Coal is particularly put out and gives the baby a look boding it no good. It is well known that this anxiety was altogether needless, as, to store electrical energy, it is generally necessary to consume coal’. This volume is closely based on the original French version: E. Hospitalier, L’Electricité dans la Maison (Paris: Masson, 1885), pp. 283–4. W. Preece, ‘The Nature of Electricity’ (Presidential Address to the Society of Telegraph Engineers) January 28 1880, Nature 21 (1879–80), pp. 334–38, 335. See detailed summary in ‘The Society of Telegraph Engineers’, Times, 29 January 1880, 11A. Other dimensions of this personalized dispute have already been noted by historians of electricity: B. Hunt, ‘‘Practice vs. theory’: The British electrical debate, 1888–91’, Isis, 74

Notes to pages 53–8

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

233

(1983), pp. 41–55; Hunt, The Maxwellians; D. W. Jordan, ‘The Adoption of Self-Induction by Telephony, 1886–89’, Annals of Science, 39 (1982), pp. 433–61; D. W. Jordan, ‘D. E. Hughes, Self-Induction and the Skin-Effect’, Centaurus, 26 (1982), pp. 123–53. Cited in a highly critical anonymous review ‘Preece’s Telegraphy’, Nature, 13 (1876), pp. 441–2, 442. E. C. Baker, Sir William Preece, F.R.S.: Victorian engineer extraordinary (London: Hutchinson, 1976). Preece ‘The Nature of Electricity’ p. 35. Maxwell (1873). Preece explicitly disagreed with Maxwell’s well-known view that electricity could not literally be identified with energy as in quantitative terms energy was quantity of electricity multiplied by potential. Preece argued: ‘in nature energy could no more be separated from electricity than heat could exist independently of temperature’; Preece, ‘The Nature of Electricity’, p. 35. Maxwell Treatise (1891) 38–40. W. Preece, ‘Juvenile Lectures: recent wonders of electricity’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 30 (1881–2), pp. 54–61, 156, 172–7, 172. O. Lodge, ‘The Relation Between Electricity and Light’ (1880) reproduced in: Lodge, Modern Views of Electricity (London and New York, NY: Macmillan and Co., 1889), pp. 311–26, quotes from pp. 311–13. O. Lodge, ‘The Ether and its Functions’ (1882) reproduced in: Lodge, Modern Views, pp. 27–58, quote on p. 49. Lodge, Modern Views. For a report of the lecture see: ‘Modern views of electricity’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 16 (1885), p. 5. W. H. Preece, ‘Address to BAAS Section G (Mechanical Science)’, BAAS Report, Part II (1888), pp. 790–1. For the great popularity of Preece’s presentation see: ‘British Association’, Times, 7 September 1888, 4A, and ‘Leader’, Ibid., 7A. ‘[Report on Preece BAAS Address]’, Times, 12 September 1888, 10E. ‘British Association: from a correspondent’, Times, 14 September 1888, 6A. S. F. Walker, Electricity in Our Homes and Workshops: a practical treatise on auxiliary electrical apparatus (London: Whittaker & Co., 1889), pp. 1–2. The frontispiece listed Walker’s membership of the Institutions of Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Civil Engineers and American Institution of Electrical Engineers. Verity, Electricity Up to Date. John Verity was involved in the early production of incandescent lamps in the USA, subsequently in the British operation of B. Verity and Sons from 1882 at the Crystal Palace exhibition (see Chapter 4) and closely co-operating with the Edison Company. ‘John Verity’, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 35 (1905) , p. 584. P. E. Scrutton, Electricity in Town and Country Houses (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1898), pp. 1–2. Lancaster, Electric Cooking, pp. , 9. W. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review 51 (n. s.) (1892), pp. 73–81, 173. For the romance and wonder literature see: A. R. Hope, Electricity and Its Wonders (London: Gall and Inglis, 1881); : W. T. Stead, ‘Looking Forward: A Romance of the Electrical Age’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), pp. 230–41; J. M. Munro, The Romance of Electricity (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1893); Gibson, The Romance of Modern Electricity; W. L. Randell, The Romance of Electricity (London: S. Low, Marston & Co. Ltd., 1931). For discussion on this topic in the US context see: Fred Nadis, Wonder

234

Notes to pages 58–63

Shows: performing science, magic, and religion in America (New Brunswick; London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 8–82. 77. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Modern Electricity’ p. 73. J. E. H. Gordon, ‘The Latest Electrical Discovery’, Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892), pp. 399, 402. 78. Gibson The Romance of Modern Electricity, p. 315.

3 Electricity as Danger: the Many Deaths of Lord Salisbury’s Gardener 1.

A. Gay and C. H. Yeaman, Central Station Electricity Supply, 2nd edn (London and New York, NY: Whittaker & Co., 1906), p. 3, (1st edn, 1899). Gay was the Chief Electrical Engineer of the Metropolitan of Islington and Yeaman was Chief Electrical Engineer of the County Borough of Hanley; Gay and Yeaman Central Station Electricity, p. ii. 2. R. Cooter and B. Luckin (eds), Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); J. L. Bronstein. Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 3. I. R. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in EarlyNineteenth Century London (London: Princeton University Press, 1998); Bertucci and Pancaldi (eds), Electric Bodies; M. Essig, Edison & the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death (New York, NY: Walker and Co., 2003). 4. M. Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair. 5. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 3–108. 6. C. R. Gibson, Romance of Modern Electricity: Describing in Non-Technical Language What Is Known About Electricity and Many of Its Interesting Applications (London: Seeley, 1906), pp. 06–7; M. B. Schiffer, Drawing the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 165–9. 7. The Scottish textiles manufacturer and popular writer on electricity Charles Gibson (1870–1931) noted that this story about expired fowls, told to him as a youngster, had now been authoritatively overturned: ‘it is now generally known now that their death has been brought about by sudden collision with the wire, against which they would have accidentally flown’. Gibson, Romance of Modern Electricty, p. 319. 8. C. H. Claudy, ‘Electrical Invasion of the Home: a Myriad of Conveniences, Afforded by this Silent, Noiseless, Wonderful Power’, Scientific American, 115 (1916), pp. 502, p. 12 (quote on p. 02). Carl Harry Claudy (1879–1957) was reputedly the author of thirty-two books and more than 1,600 essays and short stories, freelancing for several newspapers and a regular correspondent for the Scientific American. See: A. Lawrence (ed.), Who’s Who Among North American Authors: Vol. II: 1925–1926 (Los Angeles, CA: Golden Syndicate, 1925); T. W. Herringshaw (ed.), American Journalist and Author Blue Book (Chicago, IL: American Blue Book Publishers, 1923). 9. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 19–22. 10. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat; Hellrigel, ‘Quest to be Modern: the evolutionary adoption of electricity in the United States, 1880s to 1920s’, in Klaus Plitzner (ed.), Elektrizität in der Geistesgeschichte (Bassum: GNT-Verlag, 1998), pp. 65–86 . Clendinning, Domestic Demons.

Notes to pages 63–6

235

11. W. H. Preece, ‘Electricity in Collieries’, Times, 28 October 1880, 4C; W. Siemens, ‘Electricity and Gas’, Times, 3 November 1880, 4G. See also: reply by F. Higgins, Times, 12 November 1880, p. 8. For the role of physicists and engineers in developing electrical lamps to improve safety in British coal-mining, see: G. Gooday, ‘Robert Bellamy Clifton and the “depressing inheritance” of the Clarendon Laboratory, 1877–1919’, in R. Fox and G. Gooday (eds), Physics in Oxford 1839–1939:Laboratories, Learning and College Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 80–118, especially pp. 102–6. 12. The Times installed a set of Rapieff arc lights in its printing office during October 1878: Times, 24 October 1878, p. 5. 13. ‘Future of Electric Lighting’, Times 18 May 1882, 12A; St G. Lane-Fox, The Future of Electric Lighting: a Lecture Delivered at the Royal United Services Institution (London: privately published – available in Archives of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1882), pp. , 15–16. 14. This source is misdated as 1881 by Schivelbusch (1988), p. 51, n.84. 15. R. E. B. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting in Relation to Health’, Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians, 13 (1884), pp. 390–415, 405, 408, 414. 16. See Second Interim Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed into and Report upon Certain Miscellaneous Dangerous Trades: electrical generating works (London: HMSO, 1897). H. and M. Tennant (Her Majesty’s Superintending Inspector of Factories) were leading figures in the preparation of this report. See Appendix I ‘Fatal Accidents from Electric Shock in the Last Five Years’ ibid. p. 13 and Appendix II ‘The “Electrical Review’s” suggestions for dealing with apparent death from electric shock’ ibid. p. 14–15. 17. ‘The Electric Light and its Friends’, Journal of Gas Lighting, Water Supply and Sanitary Improvement, 38 (1881), pp. 030–1. The controversial American medico-legal expert on electricity Harold Brown commented in 1888 that, ‘while every other source of danger is manifest to one or more of the senses, electricity is silent impalpable, odourless, invisible.’ [Anon.], ‘The Dangers and Safeguards in Connection with the Distribution of Electricity’, Manufacturer and Builder, 21 (1889), p. 19. 18. Caroline Haslett Papers, Institution of Engineering and Technology Archives, NAEST 33/17.1.11. ‘Gas and Electricity’, 19 November 1926, p. 1. 19. U. Beck, Risk Society: towards a new modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992); B. Wynne, ‘Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science’ Public Understanding of Science, 1 (1992), pp. 281–304; J. Gregory & S. Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility (New York: Plenum, 1998), pp. 166–95. 20. ‘Burning of a Theatre in Vienna Great Loss of Life’, Times, 9 December 1881, 3A and (editorial) 7D; Times, 10 December 1881, 6A; Times, 12 December 1881, 6B. See also: Manchester Guardian, 12 December 1881, p. 8. A commentator in Punch observed on the recent catastrophe in Vienna: ‘Because gas has exploded, shall we abolish gas, and go back to oil and candles, with a double chance of fire?’, ‘Burning Questions’, Punch, 81 (1881), p. 294. 21. Gay and Yeaman Central Station Electricity, p. 1; A. J. Jex-Blake, Death by Electric Currents and by Lightning. (London: British Medical Association, 1913), p. 2. The information available on the number of fatalities in the USA is rather less precise. Jex-Blake cites evidence from Brown that there were 200 deaths from electricity in the USA during the five years up to 1888, and roughly 200 deaths per annum in the country by the second decade of the twentieth century , Harold Brown ‘A Medico-Legal View of Electrical Distribu-

236

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

Notes to pages 66–75 tion’, Medical-Legal Journal, 6 (1888–9), p. 276. Another source citing the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1890 suggests only that ‘more than one hundred’ had died in the US up to that year, of which twenty-two had died in New York. ‘Electricity’s Victims in Europe’, American Architect and Building News, 25 (1890), p. 27. Gay and Yeaman, Central Station Electricity, pp. 8–9. C. Bazermann, The Languages of Edison’s Light (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 160, 180. For contemporary discussion of the phenomenon, see: ‘The Electric Arc [sic] Among the Gas Shares’, Nature, 18 (1878), pp. 609–10 and ‘Gas versus Electricity’, Nature, 19 (1878–9), pp. 261–2. With reference to the gas companies, Hammond noted: ‘It is, indeed, well to remember that ranged against electricity is one of the strongest monopolies that the world has ever seen.’ R. Hammond, The Electric Light in our Homes (London: Warne, 1884), pp. 7–8. Hammond, The Electric Light, pp. 1–2. Hammond, The Electric Light, pp. 2–3. Cooter and Luckin, Accidents in History; ‘Explosion in Tottenham Court Road’, Times, 23 August 1880, 11E; ‘Glasgow – Fatal Gas Explosion’, Times, 3 January 1881, 11B; ‘Camden Town Gas explosion’, Times, 21 July 1881, 6F; ‘Birkenhead Gas explosion’, Times, 8 December 1881, 4A; ‘Gas Explosion [Everton Conservative club]’, Times, 15 August 1882, 8E; ‘Gas explosion [Lady Brooke’s house, Eccleston Sq]’, Times, 23 January 1883, 12A. Hammond (1906), p. 8. These deaths were mentioned by William Siemens in: ‘“Electricity and Gas”, letter to the editor’, Times, 3 November 1880, 4G. I. A. Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830– 1926 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). J. Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). ‘Railway Responsibility’, Punch, 69 (26 September 1874), p. 127. The Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897 provided that for any employment to which the Act applied, a workman who suffered ‘personal injury by accident arising out of and in the course of the employment’ was entitled to compensation from his employers. See R. Cooter, ‘The Moment of the Accident: Culture, Militarism and Modernity in Late Victorian Britain’ in Cooter and Luckin, Accidents in History, pp. 07–157. W. H. Preece, ‘Address to BAAS Section G (Mechanical Science)’, BAAS Report Part II (1888) 790–1; Times, 6 September 1881, 8A. W. H. Stone, ‘The Physiological Bearing of Electricity on Health’, Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians, 13 (1884) pp. 15–36; Jex-Blake, Death by Electric Currents. A. P. Mohun, ‘Designed For Thrills and Safety: Amusement Parks and the Commodification of Risk’, Journal of Design History, 14: 4 (2001), pp. 291–306. Jex-Blake, Death by Electric Currents, p. 2. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting’, p. 08. Mrs Beeton notes that lamp-trimming could also be a footman’s duty. See: I. Beeton The Book of Household Management; Comprising Information for the Mistress (London: S. O. Beeton, 1861), pp. 964, 994. Such was the characteristic gendering of responsibilities for electric light among servants that a male staff member typically managed the household’s dynamo in the basement or shed. Maureen Dillon, Artificial Sunshine: a Social History of Domestic Lighting (London: National Trust, 2002), pp. 77–8.

