History Brief: Electricity and Its Impact in the 1920s
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- Опубликовано: 8 ноя 2015
- Teachers, check out our 1920s workbook here: www.amazon.com/Roaring-Twentie...
In this video, the impact of electrification of homes during the 1920s is discussed. Cleaner homes, new household goods, and improved health and eyesight are noted.
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I'm working on a 100+ yr. old Victorian in Boston,Ma. USA. It has original gas and electric lights. Both fixtures are very pretty and ornate. Nice old stuff.
Both horribly dangerous still cool tho
Working on a Victorian house?
The one thing that I remember about electricity from the 1920s: Knob and tube wiring. My family used to spend their vacation in New England's beaches on the Atlantic. The cottage we rent were built either during or before the 1920s. Inside, one could see the separate, insulated wires that ran between small insulators on the ceiling to pull-chain fixtures. Sometimes, there would be a turn switch on the wall next to a door. Very few plug-in wall outlets. I thought, if we purchased a cottage with this, the first thing to do is to re-wire it.
I’m living in a house built in 1928 with K&T wiring. I mentioned to an electrician that I thought it should be replaced and he said I shouldn’t have to.
@@rzu7120 if it's in good shape, hasn't been butchered with modifications and hidden splices to newer NM cable, and hasn't been baked by overhead light fixtures, and hasn't had attic insulation blown around it, it should be safe. Bear in mind, many insurance companies will not write a home insurance policy with this type wiring active, or if they do, they will typically require it first be certified in good condition by a licensed electrician, and they will charge higher premiums. That said, although K&T was state of the art technology when the house was built, it's obsolete, and you'd have little to no incentive to continue using it.
@@rzu7120 "elelctrician... I shouldn't have." I graduated from Trade School (electrical 1964). I fully agree with electrician you spoke with. Those old systems of wire suspension are actually more efficient and safer because the heat generated from increased loading would quickly dissipate into the air around the wires.
@@Sparky-ww5re "most insurance companies will not write a home policy" Bullshit, you're making that up.
An associate of mine was an insurance inspector. The bank that gave the mortgage did all the necessary inspections before giving the homeowner the mortgage loan.
You're a "Wooden Philosopher", that is someone with strong opinions about things he knows nothing about.
safest wiring ever, as long as you didn't mess with it
I love that washing machine ad, "More manageable than servants." Just try putting that in an ad now!
Wealthy people use servants or referred to maids to do house work like laundry.
Put it in an ad, make the crybabies cry.
I bought a house in Oklahoma that was built in 1905. It was a beautiful home with lots of room. However, all of the light switches and electrical outlets were above the 3-12 to the 4 ft high mark on the wall. I investigated and found that they didn't get electricity until the 1907's. It was a wonderful home for me and I loved it. It was two story and the closets were made from any extra room between the rooms and the roof. The kitchen was made from a back porch so the floor was lower than the rest of the house. It was just delightful.
Very interesting.
TheMinnie419 interesting and cool
The really early electric setups didn't have pronged plugs. All appliances originally plugged into screw in light sockets. Probably because electric lighting was the original reason for electrification, with the electric appliances coming later.
I was born in 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. We had a refrigerator at home. I didn't see an ice box until my mother and I came to Los Angeles, California in 1947. I thought it was amazing that someone would deliver Ice in a big block three times a week.
I kind of wish there was still ice block delivery. Having a ready supply of ice blocks could be useful, especially in this hot and humid climate I am forced to live in. If I wanted a block of ice, I wouldn't even know where to find it. All that is sold around here is cubed or crushed ice and nobody delivers it.
@@NotSoCrazyNinja What will you do with that?
@@MACTEP_CHOB Right this moment, I would order enough ice blocks to build an igloo. Way too hot recently.
@@NotSoCrazyNinja But igloo are being built from snow 😁
Not mentioned here, but very important: electricity changed the very basic rules of human existence that had always existed previously - that is, electric lighting (and the later electric-powered forms of entertainment) got people to stay up late at night and not immediately go to sleep when it got dark. If you've ever camped out or stayed someplace without electricity, you find yourself going to sleep much earlier.
Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress wasn’t exactly a "model home." It was designed as a showcase for how electricity changed home life through the first 60 years of the 20th Century. Just a minor point of clarification.
There were many rural areas that did not get electricity until well after WWll and even into the 50's.
@@fritzsmith3296
How old were you when you first got electricity? What was it like to suddenly have electricity?
@@fritzsmith3296 When the govt gave a damn.. now they would take it away instead!
Is there any rural areas now that still dont have it, like way out there? I am not talking about deliberate off grid folks I am discussing places that just dont have any yet because of distance and rough terrain etc..
@@fritzsmith3296 Yes, the Rural Electrification Program brought electricity to vast areas of rural America, and that changed the way people lived in major ways. When I was a Senior in H.S. in 1969, in Texas, the North Texas State Rural Electric co-operatives sponsored a speech contest in all of the rural counties. The speech had to be titled" Rural Electricity and My Community". I entered and won 1st place for my county. All of us kids won an all expense paid 10 day trip, by bus, to Washington, D.C. where we visited all of the major sites. We all had a great and very memorable time.
@@michaelcraig9449 That is a great question! I will say that there probably are some very remote places like way up in the remote Rockies or, and this came to mind, places in remote Alaska where it might just be too costly to the local utility company to run electricity for just one customer. But I really do not know for a fact. But a good question..!!
My father was born in 1948. He grew up on a farm in a very rural area. They did not get electricity until 1957.
I love seeing those old videos on how things developed and how they used to be. Keep them coming.
No1 Google fast forward to taking off a two-tone light cover and making it a three-prong go to that point
You always put 100% good non half ass work in your videos. The decade was my favorite as far as history is concern. Great video
@ 2:42 the grocery store is a Atlantic Pacific (A & P) that became the huge grocery chain in the northeastern part of the country up to the mid 70's I believe.
My Paternal Grandfather, Matthew Mattinson, born in 1884, didn't have electricity installed in his cottage at Dent, Cumbria, until 1964!
Did he have gas lights?
@@gregorymalchuk272 There was no mains gas at his remote farm! It was candles and oil lamps.
I remember the early electric lighting in Milwaukee from the 20's Thanks for posting
Mazda Edison style light bulbs are popular in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s in larger cities and urban areas.
I'm in northern Ontario electricity is not so affordable now
And that was just the citys. Lots of farms that were away from towns never got power or gas till the 1950,s and 60,s my grandma told me in central canada
These videos are fantastic! Thank you!
What made electricity affordable and practical was finally deciding on AC over Edison's DC power and standardized voltage, ampage and cycles. Before that you needed to buy appliances that worked on what your electric co. Produced. If you traveled the world you see different countries have different electric standards and you needed adapters to plug in devices. Imagine if there were competing systems within one country. Telsa's AC induction motor was a vast improvement. Inventors had battery powered motors since 1830's. Many Radiio were battery powered because of the different systems, but you could buy the right battery. After a while the called them Farm Radios because there was little Rural electrification and Farmers bought them.. They became a necessity when daily weather forecasts and commodity prices were broadcasted were implemented.
Electric lighting didn't improve eyesight, but it did improve visibility.
By improving visibility, the number of vision related problems dropped, thereby improving eyesight, generally speaking.
Sam Mott yep he's right
@@sammott8557 That is a bit of a stretch.
Actually, it is now speculated that indoor lighting facilitated people spending longer hours indoors as children, and the lack of bright sunlight in childhood is now thought to be responsible for the epidemic of myopia.
@@gregorymalchuk272 I have myopia and I spent the vast majority of my childhood outside. Literally, several hours a day every day until my teen years when allergies started kicking in.
My mom told me that in western VA, they didn't get electricity to their home until 1944, right after WWII
I'd believe it, but that would be late 1945 or 1946 to be after the war.
sorry, typo. 1945. thx
Farmers in rural Lewis, Jefferson, St. Lawrence Co. NY got electric after WWII. Many also did not have indoor plumbing until then, even later.
Great job.
