(I say “look like” in quotes because what I’m really asking about is what product developers today might call look-and-feel.)
Given that household electricity came into use beginning in the late 19th Century, at which time where wasn’t much else to use it for besides lighting, did early setups include wall sockets? I wonder about this because older building interiors, even today, often feature numerous wall-mounted bracket lamps, often the successors to similarly configured gaslights that had taken their fuel from the household gas supply. This is noticeable generally in movies from the 1930s. About 20 years later, in A Streetcar Named Desire, scenes inside the Kowalskis’ house show an electric ceiling light being used to supply power to other small electrical items; I can’t tell if there were outlets built into the lamp originally, or if they were using a bulb-socket-to-electrical-outlet adapter in place of a light bulb.
Although people in Victorian times did have portable oil lamps, and presumably demanded portable electric lamps when electricity became available, you sure don’t see those in old historical evidence as much as you do ceiling and bracket lights. And it doesn’t seem as if there was a vast array of electrical appliances available in the early days. Phonographs were wound by hand, and not much else existed to be plugged in–at least, that’s my perception.
So it all comes down to a couple of basic questions: first, to what extent and for what did people use electricity for in the early days, besides lights. And second: let’s suppose a person were suddenly thrown back to the year 1900, and stipulate that he’s in a place that does have electricity. Would he be able to plug in and use any modern appliances, like an MP3 player with its power cord?
My family were squatters in an old house in the swamps near the Missouri river. We got electricity in '48 or '49. I was about 9 or 10 years old. Some government agency just run it to a pole with a transformer and a meter. My father somehow figure out how to run wires into the house. We first had a few lights and then a refrigerator. (A crossroads grocer got some kind of a contract to retail Crosley (?sp) refrigerators.) As I recall the first a few lights and then a refrigerator was the pattern throughout the extended community or perhaps a dozen households that did not previously have electricity. We read the meter ourselves and paid annually for a couple of years until some utility took over from the government.
Ok I am going back over 40 years ago to the old ranch house and the stories my dad told us.
Origional added electricity I believe was 30 amps, 240 VAC. When I was a kid it had been increased to 60 amps. In tne kitchen was a three way knife switch when my dad was a kid the electrict water heater and electric stove were connected to this switch only one could be used at a time. When the service was uprgaded to 60 amps the contacts were by passed to they could both run at the same time.
The wiring was some knob and tube. On the ground floor there was what might be called wooden wire mold. It was approc 1 inch wide by 1/2 inch high. The wood was groved. The wire went into the groved and then a wooden cap wasa put overr the top. The mold went to outlet boxes and cieling light fixturess.
I do not remember many wall outlets. All the wiring was two wire with no ground. So any modern equipment that can run without a ground could be pluged in with an adaptor for the ground.
I grew up in a house that was built in 1924, which, except for the addition of 220V outlets for the kitchen and basement, had the original electrical system.
All wiring was knob-and-tube.
Screw-in fuses were used instead of circuit breakers. They blew all the time.
Bedrooms only had one outlet each. The dining room had one outlet, living room three, kitchen two, and bathroom one. No outlets were grounded, which wasn’t that much of a problem in the 1970s, when grounded electrical devices weren’t commonplace yet. In the 1980s, my father bought more cheater plugs, filing off the thicker of the two plugs so they would fit in the vintage outlets. No GFCI outlets, either.
Almost all ceiling-mounted lights in the house were operated by pull chains, except for the kitchen, dining room, attic, and basement.
Wall switches were either push button or toggle switches that snapped loudly.
The electric meter was indoors. One of my chores was to read the meter, mark the dial positions on a card, and give the card to my parents to mail to Niagara Mohawk.
My grandparents had a few appliances from the 20’s that had the light socket connection thingy. That seemed to be the default at the time, now earth worries me with metal gadgets maybe that is why Bakelite took off?
Do you mean a house on a real ranch, or a single-story suburban tract house? If it’s the latter I’m in my fifties now and grew up in a then-contemporary tract house in that style. I well remember a general lack of outlets; people generally used a lot of “octopus” extensions as this was well before the era of power strips. Houses and apartments built in the 1950s and not rewired do tend to have noticeably fewer outlets then more recent structures. But even so by that time a wide variety of portable electronics and other appliances had come into widespread use, so it’s quite a bit later than the really early period I’m interested in.