Notes to pages 76–80 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

237

Marvin, When Old Technologies were New. ‘The Late Miss Clara Webster’, Times, 20 December 1844, 5C. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting’, pp. 404–5. ‘Fatal Accident with the Electric Light’, Times, 15 December 1881, 10E. Later Salisbury was Prime Minister for three periods of government: 1885–6, 1886–91 and 1895–1902, before he died in 1903. See Lady G. Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, vol. 3 (1880–6), 5 vols (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931); A. Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Wiedenfield and Nicholson/Phoenix, 1999); H. Gay, ‘Science and Opportunity in London, 1871–85: The Diary of Herbert McLeod’, History of Science, 41 (2003), pp. 427–58. ‘Death from an Electric Shock’, Times, 21 January 1880, 9G; ‘Notes’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 8 (1880), p. 4; ‘Fatalities from Electric Lighting’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 26 (1890), p. 39. On 7 January 1880 the Marquis arranged for six Jablochkoff arc lights to be hung around Hatfield House for the occasion of a grand ball. See: ‘Notes’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 8 (1880), p. 4; Cecil, Life of Robert, vol. 3, pp. 3–4. The Marquis of Salisbury’s scientific library was donated to the University of Liverpool. Salisbury was probably the only Prime Minister of Britain ever to own – let alone read – all three editions of Maxwell’s classic work. See: J. C. Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Clarendon Press Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873); 2nd edn 1881, 3rd edn 1891 (ed. J.J. Thomson) .Salisbury’s election as FRS was presumably for reasons that went beyond his sole scientific publication to date: a review of a book on photography. His only published paper was ‘On Spectral Lines of Low Temperature’, Philosophical Magazine, 4th series, XLV (April 1873), pp. 241–5, although his assistant Herbert McLeod regularly encouraged him to publish more of his after-dinner private researches. See McLeod’s obituary: ‘The Marquis of Salisbury, K. G. 1830 –1903’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 75 (1905), pp. 319–25. S. Schaffer, ‘Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House’, in C. Smith and J. Agar (eds), Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 149–80; A. Briggs, Victorian Things pp. 73–4, 389. Swan’s light was available well before Edison’s. Cecil, Life of Robert, vol. 3, pp. 3–4. See Sir William Armstrong’s letter of 21 January 1881: ‘Swan’s Electric Lamps’, Engineer, 51 (1881), p. 49; Dillon (2002), pp. 164, 169. Swan (1929), p. 75. Gay, ‘Science and Opportunity’; Salisbury papers; Hatfield House archives. Lady Gwendolen does not mention Dimmock’s death in her biographical study of her father. Letter of McLeod to Salisbury, 26 November 1881, Hatfield House Archives. In the Inquest on Dimmock’s death, Shillito also indicated he had been aware of these two deaths. ‘Fatal Accident at Hatfield Park’, The Hertfordshire Mercury, 17 December 1881, p. 5. ‘Naval and Military Intelligence’, Times, 25 November 1880, 8A; ‘Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation’, Times, 14 December 1880, 7A. Both William Armstrong and William Thomson used a Siemens alternate current machine for their Swan installations, as did William Spottiswoode for his Presidential soirees at the Royal Society – see below. Letter of McLeod to Salisbury, 14 June 1881, Hatfield House Archives.

238

Notes to pages 81–3

57. Letter of McLeod to Salisbury, 26 July 1881, Hatfield House Archives. 58. Letter of McLeod to Salisbury, 17 August 1881, Hatfield House Archives. 59. See note of McLeod’s visit to Hatfield in his diary entry for 8 December 1881, Herbert McLeod Diaries 1860–1923, by Permission of the College, Imperial College Archives, London. 60. See Salisbury’s letter c.12 or 13 December recorded in McLeod’s diary for 14 December (Imperial College Archives). An unpublished note by a carpenter who worked at Hatfield House in the period records wrote, some years later, without mentioning Dimmock’s death, that ‘During all these experiments, [the Hatfield estate staff ], who like almost everyone else were entirely ignorant of the secret and dangerous power they were dealing with, occasionally got a very nasty taste of it – I have myself 3 very vivid recollections of it. The chances of a shock were ever present, particularly so from the fact that at this time a high tension alternating current was used […] For many years, Lord Salisbury – no mean electrician – would scarcely believe it possible to get a dangerous shock, until he got one himself during his experiments.’ From: W. Butterfield, Alterations in and about Hatfield House since 1868 (1908), Hatfield House Archives. 61. McLeod’s diary of 8 and 14 December (Imperial College Archives). Letter of McLeod to Salisbury, 14 December 1881, Hatfield House Archives. 62. In a speech to the Mechanical Science Section of the BAAS in September 1881, Sir William Siemens explained that the working of the electric light and transmission of power at his own home were ‘entirely under the charge of my head gardener, Mr Buchanan, assisted by the ordinary staff of under gardeners and field labourers, who probably never heard before of the power of electricity’. See: ‘British Association for the Advancement of Science’, Times, 6 September 1881, 8B. 63. ‘Fatal Accident at Hatfield Park’, Hertfordshire Mercury, 17 December 1881, p. 5. 64. The Times on Thursday 15 December slightly misquoted these recommendations as: ‘there should be a stated time for working the current, and that notice should be given of it to all persons engaged near the wires’. The Times report was reproduced by several other papers in ways copied soon after by other periodicals. See the Hertfordshire Mercury, 17 December 1881, p. 5 and the original report in the Hertfordshire County Records Office. 65. The uniformity of insulation practice was disputed in January 1882. ‘The Dangers of Electric Lighting’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 10 (1882), p. 10. 66. The letter was published as ‘The Accident at Hatfield’ [letter from James Humphrys to the Editor of the Electrician], Electrician, 8 (1881), p. 89, and summarized as ‘The Accident at Hatfield’, Times, 19 December 1881, 9F. For discussion of this letter being sent to various daily papers, see: ‘The Dangers of Electric Lighting’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 10 (1882), p. 10. 67. The editorial continues, however: ‘Yet this precaution, simple as it is, has not yet been fully taught to a careless public. What, then, will serve to warn them from wilfully or heedlessly touching an electric light line-wire? The recommendation of the jury in this instance was ridiculously insufficient to point the moral of such a case; but the time may be near when an electrician who, from economical motives, transmits a death-dealing force through an unprotected wire, will find reason to repent his criminal recklessness’. ‘The Electric Light and its Friends’, Journal of Gas Lighting, Water Supply and Sanitary Improvement, 38 (1881) pp. 1030–1. 68. See above for Harold Brown’s attempt to make such a decisive medical-legal intervention in 1888 in the USA.

Notes to pages 84–9

239

69. ‘“The Electric Light Fatal Accident”, letter from John Rand Capron to the Editor of the Times’, Times, 27 December 1881, 6D. Capron was a gentleman spectroscopist and astronomer in addition to his professional legal work. See: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 49 (1889) pp. 59–61; John Rand Capron, Photographed Spectra: One Hundred and Thirty-Six Photographs of Metallic, Gaseous and other Spectra (London: E & F. N. Spon, 1877); Auroræ: Their Characters and Spectra (London: E & F. N. Spon, 1879). He is most famous as the earliest theorist of crop circles instanced in his letter: Nature, 22 (1880) pp. 290–1. For his interests in the gas industry, see ‘The Gas Question’, The Surrey Advertiser, 12 August 1865. 70. Editorial Notes, ‘Editorial Notes: Death from Electricity’, The Lancet, 118 (1881), p. 1102. 71. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, (1998); Pancaldi and Bertucci (eds) Electric Bodies. 72. ‘Inquests’ [Henry Pink], Times, 2 October 1884, 10F. See discussion of Stone’s work in: J. Senior, Rationalizing Electrotherapy in Neurology, 1860–1920, (PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994). W. H. Stone, ‘The Physiological Bearing of Electricity on Health’, Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians, 13 (1884), pp. 415–36; quotes on pp. 419–21, 434–5; Gibson (1906), pp. 321–2; Jex-Blake Death by Electric Currents. 73. Hammond, The Electric Light, pp. 59–61. 74. Ibid., pp. 57–61. For information on Hammond’s rise, fall and rise again see ‘Obituary Notices: Robert Hammond’, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 54 (1916), pp. 79–82, especially p. 681; R. H. Parsons, the Early Days of The Power Station Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 111. After Hammond reemerged from bankruptcy at the end of the 1880s, he never again sought to stake a public claim to authority in electricity. 75. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, p. 27. Although Decorative Electricity – like Hammond’s book – appears to have sold well, it too did not bring the authors great success in their business; indeed the Gordons were struggling financially when J. E. H. Gordon was killed in a horse-riding accident in 1893, and Mrs Gordon left electrical work thereafter. ‘Obituary: James Edward Henry Gordon’, Electrician, 30 (1893), pp. 417–18. 76. Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 06–39; Parsons, The Early Days of the Power Station, pp. 136–50. 77. Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair. 78. W. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (n. s., 1892), pp. 173–81, 179. 79. E. E. Fournier d’Albe, The life of Sir William Crookes (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), pp. 291–310. 80. As the columnist concluded ‘The Question of Danger is a Myth. […] our Board of Trade Officials Look After that, and Very Much More Minutely than in the Case of Gas.’, ‘Social flashes’, Lightning, 1 (1891–2) p. 90.See Sunday Telegraph 10 January 1892. 81. Gay and Yeaman, Central Station Electricity, p. 3. 82. In promoting a new easy-to-use light switch produced by manufacturers Appleton, Burbey and Williamson, a Lightning columnist wrote: ‘Servant maids are sometimes a little stupid through ignorance: and they have been known before now to fumble for a long time at a light switch, without being able to turn it on or off. For their sakes alone, therefore, not to speak of their masters and mistresses, the little improvement to an ordinary single light switch is well worth developing’. ‘Something New!’ [trade notices], Lightning, 1 (1891–2), p. 7.

240

Notes to pages 89–97

83. Gibson Romance of Modern Electricity, pp. 19–20. 84. C. Haslett, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 69 (1931), pp. 1376–7, 1377.

4 Electricity As Safety: Constructing a New Reputation 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

‘The Forthcoming Electrical Exhibition at the Crystal Palace’, Manchester Guardian, 19 December 1881, p. 6. A. F. Guy, Electric Light for the Million: a Handbook for the Uninitiated, of Concise Practical Information on Electric Lighting and its Cost (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co; York: J. Sampson, 1889), p. 3. Nye, Electrifying America, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 31. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). ‘The List of Awards to British Exhibitors at the Paris Exhibition’, Times, 24 October 1881, 9E. K. Beauchamp, Exhibiting Electricity (London: IEE, 1997); T. P. Hughes, Networks of Power; Nye Electrifying America; Bazermann, The Languages of Edison’s Light, pp. 99–217; R. Fox, ‘Edison et la Presse Française à l’Exposition Internationale d’Électricité de 1881’, in R. Fox, Science, Industry, and the Social Order in Post-Revolutionary France (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), pp. 223–5. F. Caron and C. Berthet’s, ‘Electrical Innovation: State Initiative or Private Initiative? Observations on the 1881 Paris Exhibition’, History and Technology, 1 (1984), pp. 307–18. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, (London: Princeton University Press, 1998); Beauchamp, Exhibiting Electricity, p. 165. In September 1881, for example, accounts of the Exhibition were published in The Times on 5–7, 9–10, 13, 15– 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 and 30 of the month. See discussion in: Anon., ‘The Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 22 September 1881, 3B; W. H. Preece, ‘Electric Lighting at the Paris Exhibition’, Journal of the Society of Arts 30 (1881), pp. 98–107; W. H. Preece, ‘Electrical Exhibitions’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 30 (1882), pp. 80–6, 82. H. Adams, ed. H. C. Lodge, The Education of Henry Adams, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1918 (First 1906 edition privately circulated)) pp. 41, 381–9. Anon., ‘The Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 13 September 1881, 8C. The editorial continued: ‘it may fairly be said that these risks are likely to be less serious than those arising from gas, which can be occasioned by any ignorant person who turns a tap carelessly, while every occurrence of them will be a lesson of practical value, leading directly to their avoidance for the future’ (‘The Series of Highly Interesting Letters which we have Published’, Times, 27 September 1881, 7C). ‘The List of Awards to British Exhibitors at the Paris Exhibition’, Times, 24 October 1881, 9E. T. Bolas, ‘The Fire Risks’, pp. 663–72, 665. ‘The International Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 9 January 1882, 10A; ‘The Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 27 January 1882, 5G; ‘The International Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 27 February 1882, 12A. See illustration taken from the Illustrated London News (Vol. 82, 1882). Anon., ‘The International Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 27 February 1882, 12A; Anon., ‘The International Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 22 March 1882, 9G; R. E. B. Crompton,

Notes to pages 97–101

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

241

Reminiscences (London: Constable and Co, 1928) pp. 8; Obituary of R. E. B. Crompton in: Times, 16 February 1940, 11F. Anon., ‘Electricity and Fire Insurance’, Times, 14 March 1882, 5E; ‘The Fire Insurance Companies and the Electrical Exhibition’, Journal of Gas Lighting, 29 (1882) p. 09. Anon., ‘The Edison Electric Light’, Times, 13 April 1882, 5G. Ibid. ‘The International Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 23 March 1882, 8B; ‘The Crystal Palace Electric Exhibition’, Times, 29 May 1882, 8C. Much interest attended the introduction of the electric arc light into the House of Commons in 1881 but it was removed by January 1882 and ‘illuminated by the customary means’ – an embarrassed euphemism for coal gas lighting; Electrical Review, 10 (1882) p. 2. Moves were under discussion in March 1882 to have the incandescent light installed; see ‘House of Commons’, Times, 14 March 1882, 6B. For discussion of this, especially the judgment that ‘Those who have visited the Electric Exhibition at the Crystal Palace will have seen for themselves beautiful miniature lights, admirably adapted for domestic use, with glare and flickering subdued’, see: ‘The Electric Lighting Bill’, Times, 14 April 1882, 9C. ‘Electric Lighting Act, 1882’, 45 & 46 VICT CH.56: ‘An Act to facilitate and regulate the supply of Electricity for Lighting and other purposes in Great Britain and Ireland [18 August 1882]’. One source noted, somewhat ironically, that far from facilitating electric lighting, this legislation ‘did a great deal towards stopping it’: Gay and Yeaman, Central Station Electricity. Anon., ‘The Electric Lighting Bill’ [editorial], Times, 17 July 1882, 9C. The primary concern of the Board of Trade on this point, in relation to both the 1882 and 1888 Electric Lighting Acts, was that electrical conductors in the public domain should be sufficiently well-insulated and out of reach that no accidental contact could be made – echoing distinctly the concerns of the Hatfield case. See: W. Thomson, ‘Electric Lighting and Public Safety’, North American Review, 150 (1890) pp. 189–96, especially pp. 194–6, listing the revised 1888 regulations. [Henry Pink inquest], Times, 2 October 1884, 10F. For accidents to the deaths in the Tuilieries Gardens in Paris, see: Table 3.1. M. Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair. For further discussion of deaths in 1882 from contact with dynamos, see: ibid, p. 9. See also: M. Josephson, Edison (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 1959) p. 61. For Morgan’s support of Edison, see: Nye Electrifying America, p. 31. W. Henshaw, Standard for Electric Light Wires, Lamps, Etc (New York: New York Board Fire Underwriters, 1881); Preece, ‘Electric Lighting at the Paris Exhibition’. Preece, ‘Electric Lighting at the Paris Exhibition’, p. 104. Letter of Willliam Thomson to William Preece, 13 February 1882, Preece–Kelvin Correspondence, IET Archives, London SC 22 /523. William Thomson to William Preece, 20 December 1882, Preece–Kelvin correspondence, IET Archives, London, SC MS 22 /525. See Chapter 3 for discussion of this. This demonstration had been shown at the Savoy Theatre in late December 1881: Anon., ‘The Savoy Theatre’, Electrical Review, 10 (1882) pp. 0–11, 10. It was subsequently repeated by Robert Hammond in his 1883 lectures: Hammond, The Electric Light in our Homes – see Chapter 3. Bolas, ‘The Fire Risks’, pp. 663–72, 670–1.