My dad in 1950 showed me an Edison Bulb that was lighting the milk house attached to the barn; around that time I clearly remember dad exclaiming his concern for the electric bill. Keeping in mind the time and the finances of the era, I laugh now at the $5 he was genuinely concerned with. I imagine that $5 then is not much off the value of, say, $150 today. Like the video, thankee!
In the mid 80's, my Dad was commenting about people with the $1000/month mortgages (or more). He and my Mom bought an old farm, 88+/- acres, two story house, two car detached garage, barn, and a handful of outbuildings and chicken coops. There were a few months he said were they had to scrape to get the $125/month mortgage payment.
In some ways your life and the life of your family parallels my own; you survived that as did they. Be well.
CrampedGrampy was it $5 a month or a year? Also was the light given off by the eddison bulb more yellowish then the bulbs of today? Just curious
Hello Mr. K: The family lived on a small farm, mom and dad with 6 kids and perhaps, 30 heifers in the barn. So, $5 is probably about right. You're correct about the color rendition, it was as you wrote, 'yellowish'. To my memory, that was the only bulb like it on the farm. Be well.
My mom mentioned a few times about when her parents' farm house got electricity. Not sure of when that was but seems like it was the late 40s, when my mom was around ten to twelve years old.
Thank you for the well made and informative video.
+Ayad Saleh They are great!
+Ayad Saleh And thank you for the wonderful comment!
My grandparents' home was built in 1905 and originally did not have electricity. When it was installed the outlets were only put on the outer walls. Luckily, they did put in ceiling lighting also. My husband and I lived in that house when we first married. Loved the big rooms and the tall ceilings but so few outlets made life a game. Don't overload the circuits!
Like Ralphie's house in A Christmas Story when his dad was lighting the Christmas tree and the fuse blew! All of those light cords going to 1 outlet.
Ralphies house is in Cleveland and it is open to tour, for a fee, of course
As a kid in the 1950's EVERYBODY knew it was a dangerous fire hazard to run a lamp cord under the carpet. Many homes caught fire because of this practice. And old fuse boxes had screw in glass fuses that blew too often. The quick fix was to put a penny in the fuse socket and screw the blown fuse back in.
That took all of the protection away on that circuit and a fire might start inside the wall from overload.
@@kimmer6 I was born in 1989 and I never heard of the penny in the fuse socket trick till I moved to the farm after my mother remarried when I was 16. My step grandpa, Ervin, now 96 yrs old, and even his kids that are well into their mid to late 60s, joke around and told me stories of that like it was voodoo. Definitely old school. And an untold number of homes burned down because many times people would blow the fuse and discover the last one was used up and the store was closed for the weekend. Or worse out of frustration the fuse keeps blowing because the skillet is plugged in the kitchen, the teenager is trying to blow dry her hair for a date, and dad is trying to watch the football game while sitting in front of the space heater. And many times the fire would start inside the walls. By the time you started to smell smoke, the fire was already spread well into the entire structure. That is one reason we started to move to circuit breakers in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and around that time 60 amp service was being replaced with at least 100 amp, which is now the bare minimum, eliminating the replacement of a 15 amp fuse with a 20 or 30, or the penny.
@@kimmer6 but many of todays generation would not understand not using a penny to jump a blown fuse, as we are so used to breakers. Although is something we should really be mindful about if you are buying or renting a very old house or apartment. Especially one with the original knob and tube wiring, something we also don't see much nowadays
The unappreciated man,making life easier for every one.
Thank you
Love these!
I love going to these videos my school has me watch only because I love reading the comments from a few months ago to like 6 years ago haha
lol right you'll always see people from a week ago arguing with a comment from 5 years ago
Greatful 💙
Nice Video
Does anyone know, when did the first homes have electricity in the USA? By when did they almost all have it, a universal thing? What about indoor plumbing and toilets, when did that start and by what date was it universally everywhere?
In the 1870,s the super rich had power and plumbing. Natural gas did not come till a little later I believe.
I'd say the first homes to have electricity would've been in the late 1870's. I'd say by the 1960's just about all homes including rural areas had electricity. This information is pertinent only to the USA.
One supposes in another hundred years the 1990s will be most thought of for adoption of the personal computer, the 2000s will be remembered as "the internet age", the 2010s as "the era of the smartphone", and I suspect the 2020s are going to be "the advent of self-driving cars".