242

Notes to pages 101–6

34. For details of Musgrave Heaphy (1842–1910), see his obituary: Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, 45 (1910), p. 771 35. Bolas, ‘The Fire Risks’, pp. 668–70. 36. Cited in Bolas ‘The Fire Risks’. 37. J. Verity, ‘“The Fire Offices and Electric Light” letter to Times’, Times, 22 August 1890, 10C. 38. For example, by 1899 the IEE required the minimal resistance of safe wiring insulation to be ten megohms divided by the maximum current (on two separate tests), whereas the Phoenix Company appealed to a threshold (generally much lower) that varied with the number of lamps installed. The Government’s Board of Trade expressed this requirement in terms of the maximum allowable leakage current as 0.1 per cent of the full current, while the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance companies demanded a leakage level twenty times lower. While such multiplicity in safety thresholds disappeared as insurance company staff were increasingly included in the relevant IEE committees, by the early-twentieth century the quarrel had become a matter of deciding who was the authority on electrical safety, not how to avoid danger. B. Bowers (1982). 39. Captain Shaw reported the following information on the incidence of house fires in the London metropolitan area: Cause of fire Candles Gas Lamps (oil) Electric Light

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

1887 142 183 245

1888 113 197 205 1

1889 138 209 257 2

Total 391 594 707 3

To blunt the apparent drama of the comparison in favour of electric light, Major Flood Page noted in a letter to The Times: ‘It is hardly necessary to say that the number of electric lamps in use is but a small percentage of the number of the other lights’ (‘Dangers of electricity’, Times, 17 February 1890, 13D). Comparison with US figures in: J. B. Verity, Electricity Up to Date, p. 61. ‘Fires’, Times, 1 January 1890, 4D; C. Waller, ‘“Electric Lighting” letter to The Times’, Times, 2 January 1890, 8B. The conventional insurance taxonomy of ‘fire risk’ was used so as to treat the risk of electric accident on the same terms as gas, deflecting attention away from the uniquely electrical danger of ‘shock’. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 25–6. I have not been able to establish the reliability of Gordon’s claim here. For studies of the British insurance industry in the period see, for example H. A. L. Cockerell and E. Green, The British Insurance Business: a Guide to its History and Records (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) 2nd edn; C. Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the development of British insurance. Vol. 2, The Era of the Insurance Giants 1870–1984 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ibid., pp. 23–5. Gordon (1891), p. 121. By contrast, Edison’s male workforce would occasionally be deployed marching as early as 1880 in ‘electric torchlight parades’, wearing helmets with full-sized electric lamps glowing on top. By 1900, however, menswear such as ties, watch-chains and scarf-pins could be purchased with built in miniature electricity lights. See: Nye Electrifying America, p. 0 and pp. 147–8. F.L. Dyer, T. C. Martin and W. H. Meadowcroft, Edison: his life and inventions (New York: Harper & Bros, 1929). Gordon, Decorative Electricity, p. 121.

Notes to pages 107–11

243

49. Schivelbusch reproduces this image without comment or explanation, Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 71. 50. Trouvé had produced miniature electromechanical gadgets for party wear, such as a rabbits beating kettle drums, birds with moving wings, and skulls with rolling eyes since 1879. Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, p. 73; Marvin (1988), p. 2 n.101. 51. E. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity, pp. 190–7. 52. This display was witnessed approvingly by a large deputation from London’s Society of Arts on Saturday 12 November. ‘Electric lighting at the Savoy Theatre’, JSA, 30 (1881–2) p. . Interest in electrical theatre lighting following the Savoy model was greatly enhanced following the catastrophic explosion involving the gas lighting system at the Vienna Ringtheater on 8 December 1881: ‘Theatres and the Electric Light’, Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 10 (1882) p. 10. 53. ‘“Danger from exposed electric light wire” letter from AICE’, Times, 13 November 1882, 6B. 54. Anon., Review in Morning Advertiser, 27 November 1882, 55. Anon., ‘Savoy Theatre’, Times, 17 February 1883, 4B. 56. Anon., ‘The Electric Light at the Savoy Theatre’, Nature, 27 (1882–3), pp. 18–9. 57. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity, p. 92. 58. Nye Electrifying America, p. 0. 59. Beauchamp Exhibiting Electricity, pp. 73, 194; Marvin When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 37–8. 60. For the reproduction of ‘Electra’ on the Edison float for the 400th anniversary Columbus Day Parade in 1892, see: Marvin When Old Technologies Were New (unpaginated in sequence of pictures between p. 08 and p. 09) and F. Nadis, Wonder Shows: performing science, magic, and religion in America (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 55. 61. In July 1892, Electricity reported that the ‘Chanteuse Electrique’ Nada Beyval, adorned with fifty electric lights, probably received her power supply not through batteries but through metal plates on the stage activated by a manager electrician in the wings: Wosk, Women and the Machine, pp. 71–2, 254. 62. This was modelled on Lefebvre’s nude symbolic allegory, La Verité of 1871, which employed a gas light – see further discussion in Chapter 7. 63. Reproduced and discussed without discussion of the safety issues in: Marvin When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 08–9, 138–9. 64. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 22–3. 65. P. E. Scrutton, Electricity in Town and Country, p. 3–4. 66. Hellrigel, ‘The Quest to be Modern’, in K.Plitzner (ed.), Elektrizität in der Geistesgeschichte (Bassum: GNT-Verlag, 1998), pp. 65–86. 67. G. N. Swinney, ‘The Evil of Vitiating and Heating the Air’, Journal of the History of Collections, 15:1 (2003), pp. 83–112. 68. H. Letheby, ‘City Court of Sewers’, Times, 11 January 1854, 7. See Chapter 1 for discussion of Punch’s characterization of Mrs Paterfamilias’s concern at Letheby’s report ‘The Domestic Reformer, or How Mr Paterfamilias made home happy’, Punch, 26 (1854), pp. 22–3, 32–33 etc. 69. Schivelbusch Disenchanted Night, p. 5. 70. See Sugg’s testimony to the Select Committee (1879) pp. 21–27. 71. After several abortive attempts with other electric lighting systems at the Central London Post Office, Preece’s advocacy led to the UK Edison Company getting a contract for

244

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

Notes to pages 111–117 supply from its Holborn Viaduct station. ‘The Electric Light at the Post Office’, Times, 22 August 1882, 5G. Select Committee, (1879), pp. ii–iv, 21–2, 69–70. Preece cites the authority of a book by a ‘Professor Parkes’, presumably: E. A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene: Intended Especially for Medical Officers of the Army and for Civil Medical Officers of Health. 4th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1873). On the anticipated displacement of smoke from the city to be accomplished by electrification, see: ‘“Easter and The Coal Question” Henry Bessemer letter to The Times’, Times, 18 April 1882, 4G. See: C. Meymott Tidy, Handbook of Modern Chemistry (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878) p. 7; 2nd edn produced in 1888. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing out that even the most efficient coal gas burners in 1884 were about fifteen times as polluting as electric light. For further discussion of this, see: G. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement. Hammond, The Electric Light (London: Warne, 1884) pp. 10–11. I thank David Knight for identifying the student in question as the younger Berthollet; see: Maurice Crosland, Society of Arcueil (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 137. Hammond, The Electric Light, p. 14. Ibid. pp. 47–8. R. E. B. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting’, pp. 390–415, 393–4. Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, The Electric Light Brought Home To Us (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1885), p. 2. Verity, Electricity Up to Date, p. 37. Scrutton, Electricity in Town and Country; Schivelbusch Disenchanted Night, p. 8. The Welsbach gas mantle and its descendants were used well into the interwar period, see: A. R. J. Ramsey, ‘The Origin and Development of the Incandescent Paraffin Lamp’, Transactions of the The Newcomen Society, 41 (1968–9), pp. 1–25. Scrutton, Electricity in Town and Country, pp. 23–4. Crompton, Artificial Lighting, pp. 394–7. Ibid. pp. 402–3. See Gay and Yeaman, Central Station Electricity, pp. 14–19. This committee included in its membership the commercial electrical engineers R. E. B. Crompton and R. Hammond and the academic electricians W. Ayrton and S. Thompson. See Anon., ‘The Committee on the Electric lighting Act’, Times, 20 December 1884, 10B. Anon., ‘Death of Lord Thurlow: Diplomat and Courier’, Times, 16 March 1916, 5E. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 323 (1888), pp. 139–40. Ibid. p. 146. Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 64–5, 230, 237–8; R. H. Parsons, The Early Days of The Power Station, pp. 189–95. See: Anon., ‘The Electric Lighting Act’, Electrician, 21 (1888) pp. 260–1. Thurlow was thereafter credited with creating the legislative conditions under which electric lighting could flourish, both in London and further a field. Anon., ‘Thurlow, the Right Hon Lord’, in the Electrician Electrical Trade Directory (Blue Book) 1890 etc., p. 72 in IET Library. Anon., ‘Dinner of the Institution of Electrical Engineers’, Electrician, 24 (1889–90) pp. 2–15, 14–15. Compare with discussion of this passage in: Morus Frankenstein’s Children, pp. 59–60. See also discussion of electrical interests of Salisbury and his half-

Notes to pages 117–24

95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

245

brother Sackvile Cecil in: H. Gay, ‘Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain 1880–1925’, Past and Present, 181 (2003) pp. 107–40. Committee Report 1897. Gay and Yeaman Central Station Electricity p. 78; See the discussion of explosions and their diagnosis in relation to gas and electricity in The Times: Anon., ‘Another Electric Explosion in London’, Times, 25 February 1895, 10F; Anon., ‘The Explosions in St Pancras’, Times, 2 March 1895, 12F; Anon., ‘Explosions of Electric Light Mains’, Times, 29 March 1895, 10G; Anon., ‘The Explosions on Southwark Bridge’, Times, 18 April 1895, 7A. See Clendinning (2004). C. Haslett, ‘Electricity in the Household’. E. E. Edwards, The Case for Electricity and How to Obtain a Supply of Electricity (London: The Electrical Association For Women, 1932), p. 2; for the complex relationship between electricity and leisure enhancement see: R. Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: the ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983).

5 Electricity as the Future: Prophetic Expertise and Contested Authority 1. 2.

Preece, ‘Domestic Electric Lighting’, pp. 94–5, 394. A. E. Kennelly, ‘Electricity in the Household’, Scribners Magazine, 7 (1889) pp. 02–15, 115. 3. E. Bellamy, Looking Backward. 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1888). 4. Nye, Electrifying America; D. E. Nye, The Invented Self an Anti-Biography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983). 5. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night (Berg, Oxford: Berg, 1988). 6. Hope, Electricity and Its Wonders, p. 17. Ascott R. Hope was the nom de plume of Scottish generalist writer Ascott Robert Hope Moncrieff (1846–1927). 7. K. Anderson, ‘Almanacks and the Profits of Natural Knowledge’, in Henson, Culture and Science, pp. 7–111; K. Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 19–29. 8. G. Gooday, ‘Sun-Spots, Weather and The Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s AntiMaterialist Representations of ‘Energy’ in British Periodicals’, in G. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the sciences in nineteenth-century periodicals (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 111–47. 9. For literary responses to steam engine, see: W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986). For Punch’s satirical comment on railways and telegraphs, see: R. Noakes, ‘The Rage for “Portable” This, That, and Everything: Representing Technology in Punch 1841–61’, in Henson (ed.), Culture and Science, p. 153. 10. R. Noakes, ‘The Rage for “Portable” This, That, and Everything’: Representing Technology in Punch 1841–61’, in Louise Henson (ed.), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); A. Briggs, Victorian Things, pp. 70–1. But Punch’s portrait of a feminized ‘Electricity’ on 8 February 1899 represented the matter with the trusty servants of the land – telegraph and submarine cable – being given their

246

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

Notes to pages 124–9 notice, and told that they would be replaced by an entirely wireless technology. See the illustration ‘Giving them Warning’ reproduced in Briggs, Victorian Things, p. 371). D. R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 97–8; J. Henniker Heaton, ‘The Postal and Telegraphic Communications of the Empire’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 19 (1887–8) p. 71. Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (London: Collins, 1870). Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, Chapter 5; I. R. Morus, ‘“The Nervous System of Britain”: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), pp. 455–75. ‘The Telephone’, Times, 14 July 1877, 6E. ‘Oral Telegraphy’, Times, 19 September 1877, 4E. ‘The Telephone’, Times, 16 November 1877, 3G. Briggs Victorian Things, pp. 81–91. For a somewhat teleological centenary history, see essays in: Ithiel de Solla Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). Similarly, the phonograph was designed primarily as an office dictaphone or telephone answering machine, see: L. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). C. Fischer, America Calling: a Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, CA and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). Marvin When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 63–108; Briggs Victorian Things, pp. 81–91; C. R. Perry, ‘The British Experience 1876–1912: the Impact of the Telephone During the Years of Delay’, in Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of The Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 69–96. Perry, ‘The British Experience’. Electrical bells had been installed at the thresholds of various dwellings, notably Lord Salisbury’s residence, since the 1860s. See: Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Wiedenfield and Nicholson/Phoenix, 1999), p. 111. W. C. Keppell, ‘The Science of Electricity as Applied in Peace and War’, Quarterly Review 144 (1877), pp. 138–79. For an examination of how electrical journalism was moulded into a collective book review for the Quarterly Review, into didactic exegesis for the Nineteenth Century, and into luxuriant fantasy for the Fortnightly Review, see: G. Gooday, ‘Profits and Prophecy: Electricity and Futurism in the Nineteenth Century Periodical’, G. N. Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 238–54. Anon., ‘Earl of Albemarle’ [obituary], Times, 29 August 1894, 8G. Marvin When Old Technologies Were New. Only Marvin’s scholarship makes any substantive claims on the nature of such writer-periodical-reader relationships. Contrast this with: Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 57–87. This discusses only the monograph literature on artificial illumination, while Mary-Ann Hellrigel examines debates on electric lighting in US newspapers, general periodicals and technical journals without analysing the roles and relationships characteristic of periodical publication. See: Hellrigel, ‘The Quest to be Modern’, pp. 65–86. Marvin When Old Technologies Were New, pp. 9–16. Marvin finds electrical topics in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, the Fortnightly Review in 1891, All the Year Round in 1894 and the Strand in 1897. For further discussion of my thesis about the importance of the

Notes to pages 129–32

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

247

general periodical, see: G. Gooday, ‘Profit and Prophecy: electricity in the late Victorian periodical’, in G. N. Cantor et al. (eds), Reading the Magazine of Nature: Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 238–54. G. Dawson, ‘The Cornhill Magazine and Shilling Monthlies in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Cantor et al. (eds) Reading the Magazine of Nature. For the development of signed publications in the monthlies, see: Shattock et al., Politics and Reviewers: The “Edinburgh” and the “Quarterly” in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), pp. 5–18; C. Judd, ‘Male pseudonyms and female authority in Victorian England’, in J. Jordan & R. Patten (eds), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 50–68. While the three-penny weekly Punch long continued its playful editorial ventriloquism of ‘Mr Punch’, William Stead adopted a new form of ‘mononymous’ editorial ubiquity in the six-penny monthly Review of Reviews. See: Dawson, in Cantor et al. (eds.) Reading the Magazine of Nature, and below. W. C. Keppel, ‘Modern Methods in Navigation and Nautical Astronomy’, Quarterly Review, 141 (1876), pp. 137–70; W. C. Keppel, ‘Sir William and Caroline Herschel’, Quarterly Review, 141 (1876), pp. 323–52; W. C. Keppel, ‘Modern Philosophers on the Probable Age of the World’, Quarterly Review, 142 (1876), pp. 02–32; W. C. Keppel, ‘Geographical and Scientific Results of the Arctic Expedition’, Quarterly Review, 143 (1877), pp. 46–86; W. C. Keppel, ‘The Science of Electricity as Applied in Peace and War’, Quarterly Review, 144 (1877) pp. 38–79; W. C. Keppel, ‘The Aggression of Russia and the Duty of Great Britain’, Quarterly Review, 145 (1878), pp. 534–70; W. C. Keppel, ‘Recent and Future Arctic Voyages’, Quarterly Review, 150 (1880), pp. 111–40. Keppel (1877) pp. 43–4. The title refers to: R. Culley, Handbook of Practical Telegraphy (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, no year or edition specified; 1st edn 1863, 6th edn most recent, 1874) and H. Schellen¸ Der Elektromagnetische Telegraph, 5th Edn, (Braunschweig: n.p. 1870), but no explicit evidence is given of their use in preparing the Quarterly text. Keppel (1877) pp. 45–55. Ibid., p. 145. Readers were frequently reminded of what they should and should not be able to judge, e.g. ‘the reader will now, we hope, follow us when we speak of the resistance of a wire, a battery, or an electric circuit of any kind’, p. 152; ‘Our readers are probably acquainted with the principle on which the signalling apparatus on land (telegraph) lines is constructed’, p. 63; ‘Those who have done us the favour of reading the earlier part of the paper will understand what is meant by the resistance of a given circuit’, p. 167. Viscount Bury, ‘Electric Light and Force’, Nineteenth Century, 12 (1882), pp. 98–119. Keppel (1877), p. 38. D. Rutenberg, ‘Nineteenth Century’, in A. Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 4 vols, (New York, NY: Greenwood, 1984), vol. 3, pp. 268, 270. Viscount Bury, ‘Electric light and force’, Nineteenth Century, 12 (1882), pp. 98–9. Ibid., pp. 103,105–6. Albemarle, ‘Electrical Transmission of Power’, Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892), pp. 73–89, 85. He referred to 1882 as ‘the unlucky year’, in which costly failure and ‘bitter disappointment’ had been the norm. Keppel had not only been elevated to become Seventh Duke of Albemarle (February 1891), but he was also Chairman of the General Electric

248

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Notes to pages 132–6 Power and Traction Company which for two years had produced and operated electric launches on the Thames (see The Times obituary, cited above). ‘Parliamentary Blue Book – “Lighting by Electricity”’, 13 August 1879; ‘Exposition Internationale d’Electricité, Paris. Catalogue Général Officiel, 11 August 1881’, Quarterly Review, 153 (1881), p. 459. The title ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’ is used in page headings from p. 442. Ibid., p. 44. Gordon later wrote: ‘less than two years ago, I wrote an article in the Quarterly Review in which, if I recollect rightly, I said that if dynamos of the future “will, we believe, rotate much more rapidly than at present; their speed will only be limited by their tendency to fly to pieces”. Then my friends and I set to work to build a dynamo on the principle I had laid down in the Quarterly Review article […]’ Quoted in: J. E. H. Gordon, ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 31 (1882–3), p. 80. The actual text from the Quarterly somewhat misquoted here was: ‘We believe [the speed of revolution] should only be limited by the strength of the wheel to resist the centrifugal force tending to make it fly to pieces. It is probable that the machines of the immediate future will be made much stronger and will revolve many times faster than any at present time.’ Gordon, The Development of Electric Lighting, p. 444. J. Gordon, ‘The Latest Electrical Discovery’, Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892), pp. 399– 402, 402. Gordon article mentioned in: Times March 2 1892, 8B. Lane-Fox, The Future of Electric Lighting, p. 4. My thanks to Anne Locker at the IET Archives for sharing this with me. While commonplace in nineteenth-century literature, this Platonic code for revelation of obscured truth was not customarily applied to forecasting the future. Lecture reported as: ‘The Future of Electric Lighting’, Times, 18 May 1882, 12A. P. Broks, Media Science Before the Great War (Basingstoke, London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 9–40, 51–52. S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 412. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New; Nye, Electrifying America. T. A. Edison, ‘The Success of the Electric light’, North American Review, 131 (1880), pp. 295–300, 295. Edison (1880), pp. 298–9. Bazermann, The Languages of Edison’s Light, pp. 83–4. St G. Lane-Fox-Pitt, ‘On the Application of Electricity to Lighting and Heating, and for Domestic and Other Purposes,’ Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, 10 (1881), pp. 148–55. ‘Future of Electric Lighting’, Times, 18 May 1882, 12A. Lane-Fox, The Future of Electric Lighting, p. 1. Ibid. Compare with William Thomson’s comment in the first section of this chapter on the perils of prophesying what the telephone could not do. F. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences 2 vols, (Michigan, MA: Dearborn, 1938), p. 482. Gooday, in Cantor et al. (eds) Reading the Magazine of Nature. [ J. Macnie] I. Thiusen, The Diothas; or, a Far Look Ahead (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883). For discussion of science and technology in American utopianism, see: H. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

Notes to pages 136–42

60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

249

1985); J. Carey and J. J. Quirk, ‘The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution’, American Scholar, 39 (1979), pp. 219–41, 395–424. Thiusen [ John Macnie], The Diothas. This Glasgow-University–educated emigrant to the USA was a scholar who published in mathematics. J. Macnie, A Treatise on The Theory and Solution of Algebraical Equations (New York: Chicago & New Orleans, 1876). Bellamy Looking Backward. Nye discusses Bellamy’s Looking Backward’s great success in 1888 (it sold several million copies), observing that Bellamy’s book emphasized the redesign of economic systems rather than focusing especially on electricity. Nye also noted that as many as 160 utopian books appeared in USA in the twelve-month period after Bellamy; Edison himself planned to follow up in 1890 with novel – producing twenty pages of notes, but eventually dropping the idea. Nye (1990), pp. 147–9. [W.T. Stead], ‘Looking Forward: A Romance of the Electrical Age’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 230. For more on Stead, see: G. Dawson, ‘The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in late-Victorian Britain’, in G. N. Cantor et al. (2004), pp. 172–95. [William Stead], ‘Electricity in the household’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 34. ‘Yet Another Utopia, by M Charles Secrétan’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 46; ‘The Author of “Looking Backward”: an Interview with Edward Bellamy’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 47. ‘The Genius of This Electric Age: Mr Edison and his Ideas’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 120. ‘The Future and What Hides In It – a Scientific Prophesy by Professor Thurston’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), pp. 115–16. Ibid. [W.T. Stead], ‘Looking Forward: A Romance of the Electrical Age’, Review of Reviews, 1 (1890), p. 230. Ibid. ‘It will be seen that the author is not deeply imbued with the communistic ideas so attractive to many. To become the well-fed slaves of an irresistible despotism with its hierarchy of walking delegates, seems hardly the loftiest conceivable destiny for the human race’. [W.T. Stead], Looking Forward (1890), p. iv. Ibid. ‘Science and Conjecture’, Spectator, 67 (1891), p. 723. See below for further discussion. Colonel W. W. Knollys, ‘War in the Future’, Fortnightly Review, [hereafter Fortnightly Review] n.s. 48 (1890), p. 274–81; Theodore Watts, ‘The Future of American Literature’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891), pp. 10–26; Oswald Crawfurd, ‘The Future of Portugal’, Fortnightly Review, 50 (1891), pp. 149–62; Wordsworth Donisthorpe, ‘The Future of Marriage’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 258–70; Susan Malmesbury, ‘A Reply to “The Future of Marriage”’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 272–81; Sir Robert Ball, ‘How Long Can the Earth Sustain Life?’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 478–90; The Duke of Marlborough, ‘A Future School of Art’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (1892), pp. 595–606; Rev. Dr Momerie, ‘Religion: its Future’, Fortnightly Review, 52 (1892), pp. 34–50. J.G. McKendrick, ‘Human Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 634–51, followed up by: J. G. McKendrick, ‘Electric Fishes’, Fortnightly Review, 54 (1893), pp. 539–50. Compare with the similarly didactic mode of fellow Glaswegian Professor: Lord Kelvin, ‘On the Dissipation of Energy’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 313–21.

250

Notes to pages 142–50

76. A. M. Gordon, ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891) pp. 78–84; G. Gooday, ‘“I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My House’: Alice Gordon and the gendered periodical representation of a contentious new technology’, in Henson (ed.), Culture and Science, pp. 173–85. 77. W. T. Stead, ‘The Reviews Reviewed: The Fortnightly Review’, Review of Reviews, 3 (1891), p. 165. For similar criticisms, see: ‘Domestic electric light’, Saturday Review, 71 (1891), p. 453, discussed in: Gooday, ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My House’. 78. W. Crookes, ‘Electricity in Transit: from Plenum to Vacuum’, Electrician, 26 (1891), p. 323, etc. 79. W. Crookes, ‘Electricity in Relation to Science’, Nature, 45 (1891), p. 63. Published: 19 November 1891. 80. ‘Science and Conjecture’, Spectator, 67 (1891), pp. 723–4. On the problems of scientific power and hubris, see: ‘Fairy Tales of Science’, Times, 27 December 1881, 7C. 81. Anon., ‘Science and Conjecture’, Spectator, 67 (1891), p. 723. See further discussion of Crookes as a challenged authority in Cantor (2005). For Crookes’ spiritualism, see: “Natural Causes? Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain”, in N, Bown, C. Burdett and P. Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 23–43. 82. W. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 51 (1892), pp. 175– 6. For the relation of this piece to Marconi’s wireless telegraphy of 1896, see S. Hong, Wireless: from Marconi’s Black Box to the Audion (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 22. 83. Crookes, ‘Some Possibilities’, pp. 178–81. 84. ‘The Electrical Exhibition’, Nature, 45 (1892), p. 356. 85. W. Stead, ‘The Reviews Reviewed: The Fortnightly Review’, Review of Reviews, 5 (1892), p. 182. 86. Carolyn Marvin suggests that ‘Some Possibilities’ instantiates a wider trend of expert literary endeavour of using the ‘raw material’ of scientific discovery to mix fantasy and reality in ‘equal proportions of the familiar and novel’. See: Marvin When Old Technologies Were New, p. 156. 87. Anon., ‘Notes’, Electrician, 28 (1892), pp. 341–2. See Anon., ‘Science and Conjecture’. 88. L. Frank Baum, The Master Key: an electrical fairy tale founded upon the mysteries of electricity and the optimism of its devotees. It was written for boys but others may read it (New York, NY: Bowen-Merrill, 1901), p. 3. 89. The Diothas or Looking Forward was set in the ninety-sixth century, and Bellamy’s Looking Backward was set over 110 years hence. 90. See his speech reported in: ‘Dinner of the Institution of Electrical Engineers’, Electrician, 24 (1889–90) p. 13. Discussed in: Morus, Frankenstein’s Children. 91. Anon., ‘Re-opening of the Liverpool Overhead Railway’, Liverpool Mercury, 6 February 1893. 92. W. Stead, ‘Character Sketch: The Marquis of Salisbury’, Review of Reviews, 17 (1898), pp. 224–5. This source was located using the SciPer online database: www. sciper.org. 93. For the arch-conservatism of this politician, now chiefly recollected as Gladstone’s antireformist opponent, see Roberts Salisbury. For the complex later politics of electrical supply in London, see: Hughes, Networks of Power, pp. 247–61. 94. L. Frank Baum, The Master Key, p. 3.

Notes to pages 150–7

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95. T. Edison, ‘The Woman of the Future: a Remarkable Prophecy by the Great Inventor’, Good Housekeeping, October (1912), pp. 36–44. For further discussion of Edison’s ‘prediction’, see: Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: a Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). 96. R. Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother. The anthropomorphic subtext of this imagery I shall return to in Chapter 7. 97. G. Roberts, ‘Electrification’, in Colin Chant (ed.), Science, Technology and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 68–112. 98. M. Ashley and R. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days: a Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction From 1911 to 1936 (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004). 99. C. Robinson, ‘Decorative Electricity’, Queen, Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle, 89 (1891), p. 554.

Chapter 6: Aestheticizing Electricity: gendered cultures of domestic illumination 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, The Electric Light Brought Home To Us (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1885), p. 13. A.M. Gordon, ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891) pp. 78–284, 283. Also in: Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, with a Chapter on Fire Risks by J.E.H. Gordon (London: Sampson and Low, 1891), pp. 3–4. For a traditional view that discusses women only in the context of the later twentieth-century responses to electric lighting once permanently installed, see: B. Bowers, Lengthening the Day: a History of Lighting Technology (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998). Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night. Shivelbusch discusses the origins and development of the lampshade but does not specifically investigate the gendered aspects of its design and usage. Gordon ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’. The arguments in this chapter emerge from some collaborative researches with Sophie Forgan who first introduced me to Mrs Gordon’s work, and also: G. Gooday, ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My House’, pp. 173–85. Verity, Electricity up to Date, p. 34. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children; I. Morus, ‘More the Aspect of Magic than Anything Natural; in A. Fyfe and B. Lightman (eds) Science in the Marketplace (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 336–370. Bowers Lengthening the Day. J. Swan, ‘The Moderator Electric Light’, Times, 3 June 1878, 13E. Swan follows this up in: ‘Subdivision of the Electric Light’, Times, 26 November 1880, 10C. Swan, ‘The Moderator’. See: ‘Electric Lighting – Dr Hopkinson’, Times, 10 May 1879, 2F and H. Ayrton, The Electric Arc (London: ‘The Electrician’ Printing and Publishing Company: 1902). Anon., ‘Electric Lighting’, Times, 11 October 1879, 6D; Anon., ‘The Electric Light’, Times, 22 October 1878, 3D. Anon., ‘The Electric Light’, Times, 24 October 1878, 5F. Anon., ‘The British Association’, Times, 22 August 1878, 8A; Anon., ‘“Electric Lighting” including letter from gas manufacturer William Sugg’, Times, 11 October 1878, 9E.