The 2020s might be remembered as the smart home age. It seems that trends are moving in that direction. Smart home devices are getting cheaper and more and more appliances are having smart home stuff integrated into them. The problem right this second is the lack of decent standards. There are way too many versions of smart home devices and they don't like to communicate. I'm betting the 2030s will be remembered as the wearable/augmented reality years. I think the smartphone will go the way of the flip phone and be replaced with more wearables. The hindering factor right now is cost. Think about it, no longer having to even touch your "phone" to use it. Everything voice-controlled, maybe a wristwatch style device to handle the few things that might require a touch. "Glasses" that will allow you to see the world clearly, but also see overlays. Let's say you enter a strip mall. You're hungry. Your wearable detects that you might be hungry and asks if you wish to find food. If you reply yes, it can then give you an overview of the food establishments in that mall or you can suggest a theme of food you want and it will show you what is available. Once you figure out what you want, it can give you actual arrows (turn by turn navigation) in your field of vision to direct you to the restaurant of your choosing. It can display their menu and maybe prices. You can call them if you have a question while you're on your way to them. Once there, maybe you can order without even having to talk to anyone or touch a wallet or card or anything. Maybe you can order before you start heading there so that it's ready when you get there. When done eating, you can leave a review easily that others can use.
On your way home, the wearable will alert your home when you are about to arrive so that it can make adjustments to make your arrival pleasant (turn on lights, adjust the HVAC system, etc). Upon arrival, your home senses you have arrived and can unlock the door for you and greet you. When you're ready to leave, you can "tell" your car to prepare. It can start and turn on the heat or AC for you so that the interior is perfect before you even get to it without ever having to touch a button. Imagine, it's a hot summer day and you are able to come to a nice cool car interior and a car that is ready to go without having to touch keys or buttons or fobs. No worry of theft either as the car will be "smart enough" to detect if it is you trying to take it. If it's not you, it locks down. If a window is broken or a door lock bypasses and it's not you, it can lock itself down and maybe even alert a security company that can then check the car cameras to verify the situation and alert the police if need be.
Augmented reality via wearables and everything being "smart" is the future. It's coming, I'm just not sure exactly when. My best guess is the 2030s. The timeline I suspect is 2020s, an increase in smart home and maybe smart cars by the late 2020s. Then in 2030s, wearables will start to become popular due to a decrease in technology prices. By the late 2030s augmented reality will become a lot better. Then the 2040s will be the prime years for the formation of standards for the future. Kind of like electricity was wild and crazy in the beginning but eventually became a standard. The time will come when wearables with augmented reality will be more popular than smartphones are today.
That’s a really curious take and you’re not wrong. Growing up in the 00s and 10s I’d guess that the Smartphone was to the 10s like the personal desktop computer was to the 80s. I wasn’t around back then but it seems like personal desktop computers became more and more affordable in the mid to late 70s and by 1983 or 1984 I would assume that they were commonplace in offices, schools, libraries, etc. From my experience smartphones began to rise in the late 2000s and early 10s; by 2013 or 2014 they had already become omnipresent.
We don't know that yet. A lot of the stuff talked about today doesn't exist yet and is faddish
Bravo!!! ⚡️👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿⚡️
20 Watt lamp
This allowed people to stay up later!
the first beast.
Disney's Carousel of Progress at 2:50
Some even 1940s.
Actually we spend just as much time cleaning our houses as they used to in the 1800s. It's just as a result of appliances they're far cleaner then they used to be.
BUT NOW POWER COMPANIES HAVE TAKEN AFTER PIGS.
wonder how primitive we will look in 100 yrs
Who knew that over 100 years and due to green energy costs we are going back to candles and oil as it is much cheaper. Hydro is no longer affordable.
Lynn Rahn I
Well you see the electricity was affordable for the time as to get people depended but then the electric company would spike up the price and start an energy struggle which lead to nuclear meltdowns and people stealing grease to burn as diesel so the truth is if the electricity went away it would be hard for the first few months but then people would turn out wiser .
I came looking for the really stupid electricity propaganda