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Notes to pages 157–62

14. Anon., ‘Electric Lighting at the Albert Hall’, Times, 15 April 1879, 11D; Anon., ‘Electric Lighting’, Times, 8 May 1879, 11C. 15. See: ‘“Electric Lighting” letter from St George Lane Fox to the editor of the Times’, Times, 24 October1878, 5F. While Lane-Fox expertly critiqued the operations of arc lamps, he declared explicitly that he owned no gas shares and thus spoke impartially. Nevertheless, it is likely that Lane-Fox was already working on his own efforts to patent an incandescent lamp to rival that recently announced by Edison, and thus had obvious reasons to seek to heighten critical awareness of the problems of arc lighting. For a letter criticizing electric light from a gas shareholder, see: ‘Electric Lighting’, Times, 14 October 1878, 10F. 16. Anon., Times [Leader], 19 October 1878, 9D. 17. St G. Lane-Fox, ‘Lane-Fox letter to the Times’, Times, 8 May 1879 (see note 15). 18. Select Committee on Lighting by Electricity, Report from the Select Committee on Lighting by Electricity (London: HMSO, 1879). Question 47, p. 9; questions 69–70, p. 11; question 86, p. 12. 19. Ibid question 71, p. 11. 20. Ibid. question 72, p. 11. See summary report: Times, 28 April 1879, 9F. 21. ‘[T]he globes of the ten new light [on the Embankment] are of the frosted glass description, which, while permitting a greater diffusion of the electric light, do not tone it down so efficiently and pleasantly as do the opalescent glass globes’ (Anon., ‘Electric Light’, Times, 11 October 1879, 6D). 22. Ibid. 23. Anon., ‘Electric Light at the British Museum’, Times, 24 November 1879, 9F; This successful outcome was the result of a collaboration involving the Siemens Company’s development of new kinds of carbon at their Berlin works, and the adoption of gilt reflector arrangements by Mr Bond, the principal librarian. 24. Ibid. 25. Letter of C. L.Jebb (née Reynolds) to her sister, Cambridge, August 1880 in: M. R. Bobbit, With Dearest Love to All: the Life and Letters of Lady Jebb (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 162. Cited in: J. Evans, The Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) pp. 2, 242. 26. Roberts, Salisbury, pp. 111–13. 27. Briggs, Victorian Things, pp. 373–4, 389. 28. Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, vol. 3, pp. 3–4. As noted in Chapter 3, the Salisbury household used Brush alternators and, several years later, the Brush company catalogue commented: ‘The words “electric light” may to some convey the idea of a large brilliant white light, unbecoming to the complexion, having an occasional flicker, and casting shadow like moonlight; such was in fact the electric light of five years ago, when it was first practically introduced into England. This is, however, only one form of the electric light, and is known as the “arc” light.’ Anglo-American Electric Light Corporation (1885), p. 8. 29. Anon., ‘Electric Light in the City’, Times, 2 April 1881, 12A. 30. See the Graphic of 9 April 1881, from William J. Hammer Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, hereafter NMAH, Series 3, Box 48, Folder 5. 31. Hammond The Electric Light, p. 201. 32. Parsons, The Early Days of The Power Station. 33. Verity, Electricity Up to Date, p. 32. 34. Ibid. p. 34. In the early twentieth century, forms of arc light ‘diffuser’ were developed for indoor use.

Notes to pages 163–7

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35. Lane-Fox, The Future of Electric Lighting, p. 2. Lane-Fox commented that, ‘The prejudice against arc lighting as a pleasant kind of illumination is too deeply rooted in this country to make it worth while discussing.’ See also: ‘Problems Connected with Indoor Illumination’, Electrician, 26 (1891), pp. 480–1 (p. 480 discussed below). 36. Bazermann, The Languages of Edison’s Light, p. 160, p. 180. 37. T. A. Edison, ‘The Success of the Electric light’, North American Review, 131 (1880) pp. 295–300, 295. 38. Edison ‘Success’, p. 297. 39. Nye, Electrifying America, p. 3. Bazermann Languages of Edison’s Light; M.A. Hellrigel, ‘The Quest to be Modern’, pp. 65–86. 40. ‘Subdivision of the Electric Light’, Times, 26 November 1880, 10C. 41. Cecil, Life of Robert (1931), pp. 3–4. 42. Ibid., p. 6. 43. L. Hannah, Electricity Before Nationalization: a Study of the Electricity Supply Industry in Britain to 1948 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) p. 4. Hannah does not differentiate between the different kinds of lighting. 44. Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, p. 102. 45. R. E. B. Crompton, Reminiscences, p. 10. 46. Nye Electrifying America; MorusFrankenstein’s Children. 47. Cornwallis-West Reminiscences, p. 102. 48. Anon. [ J. E. H. Gordon], ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’, Quarterly Review, 153 (1881), pp. 441–61, 459; Gordon (1883); Anon. [ J. E. H. Gordon], ‘Parliamentary Blue Book – “Lighting by Electricity”’ 13 August 1879; ‘Exposition Internationale d’Electricité, Paris. Catalogue Général Officiel, Aug. 11, 1881’, Quarterly Review, 153 (1881), pp. 441–61, 459–61. Following the customary practice in the Quarterly Review, a secondary title ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’, was thence used in page headings and is cited as the title hereafter. Gordon claimed authorship of the Quarterly piece in an entirely different article, under the same title, presented as a Society of Arts lecture in May 1883. See: J. E. H. Gordon, ‘The Development of Electric Lighting’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 31 (1882–3), pp. 78–87, 780. For biographical details of Gordon, see obituary in The Times, 5 February 1893, 6; ‘Obituary: James Edward Henry Gordon’, Electrician, 30 (1893), pp. 417–8. 49. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 179–82. 50. Some were prepared to dismiss the concern about the dazzling effects of incandescent lamps as a mere aberration, one which did not need the intervention of decorative shading to accomplish, such as the US popularizer Rev. Alfred Taylor in his Fresh Facts for the People about Electricity in 1885: ‘In some quarters fears have been expressed that the electric light is injurious to the eyes. If these fears were well grounded, electric light would be costly at any price. If there is any ground in this fear, it is only in regard to those arc lights which have a fashion of winking, or suddenly going almost out and then as suddenly bursting into brilliancy. But such lights, annoying as they were, are now so greatly improved as to be safely under control. The very unsteady ones have been banished and better lights have taken their place.’ He even went on to cite a French oculist authority, Dr Juval, that ‘not a single case of visional disorder among electricians is recorded. There is no damaging effect on the eyes unless by looking directly into the light; and this is no more necessary in the case of an electric light that it is to look at the sun. Operatives working under electric light make no complaint, either of its unpleasant or injurious effects; but on the contrary, the large volume supplied relieves all necessity for straining

254

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

Notes to pages 167–75 the sight otherwise required when employed under gas or other artificial lights of less volume’. Rev. Alfred Taylor, Fresh Facts for the People about Electricity (New York, NY and Philadelphia: Rev. Alfred Taylor, 1885), p. 37. Letter of William Thomson to William Preece, 13 February 1882, IET Archives, SC 22 /523. This is also noted in Bowers Lengthening the Day, p. 161. Bowers suggests that the silk shades might have been created by Lady Thomson’s servants according to her instructions, rather than necessarily by her own hands. Letter of Sir William Thomson to Edward H. Johnson, 9 March 1882, Archives, National Museum of American History, W. J. Hammer Collection NMAH. These comments on the aesthetics of the Edison light were interpolated to the letter as an afterthought by Thomson. For consumer-oriented adaptations of technology, see Oudshoorn and Pinch (eds.), How Users Matter and K. Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Crystal Palace International Electrical Exhibition Catalogue (London: 1882), ‘B. Verity and sons’, p. 117, ‘Faraday and Son’, p. 146. Ibid, p. 135. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity, pp. 114–17. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 59–60, 146. S. Bowden and A. Offer, ‘The Technological Revolution that Never Was: Gender, Class, and the Diffusion of Household Appliances in Interwar England’, in V. de Grazia and E. Furlough (eds) The Sex of Things (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996) pp. 244–74, 245. A. F. Guy, Electric Light for the Million, p. 3 [Preface dated April 1889]. When the Sambournes’ house was electrified in 1896, Linley took a unilateral decision to do so, indifferent to the views of his spouse Marion. See: S. Nicholson, A Victorian Household (Stroud: Stroud, 1998), p. 156. L. Sambourne, ‘Happy Thought’, Punch, 97 (1889), p. 30. I am very grateful to Laurie Brewer for supplying me with this reference. See further discussion of Sambourne’s cartoons on electrical themes and discussion of how electricity impinged on his marital relationship to Marion Sambourne, see: Gooday ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My Home’. Anon., ‘Problems Connected with Indoor Illumination’, Electrician 26 (1891), pp. 480– 1. ‘Indoor Illumination’, J. B. Verity to the editor of the Electrician 26 (1891) p. 521. The Cimerii - according to Homer these were an ancient people of far west or north Europe who lived in perpetual darkness. Other letters on the same page from ‘B.P.’ [Brock-Pellie] and ‘Progress’ disagreed that arc-lighting was not acceptable for internal lighting. ‘Notes’, Electrician 26 (1891) p. 502. Gordon, ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891), p. 284. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, p. 156. J. G. Butcher married the widowed Alice Gordon in 1898, following James Gordon’s early death in 1893 (see later); adopting the new identity as Mrs Butcher, she became Lady Danesfort when Butcher was raised to the peerage in 1924. See: ‘Obituary: Lord Danesfort’, Times, 1 July 1935, 22A (with portrait) and ‘“Lord Danesfort and Electricity”, Letter from R. E. B. Crompton’, Times, 3 July 1935, 15F. ‘Queen’s Drawing Room’, Times, 2 March 1882, 8A.

Notes to pages 176–81

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69. As Alice lamented in her autobiographical chapter to Decorative Electricity ‘The public who through long winter evenings, and longer London fogs, sit reading by the cool and steady light of their electric lamps, but who are most indignant if by any chance it flickers or fails them, do not realize how intense the struggle has been for those pioneers of electric lighting who have toiled so hard and incessantly to surprise yet one more of Nature’s secrets […] Many an engineer’s wife knows how common it was four or five years ago for their husbands, who had come back late at night worn out and exhausted, to be fetched again by the message that there was ‘something wrong at the works.’ Gordon Decorative Electricity, pp. 153–4, 167, 162. 70. [Obituary of J. E. H Gordon] Times 6 February 1893, 6; [Anon.], ‘Obituary: James Edward Henry Gordon’, Electrician 30 (1893), pp. 417–18. 71. Meredith’s personal patronage for this publication is hinted at in her avowed aim not to bore readers with an ‘exhaustive’ account of electric lighting, but to offer only what ‘Mr George Meredith calls “the first tadpole wriggle of an idea”’ of how to produce ‘good and artistic’ results with electric light. Mrs Gordon Decorative Electricity, p. 279. This theme is not discussed in The Letters of George Meredith, ed. C.L. Cline, 3 vols (Oxford, 1970). Nor does Alice Gordon in her later remarried role as Lady Butcher mention any of this in her, Memories of George Meredith O.M. (London, 1919). Mrs Gordon’s Fortnightly article was advertised along with the rest of the issue in The Times 31 January 1891, 12B. 72. In the index to the Fortnightly for January–June 1891, Alice is more conventionally listed as ‘Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’. Mrs Eliza Robins Pennell, ‘A Century of Women’s Rights’, Fortnightly Review, 48 (1890), pp. 408–17; Lady Dilke and Miss Florence Routledge, ‘Trades Unionism among Women’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891), pp. 741–50; Mrs Henry Fawcett, ‘The Emancipation of Women’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891), pp. 673–85. Compare with: Alice M. Gordon, ‘Women as Students of Design’, Fortnightly Review, 55 (1894), pp. 521–7. 73. Mrs Gordon (1891), pp. 280, 284. See: O. Wilde, ‘Preface to Dorian Grey’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1891), pp. 480–1. 74. Mrs Gordon (1891), p. 284. 75. Ibid, pp. 279–82. For an illustration of the covered lamps and gentleman’s chair with light fitting, see: Mrs Gordon (1891), pp. 64–6. 76. Gordon, ‘The Development of Decorative Electricity’. Text reproduced with minor alterations in: Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 3–4. 77. Decorative Electricity was published at the very expensive price of twelve shillings (Times, 20 March 1891, 8D). 78. ‘How trying and unbecoming it can be, to even the very youngest and prettiest among women can be studied when a lecture or concert is given... Wherever there are large ceiling lights alone with reflectors over them, women must be content to look their worst. Ceiling lighting is most unbecoming to a woman’s age, and causes dark shadows under the eyes, which accounts for the haggard and worn look of most people at concerts’; Gordon Decorative Electricity, p. 46). 79. Ibid., p. 0. 80. Schivelbusch Disenchanted Night, pp. –76. See discussion of conservatism in electric lighting practices in: G. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement,Chapter 6. 81. Gordon Decorative Electricity, pp. 40–1. 82. Ibid., pp. 35–7. 83. Gordon Domesticating Electricity, pp. 39–40. 84. Ibid. Figure 11, pp. 55–6.

256

Notes to pages 181–4

85. Ibid.: Illustration on p. 91, text on p. 92 and p. 94 (Figure 22). In the second illustration, the crane is searching for the bronze frog who ‘squats in happy security above the light’. 86. Gordon Decorative Electricity, pp. 95–6, 103–9. 87. Ibid., pp. 133–11. 88. Ibid., p. 113. 89. St James Gazette review of Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity cited in: ‘Opinions of the Press on the First Edition’ – an unpaginated endpiece in the second ‘newer and cheaper’ edition of Decorative Electricity, in autumn 1891. 90. ‘Domestic Electric Light’, The Saturday Review, 71 (1891), p. 453. 91. The British-based companies advertising in the front matter were B. Verity and Sons (see above), and Faraday and Son’s Artistic Fittings manufacturers of dragon and dolphin brackets; Cairene and Moresque pendants; Spanish and Venetian church lamps, and embossed shells and adjustable reflectors. In the back matter, there were advertisements from Henry and John Cooper, Artist decorators, who had available for electric lighting Carved Italian cupids, Carton-Pierre girandoles (half-chandeliers), Arabians glass vases and ‘the wing-chair and newspapertable, arranged with incandescent lamps as suggested by J.G.H. [sic] Gordon’; the Brush Electrical Engineering Company that displayed ‘Ornamental Artistic Fittings’ in its show-rooms; the General Electric Company that produced ‘Decorative switches, wall plugs and ceiling roses’; Rashleigh Phipps and Dawson who offered the ‘Best, Cheapest and most Artistic display of fittings in London’, and Woodhouse and Rawson United, Limited who produced brackets, electroliers and pendants, claiming to be contractors to such public bodies as the Stock Exchange, London County Council, the Admiralty and War Office, and such private individuals as the Marquis of Salisbury, Marquis of Ripon, and H. H. Maharajah of Mysore. 92. ‘Opinions of the Press on the First Edition’ in the front matter of Decorative Electricity, 2nd edn dated 1892. See another brief US comment under ‘Fine Arts’, The Nation, 52: 1347 (23 April 1891). 93. The gas journal reviewer considers it was written after the style of the ‘aesthetic’ handbooks which had become ‘only too plentiful’ since ‘fashionable ladies had taken to instructing the world’ on wall-papers and fireplaces, ‘Electrical Lighting Memoranda’, Journal of Gas Lighting, Water Supply etc, 7 April 1891, p. 639. 94. ‘Decorative Electricity’, Electrical Review, 28 (1891), p. 404. Nevertheless the advertising of electrical lighting companies in both the preliminary and closing leaves of the book prompted the reviewer to conclude with the suggestion that it was better described as ‘a trade catalogue disguised by autobiographical sketches’. 95. ‘Domestic Electric Light’, The Saturday Review, 71 (1891), p. 453. 96. ‘Opinions of the Press’, ibid. 97. ‘More Books on Electricity’, Saturday Review, 72 (1891), pp. 421–2; ‘Domestic Electric Light’, The Saturday Review, 71 (1891), p. 453. See further discussion in: Gooday (2004) ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My Home’. 98. Robinson, ‘Decorative Electricity’, p. 554. She described James Gordon as ‘the eminent electrician, to whose undaunted courage and industry electricity owes much of its development’. For discussion of Queen in the context of other women’s periodical publications, see M. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996). 99. Gordon, ‘Decorative Electricity’, pp. 14–15; ‘Electrical Lighting Memoranda’, Ibid; ‘Decorative Electricity, by Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’, Black and White, 1 (1891), p. 75

Notes to pages 185–91

257

100. ‘Decorative Electricity, by Mrs J. E. H. Gordon’, Electrician, 26 (1891), p. 70. Earlier discussion is in: ‘Problems Connected with Indoor Illumination’, Ibid., pp. 480–1, and Ibid., pp. 501–2 and p. 521. 101. Robinson ‘Decorative Electricity’, p. 554. 102. Ibid, p. 554. 103. ‘More Books on Electricity’, pp. 421–2; ‘Domestic Electric Light’, p. 453. See further discussion in: Gooday ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My Home’. 104. ‘Our Booking Office’, Punch, 100 (1891), p. 213. 105. This comprised forty-two lights for regular ‘daily’ usage, and eighty-seven additional lights for ‘occasional’ usage when guests were visiting. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, pp. 173–8. 106. H. J. Dowsing (ed.), Crystal Palace Exhibition 1892 Official Catalogue and Guide (Sydenham: Crystal Palace Company, 1892), p. 3. The front cover specifies that ‘over 500 horsepower of the electricity used at this Exhibition is conveyed through 1 ¼ miles of undergrounds Mains from the Central stations at Sydenham, erected by J. E. H. Gordon & Co Ltd’. Copy in William J. Hammer Collection, NMAH, Series 3, Box 42, Folder 2. 107. Other committee members were Mrs W. K. Clifford, Mrs [George] Green, Mrs [Charles] Kingsley, and Charlotte Yonge. See letter of Alice Gordon to editor of The Times ‘Women authors and the Chicago Exhibition’, Times, 5 January 1893, 8C. For Mrs Gordon’s book at the Chicago Exhibition, see: E. E. Clarke List Of Books Sent By Home and Foreign Committees To The Library Of The Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893: compiled for the United States World’s Columbian Commission Board of Lady Managers (Chicago: 1893), p. 76. My thanks to Sophie Forgan for drawing my attention to Alice Gordon’s later writings, for example A. M. Gordon , ‘Women as Students of Design’, Fortnightly Review, 55 (1894), pp. 521–7. For the posthumous winding up of J. E. H. Gordon’s company see: Times, 20 January 1896, 14B–C; for the second marriage of Alice Gordon to J. G. Butcher, see: Times, 17 March 1898, 10A. Later in her life and upon her death, little reference was made to her earlier work in decorative electricity. See: ‘Funeral of Lady Danesfort’ Times, 20 June 1929, 19C. 108. ‘The Light in London: the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition’, Sunday Times, 10 January 1892, 6A. 109. ‘The Ladies Column’ continued in Lightning: the Popular and Business Review of Electricity up to the end of Volume 1 ( June 1892) as a series of gossipy notes. 110. ‘The Ladies Column’, pp. 20–2. 111. Ibid. 112. I have been unable thus far to trace a copy of this publication. 113. ‘The Ladies Column’, pp. 209–10 & pp. 233–4. There is no direct evidence as to whether the main column text was written by a male or female hand, thus we cannot necessarily take it for granted that the contributors to this ‘Ladies’ column’ were in fact (all or always) women. 114. ‘Ladies Column’, Lightning, p. 19. 115. ‘The Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition’, Times, 9 January 1892, 6E. 116. Dowsing, Crystal Palace, p.7; ‘The Ladies Column’, p. 39. See more on the Rashleigh, Phipps, and Dawson display in Chapter 7 regarding the figure of electricity dominating the world. 117. ‘Electrical Books’ Letter from F. Hubber, South Street Exeter, 19 February, Lightning, 1 (1891–92), p. 25. A. Bromley Holmes, Practical Electric Lighting (E. & F. N. Spon:

258

Notes to pages 191–5

London, 1st edn 1883). By implication, the edition suggested by Lightning was the third of 1887. 118. ‘Decorative Electricity’, Lightning, 2 (1892–3), p. 23. 119. ‘Decorative Electricity’, Lightning, 2, p. 194; ‘A Home of Light and Luxury’, Lightning, 2 (1892–3), p. 203; Frederic Berlyn, ‘Art and Electric Lighting’, Lightning, 2 (1892–3), p. 265. 120. ‘Artistic Designs for Arc Lamps’, Lightning, 2 (1892–3), pp. 364–5, c.f. comments by the Sunday Times on the ‘small arc’ used on display at Crystal Palace above. The General Electric Company in the USA undertook extensive efforts in the early twentieth century to develop shielded and reflection forms of arc lighting for indoor usage. See: Warshaw collection NMAH, Collection number 60, Electricity, Box 6: Folder 5. 121. General Electric Company, Decorative Electric Lighting (New York, NY: Bartlett and Co, 1893). See: Warshaw collection NMAH, Collection Number 60, Electricity, Box 6, Folder 4. 122. J. R. Cravath, ‘Electricity at the World’s Fair’, Review of Reviews, 1893 (US edition), pp. 35–36. Hammer collection NMAH, Series 3, Box 51, Folder 6). 123. Editor of New York’s Engineering Magazine to William J. Hammer, 5 June 1893, NMAH Hammer Collection Series 1, Box 1, Folder 10, Item 150. 124. F. A. Perrine DS, ‘Electricity in the Home and Office’, Engineering Magazine, 5 (1893), pp. 585–92, 587. My thanks to Becky Higgitt for helping me trace this piece. 125. Bowers, Lengthening The Day. Bowers suggests that as a result of the ending of the SwanEdison monopoly the prices in Britain dropped from three shillings and nine pence down to about one shilling, p. 108. For evidence of the diverse responses to the prospect of adopting electric light into the 1950s and later, see pp. 63–9. As a further example, considerable resistance was shown to the electric light by Lady Frances Campbell, the daughter of the eighth Duke and Duchess of Argyll who married Eustace Balfour, youngest brother of Arthur Balfour PM and was thus related by marriage to the Salisburys. Blanche Dugdale recalled that her mother ‘detested changes of any kind, resisting to her dying day the introduction even of electric light’ in her London home, much preferring to use oil lamps instead until her death in 1931. B. Dugdale, Family Homespun (London: John Murray, 1940), p. 114. See: C. Percy, ‘Dugdale, Blanche Elizabeth Campbell (1880–1948)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 126. D. S. Ryan, ‘Peel, Constance Dorothy Evelyn (1868–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Life’s Enchanted Cup – An Autobiography (1872–1933) (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933). Ryan notes that Dorothy was also the granddaughter of Robert Peel, and thus returned to her grandpaternal name upon marriage. 127. C. S. Peel (Illustrated by Agnes Walker), The New Home: Treating of the Arrangement, Decoration, and Furnishing of a House (London: A. Constable & Co., 1898), pp. 8–9. 128. C. S. Peel (Illustrated by Agnes Walker), The New Home: Treating of the Arrangement, Decoration, and Furnishing of a House, 2nd edn (London: A. Constable & Co., 1903), p. 62. 129. Ibid. pp. 8–9, 65–6. 130. Anon., Electric Home Lighting: A Lecture on Electric Light in the Home Suitable for Delivery Before Groups of the General Public, (London: Electrical Development Association, Light Service Bureau, [c.1930]) – copy in the NAEST Archive, IET Archives: Caroline Haslett papers ‘Gas vs. Electricity’, 33/17.1.11. 2–4. See for example the discussion on

Notes to pages 195–9

259

details of decoration: ‘Silk shades are ever popular, but those of glass, parchment and specially treated materials can be equally effective. The warmer colours […] yellow, orange, peach and tones of pink and red all give an effect of warmth and cosiness and are more to be advised than blue, green or mauve’, p. . 131. ‘Popularity of the Electric Light’, Electrician, 44 (1899), pp. 330–1. 132. As Joseph Swan remarked in discussion of the 1882 Electric lighting Act at the Health Exhibition conference in 1884, many had ‘not sufficiently recognised the fact that electric lighting was an infant and required nursing, and not a dangerous adult in need of a “straight jacket”.’ Rookes. E. B. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting’, pp. 390–415, 409. 133. Lancaster, Electric Cooking. For the continuing success of the gas industry, see Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity. 134. A. P. Trotter, The Elements of Illuminating Engineering (London, 1921), p. 26. Discussed in: C. Otter, ‘Cleansing and Clarifying: technology and perception in nineteenth-century London’, Journal of British Studies, 43 (2003), pp. 40–64, 61.

7 Personifying Electricity: gendered icons of uncertain identity 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

E. Atkinson and A. Ganot, Natural Philosophy for General Readers and Young Persons (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), p. 99. Ganot’s original French text reads: ‘Autant les découvertes électriques avaient marché avec lenteur dans l’antiquité et dans le moyen âge, aûtant leur progrès a été rapide dans les xviii et xix siècles. Depuis soixante-dix ans surtout, les faits nouveaux ont été si nombreux et si remarquables, leurs applications si importantes et si curieuses, qu’on a compare avex raison l’électricité à une fée complaisante à laquelle il suffrait de demander des prodiges pour les voir aussitôt se réaliser.’A. Ganot, Cours de physique purement expérimentale, à l’usage des personnes étrangères aux connaissances mathématiques, (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1859), p. 426. I am grateful to Joseph Simon for this information. Hope, Electricity and Its Wonders, p. 117. See, for example, the case study of General Electric’s use of female figures in its advertising: D. E. Nye. Image worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). A. Beltran and P. A. Carré, La Fée et la Servante: la Société Française Face à l’Électricité, XIXe–XXe Siècle, (Paris: Belin, 1991). See reference to the fairies of science (including Electricity) in Arabella Buckley’s children’s book, The Fairy-Land of Science (London: Edward Stanford, 1879). For more on Buckley see: B. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for new audiences (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press: 2007), pp. 238–53. For a more recent manifestation I thank Elizabeth Ihrig for showing me the longevity of ‘Reddy Kilowatt’ in US children’s cartoon culture. This character was apparently created by Ashton B. Collins Sr., general commercial manager of the Alabama Power Company c. 1926 after he had attended an electrical industry convention to discuss the problem of how to ‘sell electricity as a servant of mankind’. Lancaster, Electric Cooking. W. J. Hammer, ‘Electrical Diablerie’, New York World, 3 January 1885, unpaginated item in W. J. Hammer collection, NMAH, series 3 box 51 Folder 3. Adapted from translation by P. Julian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1974), pp. 94–5.

260 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes to pages 199–203 A. Beltran, P. A. Carré & B. Bensaude-Vincent, ‘En Flanant Dans le Expo: Images d’Électricité’, Culture Technique, 17 (1987), pp. 9–93.P. A. Carré, ‘Expositions et Modernité: Electricité et Communication Dans les Expositions Parisiennes de 1867 à 1900’, Romantisme, 65: 3 (1989), pp. 7–48. M. Warner, Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), p. 86. Julian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, pp. 2–4. Julian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, pp. 2–4; Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 3–4. Special Correspondent, ‘The Paris Exhibition’, Electrical Review, 46 (1900), pp. 731–2. Ibid.. Julian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau, pp. 0, 88. ‘Paris Exhibition. From our Own Correspondent’, Times, 13 April 1900, 4A; ‘The Paris Exhibition. From our own correspondent’, Times, 28 May 1900, 8B; ‘The Paris Exhibition. From our own correspondent’, Times, 6 June 1900, 10D; ‘The Paris Exhibition. From our own correspondent’, Times, 9 June 1900, 8B. H. B. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 25. ‘[T]hey had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and [equally much] expected to understand one as little as the other’. ‘Chicago’ (1893) was Chapter 22 of ibid. S. Bathrick, ‘The Female Colossus: the Body as Façade and Threshold’, in J. Gaines and C. Herzog (eds.), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 79–99. The statue was a gift from the French people to a fellow nation liberated by revolution; the statue was not ready in time for the US Centennial celebrations of 1876, only being completed in France during 1884 See Warner, Monuments and Maidens and E. Stafford, Worshipping Virtues: Personification and the Divine in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2000). Wosk, Women and the Machine, p. 72; Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, plates between pp. 08–9. Hammer, ‘Electrical Diablerie’, unpaginated item. Some time after 1889 Hammer circulated privately printed copies with the subtitle: ‘being a veracious account of an Electrical Dinner tendered in 1884 by William J Hammer, Consulting Electrical Engineer, to the ‘Society of Seventy-Seven’ of the N.P.H.S. of Newark N.J. in the First Electrical House ever established in the World’. This account also mentions that as the New Year arrived at midnight, Hammer presented the party with a four-foot high-confection of fruit, from which hung tiny electric lamps, the whole construct being ‘surmounted by a bronze figure of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty’ and ‘uplifted in “Miss Liberty’s” right hand burned an Edison lamp no larger than a bean’. Ibid. Wosk, Women and the Machine, p. 69. Buckley, The Fairy Land of Science. Quotation from the Kessinger reprint, p. . Buckley is discussed in N. Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 107–8. My thanks to Lauren Kassell for drawing Bown to my attention. For additional literature on the fairy imagery in science, see J. C. Brough, The Fairy Tales of Science: with Illustrations by Charles H. Bennett (London: Griffith & Farran, 1859); [ J. Hinton], ‘The Fairy Land of Science’, Cornhill Magazine, 5 (1862), pp. 6–42, 36; [Saintine, X. B.], pseudonym of Joseph Xavier Boniface, The Fairy Tales of Science: Being the Adventures of the Three Sisters, Animalia, Vegetalia, and Mineralia. Translated from the French (London, [1885]); J. G. MacPherson, The Fairyland

Notes to pages 203–7

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

261

Tales of Science, 2nd edition, (London: Simpkin, 1891) (Earlier edition has title: Tales of Science: Being Popular Scientific Papers). For Buckley’s earlier work in history of science, see: A. B. Buckley, A Short History of Natural Science: and of the Progress of Discovery from the Time of the Greeks to the Present Day (London: J. Murray, 1876). See for example the use of fairies in 1885 advertisements for promoting Borax and the Pall Mall Electrical Association therapeutic belt in L. A. Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian women (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 61, 108. Bown, Fairies, p. 1. For discussion of Buckley’s electric fairy, see: ‘Home Reading for the Secondary Schools’, The School Review, 3:8 (October, 1895) pp. 485–95. L. Kandler (1851–1927). For brief comment on Kandler, see: D. Gugerli, ‘Modernität-Elektrotechnik-Fortschritt Zur Soziotechnischen Semantik Moderner Erwartungshorizonte’, in S. K. Plitzner (ed.), Elektrizität in der Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart: GNT-Verlag, 1998), pp. 51–63. J. Monnier-Raball, P. Kaenel, G. Fonio, Autour de l’électricité: un Siecle d’Affiche et de Design (Le Mont-sur-Lausanne: Editions de la Tour Lausanne, c. 1990), pp. 6–8. A cognate image was used on another Austrian text: A. von Urbanitzky, Die Elektricität im Dienste der Menschheit. Eine populäre Darstellung der magnetischen und elektrischen Naturkräfte und deren praktischen Anwendungen, etc (Wien: Pest, 1885). This frontispiece to La Lumiere Electrique is reproduced in Schivelbusch Disenchanted Night, p. 5 and p. 7, but without explanation or commentary on the changes involved. Schivelbusch misdates the change of frontispiece to 1886. T. du Moncel (ed.), La Lumière Electrique: Journal Universel d’Electricité (Paris: Aux Bureaux du Journal). See January 1884 volume. As an example of the impact of the international circulating journal on European representation, we can note that this Lumière Electrique model was borrowed by Dr Martin M. Krieg for the front cover of his Taschenbuch der Elektricität (1888), albeit with minor alterations of background detail, such as the electric tram technology that had existed since 1884. M. Krieg, Taschenbuch der Elektricität: ein Nachschlagebuch und Ratgeber für Techniker, Praktiker, Industrielle und technische Lehr-Anstalten (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1888). My thanks to Geoffrey Cantor for drawing this source to my attention. For a portrayal of Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt holding up an Edison light in the mode of the statue of liberty c.1883, see: Wosk, Women and the Machine, p. 72. S. Cordulack, ‘A Franco-American Battle of Beams, Electricity and Selling of Modernity’, Journal of Design History, 18 (2005), pp. 147–66. Gordon, Decorative Electricity, front matter. W. König, ‘Friedrich Engels und “Die Elektrotechnische Revolution”: Technikutopie und Technikeuphorie im Sozialismus in den 1880er Jahren’, Technikgeschichte, 56 (1989) pp. –37. p. 3 has a picture of the female semi-naked bearer of electricity on the spinning/fan wheel by Ludwig Sütterlin (1865–1917), ‘Die Elektricität als lichtträgerin auf dem flugelrad’, taken from: Berliner Kraft – Und Licht (Bewag) Ag – 100 Jahre Strom fur Berlin;Ein Streifzug durch unsre Geschichte in Wort und Bild 1884–1984; Berliner Kraftund Licht (Bewag AG, 1984). See: König, Fredrich Engels, p. 6 for an 1896 caricature of Stuttgart Electrical Exhibition 1896, Berlin trade exhibition 1896 with crowing cockerel of Paris 1900. Both male and female have halo-like images above their head of electric light, ‘La Verité’ posing with light above. Thanks to the El Museum in Denmark for supplying this information.

262

Notes to pages 207–11

37. See General Electric folder, Warshaw collection, NMAH. 38. Monnier-Raball et al., Autour de l’electricite, pp. 92–3. For another female image in promoting oil lamps, see: Beltran and Carre, La fée et la servante, p. 209. 39. ‘A Giant in Germ’, Punch, 25 June 1881. 40. Hospitalier, Domestic Electricity, p. 212. 41. Crompton, ‘Artificial Lighting’, p. 409. 42. ‘Popularity of the Electric Light’, Electrician, 44 (1899), pp. 330–1. For Punch’s alternative account of the development of the babe into a mischievous (male) electrical sprite, see: G. Gooday, ‘I Never Will Have the Electric Light in My House’, pp. 174–7, and Gooday, The Morals of Measurement, pp. 253–5. 43. P. Benjamin, The Age of Electricity (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1886), p. i. 44. W. C. Richards, Electron, Or The Pranks Of The Modern Puck: a Telegraphic Epic for the Times (New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1858), pp. 63–4. I thank Elizabeth Ihrig for drawing my attention to this rare volume in the Bakken Library. 45. Trans. E. W. Lane (ed.), The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, In England: the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, illustrated William Harvey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883). There were earlier editions of Lane’s text and Harvey’s illustrations by other publishers for example; (London: J. Murray, 1859) and (London: Charles Knight and Co., Ludgate Street, 1839–1841). 46. [Hinton], ‘The Fairy Land of Science’, pp. 36–42, 36. 47. Hope, Electricity and its wonders, pp. 125–6. Hope alludes to Homer’s Iliad in describing electricity as being as ‘potent as the fabled thunder-bolt of “cloud-compelling Jove”’. Ibid. 48. Benjamin, The Age of Electricity, p. 371. 49. ‘Our booking office’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 100 (1891), p. 19. 50. R. Mullineux Walmsley, The Electric Current, how produced and how used (London; Paris; Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1894), p. 754. Walmsley’s credentials are listed on the title page as: DSc. London, FRSE etc. Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering in the Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh. Formerly Principal of the Sind Arts College, Bombay University. 51. L. Frank Baum, The Master Key. 52. ‘Electricity: Man’s Mightiest and Readiest Servant’ Scientific American, 115 (1916) unpaginated. This advertising was the successful entry in a competition to tell the story of electricity in which over 800 of USA’s artists entered. The use of the Aladdin motif was described as suggesting ‘more about electricity than a multitude of words’. See the Electric Storage Company’s ‘Exide’ commercial in the same issue for another example of a strongly masculine image used to identify the nature of electricity. 53. ‘Electricity, Man’s Slave’, New York Tribune, 18 January 1885, p. 10. Wosk, Women and the Machinep. 3; Nye, Electrifying America, p. 168. 54. As one of the most prolific and internationally successful popular science writers and lecturers of the early twentieth century, Gibson had no formal training in science beyond school, approximately half of the forty-five books he published between 1906 and 1930 were on electrical topics, all the while running Gibson Bros, the family’s curtain manufacturing business in Glasgow. P. Bowler, ‘Experts and Publishers: Writing Popular Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Writing Popular History of Science Now’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), pp. 59–187, 171. Gibson’s oeuvre was mostly published by Seeley of London (later Seeley, Service and Co.) and Lippincott’s in Philadelphia, and translated into Arabic, Braille, Dutch, Estonian, Hungarian, Italian

Notes to pages 211–17

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

263

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INDEX

accident see ‘electricity’ Adams, Henry, 94, 201 Aladdin, 186, 198, 208–12, 262 (n.52) Albemarle, The Duke of see ‘Keppell, William Coutts’ alternate vs. direct current, 13, 17, 22–3, 59, 63–4, 80, 87, 96, 99, 103 American Civil War, 130 Anthropomorphization, 5, 19, 26, 35, 38, 49–52, 57, 74, 148–51, 196–20, 208, 212, 215–16, 219 Ariel, 9, 35, 52, 151, 198, 207–9 Armstrong, William, 32, 79–80, 164–5, 168 asbestos, 86, 101, 106, 109 batteries, 46, 50, 81, 86, 89, 93–4, 105–9, 131, 141, 204, 207, 209, 247 (n.34) Baum, L. Frank, 146, 148, 210 Beeton, Isabella, 236 (n.38) Bell, Alexander Graham, 125 Bellamy, Edward, 122–3, 136–41, 146–7, 151, 249 (n.61) Benjamin, Park, 138–9, 143, 208–9 Bierce, Ambrose, 39, 229 (n.8) body, 2, 6–7, 75–6, 78, 85, 89, 92, 106–7, 200–1 Bolas, Thomas, 95, 101–2 Bottomley, John Thomas, 101 Bramwell, Frederick, 98 Brandreth, Alice Mary, see ‘Gordon, Alice’ British Association for the Advancement of Science, 28, 74, 125, 156, 161, 238 (n. 62) British Museum, 32, 158–9, 168 Brough, John Cargill, 260 (n. 24)

Brush Company, 24, 64, 78, 82–3, 88–9, 96, 101, 114, 116, 154, 157, 168 budget 31, 178, 184, 193 Buckley, Arabella, 203, 259 (n. 5), 260 (n. 24) Bury, Viscount see ‘Keppell, William Coutts’ Cecil , Lady Gwendolen, 79–80, 160, 165, 237 (n. 53) Chicago, 94, 187, 192, 198, 201 (see also: ‘exhibitions’) Christian, 2, 137–8, 181 Churchill, Lord and Lady Randolph, 2, 17, 22, 33, 50, 165–6, 176, 226 (n. 32) Clark, Latimer, 46, 54 Claudy, Carl Harry, 62, 65,234 (n.8) Congregationalist, see: ‘Christian’ Cornwallis-West, Mrs G., 226 (n.32) cost, 12–13, 29–31, 91, 105, 135, 166, 170, 177–8, 185 (see also: ‘expense’) ‘Cragside’, 32, 79, 164, 168 Crawford, Lord, 117 Crompton, Rookes Evelyn Bell, 24, 33, 63–4, 93, 102, 114–15, 165–6, 175, 226 (n.32), 244 (n.88) Crookes, William, 23, 33, 42, 58–9, 87, 123, 132, 141–5, 151, 166, 176, 220, 250 (n.81) Dagg, John R., 82 Danger, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25, 48, 59, 61–90, 92–103, 107–8, 110, 114, 117–18, 122, 129, 134, 199, 206, 216, 220, 235 (n.17), 238 (n.60), 242 (n.38)

288

Index

death, 6–7, 14, 20–3, 37, 58–91, 99, 102–6, 116–7, 127, 137, 199, 216, 234 (n.7), 235 (n.21), 237 (n.53) décor, 167 decoration, 24, 29, 105–6, 109, 118, 153, 175, 177–87, 193, 225 (n.18), 258 (n.130) Dickens, Charles, 33 Dimmock, William, 7, 20, 66, 73, 75–89, 102, 116–18, 237 (n.53), 238 (n.60) Disraeli, Benjamin, 77, 79, 111 Domestication, 1–7, 9–35, 40–1, 89, 98, 119, 124, 127, 164, 174–5, 183, 187, 195–6, 199, 202–3, 211–2, 216, 219–22 D’Oyly Carte, Richard, 107–9 du Maurier, Georges, 126 dynamo, 9, 16–17, 22, 33, 49–50, 52–3, 59, 80–1, 85, 88, 94, 101–2, 109, 122, 131–2, 165, 201, 204, 221, 228 (n.69), 236 (n.39)

heating, 1, 4, 6, 12, 16, 25, 31–2, 34, 47, 57, 61, 92, 135, 138, 211, 214–6, 219, 221 jewellery, 6–7, 76, 106–7, 109 lighting, see ‘lighting’ transport, 1, 10, 15, 39, 136–7, 140 Elmitt Edwards, Elsie, 118 Energy, 4, 15, 18, 38, 40, 43–4, 50–8, 58, 65, 131, 142–3, 149, 172, 201, 233 (n.63) Ether, 5, 38, 40, 43–4, 47, 53, 55–8, 142–3 exhibitions electrical Crystal Palace, 1882, 91, 93, 96–9, 101, 106, 144, 155, 168, 186–7, 189–93 Paris, 1881,20, 49–50, 91–5, 100, 132, 169, 175, 193, 199, 214 Paris, 1889,170, 193 Paris, 1900, 198, 200–1 other Chicago World’s Fair, 1893 25, 94, 155, 187, 192, 198, 201 Great Exhibition, 1851, 93 economy, 3, 74, 111, 151, 156, 167, 172, International Health Exhibition, 1884, 179, 184–6, 194–5 63, 66, 84–5, 99, 114–5, 208 Edison, Thomas Alva, 2, 5, 10, 13–17, 21, Expense, 30, 103, 115, 118, 147, 177, 23, 32–4, 41, 49–50, 58, 63, 71–2, 80, 184–5, 194 (see also ‘cost’) 87, 93–101, 106, 108, 111, 121–5, 131, Expertise, 3, 5, 6, 21, 41, 62–3, 76, 79, 84, 134–9, 146, 149–51, 154–7, 161–8, 86, 89, 93, 99–100, 104–5, 112–3, 175, 189, 192–3, 196, 198–9, 202, 119, 121–2, 134, 143–52, 155, 172–5, 206–7, 211–13, 221–2, 225 (n.22), 182–95, 214–5, 220 242 (n.46), 249 (n.61) Experts, 3–4, 19, 38, 40–2, 63, 78, 84, electrical diablerie, 199, 202 99–100, 118, 123, 128–30, 133–4, electricity 141, 145–6, 214 accident, 2, 6, 13–4, 19–20, 23, 29, 37, 61, 63–4, 66–8, 70, 72–8, 81–7, Fairclough, Margaret, 25 91–2, 94–6, 98–9, 102–4, 108, 146, fairy, 5, 19, 106, 149–50, 196–208, 212–7 236 (n.33), 241 (n.26), 242 (n.41) fashion, 45, 121, 171, 181, 253 (n. 50) aesthetics, 23, 30, 33, 104, 115, 154, 170, fatality, 6, 72–3, 77, 82, 87, 100 (see also ‘death’) 178–7, 183 fear, 2, 5, 7, 12–14, 17, 20, 25, 32, 61–2, as baby, 5, 51, 53, 196 64–6, 71–2, 75–6, 86, 89, 91, 99, clothing, 78, 101, 106, 109 109–10, 112, 114–15, 118, 121, 146, cooking, 1, 4, 6, 12, 16, 25, 31–2, 34, 57, 193, 202–3, 219, 230 (n.22), 253 (n. 61, 92, 110, 118, 149, 196, 202, 211, 50) 214–6, 219–21, 224 (n.2) Fell, Herbert, 178 decoration, 24, 105–6, 109, 111, 153, fire 177–87, 193, 225 (n. 18), 258 risk, 19, 95, 103–5 (n.130)

Index insurance against, 64, 91–2, 99–105, 242 (n.38) First World War, 11, 34, 49, 127, 133, 215 Fitzroy, Robert, 124 Fleming, John Ambrose, 43 Fluids, 44–8 Franklin, Benjamin, 41, 48, 54, 62, 230 (n.24) Fuse, 7, 68–70, 92, 94, 97, 99–101, 105, 114 Future, 2, 4, 7, 9–10, 23, 31, 34, 48, 50–2, 61, 82, 84, 92, 98, 110–111, 117, 119, 121–52, 156–8, 161, 163, 185, 188, 202–3, 208, 213, 216–17, 219–22, 248 (n.43) futurism, 3, 128–9, 137, 141, 144–5, 148, 151, 206 Ganot, Adolphe, 199, 259 (n.1) gardener, see ‘Dimmock, William’ gas lighting, 2, 4–7, 12, 15–18, 24–35, 63, 66, 71, 75–8, 91–2, 97, 99, 101, 105–6, 109–17, 119, 122, 134–5, 150, 153, 156–7, 162–7, 173, 184, 194–6, 207, 213, 219–21, 228 (n.70) (see also ‘lighting’) heating, 4, 10, 32, 110, 196, 199 (see also: ‘heating’) cookery, 5, 10, 14, 25, 31, 34, 110, 196, 199, 207, 215–6 supply, 38, 44–7, 65, 118, 229 (n. 19) safety of, 61–4, 66, 72, 76, 91, 97, 118, 235 (n.20), 236 (n.27), 240 (n.12), 243 (n. 52) (see also ‘hazard’) Gay, Albert, 61, 67, 70–1, 88–9, 104, 234 (n.1) Gender, 2, 5–7, 24, 30–5, 40, 52, 62, 75–6, 89, 104, 106, 113, 148–9, 153–9, 170– 96, 197–201, 207, 213–7, 219–20, 236 (n.39) General Electric Company, 192, 211, 256 (n.91), 258 (n.120) Genie, 9, 35, 198, 207–12 Gernsback, Hugo, 150 Gibson, Edward, 44–5, 59, 89, 198, 211–2, 230 (n.22), 234 (n.7), 262 (n.54) Gilbert and Sullivan, 107 Gilbert, William Schwenk, 33, 166

289

Glasgow, 50, 79, 101, 141, 168, 211 goddess, 5, 19, 197–204, 207–8 Gordon, Alice (Mrs J. E. H.), 2, 6–7, 22, 31, 34, 86, 103–6, 109, 141–2, 144, 151–2, 153–5, 162, 170–98, 206, 209, 214, 220–1, 239 (n.75), 249 (n.76) Gordon, James Edward, 2, 22, 58, 76, 86, 89, 102–5, 128, 132–3, 141, 143, 154, 162, 166, 174–87, 198, 214, 220 government Conservative, 74, 93, 147 Liberal, 47, 71, 79, 92, 98, 115, 118 Guy, Arthur, 91, 170 Hammer, William J., 170, 192–3, 199, 202, 260 (n.22) Harris, Frank, 176 Haslett, Caroline, 65, 89, 118 Hatfield House, 24, 32, 62, 65–6, 68, 76–82, 114, 116, 160, 165–6, 168 Hazard, 2–4, 6, 20, 23–4, 33, 37, 59, 63–6, 71–8, 83–4, 87–9, 94, 100–14, 130, 146 headaches, 24, 29, 34, 109, 113, 153, 170, 185 health, 4, 6, 63, 73, 76, 84–5, 92–3, 99, 109–18, 159, 194–5, 208, 216 Heaphy, Musgrave, 101–3 heating, 1, 4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 25, 31–2, 37, 47, 57, 61, 92, 95, 99–100, 110, 118, 135, 138, 196, 199, 211, 214–6, 219–21, 224 (n.2) (see also: ‘electricity’ and ‘gas’) Hinton, James, 208 Holmes, A. Bromley, 191 Hope, Ascott R., 123, 197, 209 Hospitalier, Edmund, 107, 169, 208 House of Commons, 32, 98, 115, 165, 241 (n.22) House of Lords, 77–8, 115–6 Humphrys, James, 37, 83 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 129, 131, 176 imp, 5, 19, 149–50, 198, 208 Institution of Civil Engineers, 164, 214 Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), 102–3, 142, 147, 242 (n.38)

290

Index

Jablochkoff, 32, 66, 73, 79–80, 111, 156–60 Jebb, Caroline, 159 Jenkin, Fleeming, 46, 54 Jex-Blake, Arthur John, 67, 235 (n.21) Journalist, 19–20, 24, 47, 65, 94, 97, 123–5, 129, 136–7, 146, 173, 188 Kennelly, Arthur Edwin, 9, 23, 121, 138–9, 146, 151, 169, 222 Keppell, William Coutts, 128–32 King Coal, 50–2, 208 King Steam, see ‘King Coal’

Lodge, Oliver, 5, 47–8, 53, 55–8, 229 (n.11), 231 (n.41) London, 22, 24–5, 28–9, 32–3, 46, 54–5, 58, 63, 66–70, 77, 79, 84, 88, 92–4, 98, 103, 107–8, 110–3, 117–8, 128, 135, 144–5, 148, 155–68, 173–6, 187, 191, 214, 225 (n. 22), 227 (n. 55) Lubbock, John, 161 Luxury 3, 17, 19, 30–1, 61, 142, 153, 155, 160, 184–6, 191–5, 220

Macnie, John, 136–7, 249 (n.60) Magic, 2, 4, 5, 19, 23, 58, 87, 107, 159, 192, la fée electricité, 5, 198–202, 208, 216–7 200–3, 208–9, 215–7 Lancaster, Edward, 2, 25, 34, 57, 198–9, Marlborough, The Duke of, 117 214–5, 220 Marvin, Charles, 75 Lancaster, Maud (Lucas), 6, 25, 34, 37, 57, Maxwell, James Clerk , 43, 47, 196, 198–9, 214–5, 220 54–5, 79, 128, 174–5, 230 (n.27), 233 Lane-Fox, St George, 63–4, 94, 96, 123, 133, (n.63) 135–6, 163, 248 (n.52), 252 (n.15), Maxwellian, 5, 39–41, 47, 53, 55–6, 230 253 (n. 35) (n.22) Lane-Fox-Pitt see ‘Lane–Fox, St George’ McKendrick, John, 141 Largs, 101, 167 McLeod, Herbert, 79–82, 88, 237 (n. 47), Letheby, Henry, 110–2, 243 (n. 68) 238 (n. 60) lighting, medical, 61, 84–5, 128, 138 electrical Meredith, George, 175–6, 255 (n.71) domestic, 1–2, 6–7, 10, 16, 19, 24, 30– middle-class, 28, 30–4, 129, 193, 208 1, 33, 47, 75, 79, 98, 116, 118, 135–6, modernity, 2, 5, 14–19, 63, 92, 114, 118, 154–96, 212, 225 (n.18 & 22) 121, 140, 179, 216–7, 225 (n.19) arc, 20, 24–5, 32, 66–7, 73, 77–80, 97, Moncel, Theodore du, 204 100, 111, 154–165, 168, 173, 176, Morand, Paul, 199–201 192, 196 ‘Mr Therm’, 199, 207, 215–6 Rapieff, 57, 235 (n.12) Mystery, 2, 9, 19, 35, 38–40, 43, 45, 57–8, Incandescent, 9–10, 13, 15–16, 23–5, 94, 130, 132, 210, 217 30, 41, 48, 58, 61, 63–4, 71, 78, 80, mythology, 23, 53, 87, 198, 217 91, 93, 96, 101, 106–7, 110–6, 123, 144, 154, 156, 162–171, 174–5, 187, Paris, 50, 84, 93–100, 110–11, 156, 200–1, 189, 195–6, 200, 202, 207, 221, 225 204 (see also ‘exhibitions’) patent, 9, 101, 107, 123, 135, 157, 193, 207, (n.15) 252 (n.15) gas Paterfamilias, Mr & Mrs, 32–3 lamp, 4, 6–7, 15–16, 29, 63–4, 75, patronage 166–7, 228 (n.70) Royal, 97, 157 mantle, 15–16, 30, 110, 114 other, 2, 79, 117, 165, 193, 255 (n.71) natural, 159 Peel, Constance (Dorothy), 2, 6, 193–6, 220 street, 10, 12, 24, 28, 53, 97, 156–7, personification, 6, 35, 49, 57, 186, 197–217 161–3 lightning, 6, 10, 19–20, 24–5, 46, 50, 55, 59, Preece, William, 19–21, 30–1, 38, 53–6, 63, 74, 91, 95, 98, 100–2, 111, 121–22, 62, 84, 130, 165, 204–7

Index 147, 157, 167, 209, 233 (n.63), 243 (n.71) prophesy, 121, 136, 139, 142, 146, 149 Puck, 52, 198, 207–8 Punch, 32, 38, 50–2, 73–4, 124, 126–7, 171, 186, 196, 207–9 Queen Victoria, 116, 175, 185 Ramsay, William, 48 Rand Capron, John, 83–4, 239 (n.69) Richards, William. C., 262 (n.44) Richmann, Georg, 62 Robinson, Charlotte, 151, 175, 184 Royal Academy, 32, 165, 168 Royal Institution, 45, 58, 132, 155, 158

291

Spottiswoode, William, 79–80, 98, 135, 168, 175 Statue of Liberty, 201–2, 205, 260 (n.22) Stead, William, 2, 24, 123, 138–41, 144–8, 247 (n.29) Stewart, Balfour, 124 Stone, William H., 84–5 Sugg, William, 29, 111 Swan Company, 101, 168, 169 Swan, Joseph, 33, 63–4, 79–81, 94, 101, 106, 156, 164–70, 175, 196, 208, 214, 221

taming, 2, 4, 6, 10, 21, 23, 26–8, 217, 221 (see also: ‘domestication’) technological determinism, 26 technologization, 9, 11, 196 Salisbury, third Marquess of (Gascoynetelegraph, 4, 13, 21, 25, 27, 38, 44–6, 53–4, Cecil, Robert), 2, 6, 20, 23–4, 32, 37, 58, 62, 65, 79–84, 94, 96, 102, 111, 61–89, 93, 115–17, 147–8, 154, 160, 114, 123–7, 130–4, 138–9, 143, 164, 165, 168, 175, 237 (n.44 & n.47), 238 208–12 (n.60), 252 (n.28), 256 (n.91) teleology, 9, 15, 26 satire, 32, 39, 50, 52, 123–4, 170, 208, 245 telephone, 18, 27, 44, 61, 65, 77, 79, 83, 94, (n.9) 123–8, 131, 204, 211, 229 (n.15) Savoy Theatre, 32, 101, 107–9, 165, 168 tension (voltage), 23, 28, 63, 65, 73, 79, 83, science communication, 6, 38, 41 85–9, 238 (n.60) Scrutton, Percy, 57, 110, 114–5 Select Committee on Lighting by Electricity, Tesla, Nikola, 2, 23, 25, 58–9, 132–3, 142–4 Theatres, 7, 67, 73, 76–7, 84, 98, 106–7, 98, 111, 130, 158 109, 119, 122, 156, 161 Serrin, 156 Thiusen, Ismar, see ‘Macnie, John’ servant electricity as, 5, 22, 35, 37, 40, 57, 83, 95, Thomson, J. J., 48, 229 (n.11) Thomson, Lady, 100, 154, 167–8, 177 140, 196–7, 202, 205, 208–11, 259 Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), 23, 50–2, (n. 5) domestic, 2, 34, 64–6, 71–2, 75–6, 86–7, 79, 98, 100–1, 126, 130, 167–8 (see 89, 100, 118, 136, 149, 178, 181, also: ‘Keppell, William Coutts’) 193–4, 221, 225 (n.22), 236 (n.39) Thurlow, Lord (Hovell-Thurlow-Cummingshareholder, 66, 71–2, 132, 157, 184 Bruce, Thomas John), 2, 116 Shillito, Henry, 79, 81–2 Trotter, Alexander Pelham, 196 Siemens, Werner, 98–9, 101, 157 Trowbridge, John, 39–43, 229 (nn.16–17) Siemens, William, 111, 161, 236 (n.29), 238 Tyndall, John, 45–6, 48, 129, 158, (n.62) 176, 231 (n.32) social construction of technology (SCOT), uncertainty, 3, 10, 38–40, 46, 93, 118, 219 27 United States of America, 1, 11–4, 17–8, 20, Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electri27, 34, 38, 40, 62, 66, 86–7, 99–100, cians (STEE), 102–4, 117 103, 111, 122, 127, 138, 150, 155, 157, spectacle, 12, 28, 107, 134, 154, 156, 161 159, 162–3, 183, 187, 192, 199, 202, Spencer, Herbert, 45–6, 231 (n.30 and n.32)

292

Index 206, 208, 211–2, 219, 233 (n.72), 235 (n.21), 249 (n.61), 258 (n.120)

Vanderbilt, Mrs Cornelius, 99, 108, 202 Verity, John, 56, 114, 155, 162, 173–4, 178, 181, 233 (n.72) Verne, Jules, 124–5, 135–6 Vienna, 66, 77, 204, 243 (n.52)

Walker, Sydney, 56 White, James, 101 Wizard, 5, 19, 25, 134, 149–50, 198, 211–3 (see also ‘magic’) Yeaman, Charles Henry, see ‘Gay, Albert’