I’ve always been impressed by the early phone systems, in which the power to the handsets came over the wires from the phone company. Even today, with a basic landline telephone you can still use the phone during a local power outage. Come to think of it, I now suspect that the early telephony engineers and technicians realized that phone technology was far ahead of power distribution technology, so didn’t want to offer phones that needed to be plugged in.
janeslogin, thank you for a fascinating and informative answer! I didn’t know there were places that still hadn’t been electrified that late, at least in the 48 contiguous states.
My Grandmothers house (in south Minneapolis) had all knob & tube wiring, except for rooms where they had re-used the gas pipes as electrical conduit – they just pulled wires through the pipes and connected them. Those rooms actually had wall switches (pushbuttons, like elmwood mentioned) controlling the fixtures, which were mostly wall brackets replacing gas lamps. The switches were in appropriate places; they replaced small valves that had been used to control the gas lighting.
Many early portable electric appliances came with or were modified to have a base at the end of the cord that would screw into an edison light bulb socket. Partly because many houses didn’t have many electrical outlets, but also because early electric companies charged different prices for ‘lighting’ electricity vs. ‘appliance’ electricity. The houses were wired with different circuits for just the electric lights. That electricity was cheaper, because the electric company was competing with the gas lighting company. But there was no competition for portable appliances, so the electric company charged a lot more for this electricity. People got around this price gouging by connecting their electrical appliances by screwing the cord into a light bulb spocket when they wanted to use them.
Also, electric motors were expensive. Currently, they are cheap enough so that your electric mixer, blender, vacuum, window fan, etc. each have a built in motor, even though it goes unused most of the time. But back then, you could buy whole sets of matching appliances which each connected to the one motor when it was time for them to be used.
elmwood and t-bonham@scc.net, what does “knob and tube” wiring mean?
We had the “snappy” light switches in our house, too, except for a couple that we replaced ourselves. Also we had nary an outdoor power switch; even today they’re not common as far as I know. Unless that’s just a warm region thing, I’m astonished that outdoor power isn’t standard on houses and even apartments everywhere. At Christmastime we always had to run an extension cord through a window that was slightly ajar in order to power the outdoor lights. It’s certainly doable in L.A., but even here it’s not that great at the end of December.
We did have a couple of outdoor lights, but they were controlled from wall switches inside.
knob is an insulator like a miniature of those on power poles. also ceramic bars were used with a groove for the wires.
tube is a ceramic tube placed where a wire passed through a wall, floor or ceiling.
the wire was bare and mounted on these ceramic devices out in the air, or through the tubes. the only solid objects the wire could touch were these ceramic insulators on its path from fuse box to light switch or socket.
In the earliest days of electricity, things weren’t standard. The voltage and frequency varied, and some places even used DC (not common, except for some lighting systems). There were quite a few 25 Hz systems, and voltages were generally somewhere in the 100 to 250 volt range, though I’ve heard of some systems that used lower voltages like 50 volts or thereabouts.
Connectors often weren’t standard either. The Edison base (what people are calling a light socket or screw connection in this thread) became popular, and many of the first two pronged sockets were adapters that plugged into an Edison base.
Like everything else with competing standards (VHS vs Beta, CD vs minidisk, etc) eventually one standard began to dominate and eventually just about everyone followed suit. It’s interesting to note that there were some 25 Hz systems still operating a few years ago (not sure if they still are) though they weren’t used for standard residential service.
In addition to knob and tube wiring which was already mentioned, another thing you often find in old houses are push button switches (push the top switch to turn the light on, push the bottom switch to turn it off).
Technically if all of that old wiring is properly maintained it’s still acceptable under current electrical codes, as long as you only replace like with like and don’t change anything. As soon as you change something though you have to bring everything affected up to current code. You still find knob and tube wiring in homes sometimes. Personally, the stuff gives me the willies and if I had it in my house I would rip it out ASAP.
3 prong outlets didn’t become common until the 60s. Older houses grounded through the cold water pipe. Modern houses are required to ground the water system, but do not rely on the water pipe for the primary earth ground. GFCIs didn’t become common until the late 70s or early 80s. AFCIs have only been around for the last decade or so. None of these safety systems are required to be back-fitted into existing homes, but they are a good idea.
Older homes also had screw in type fuses. Breakers replaced those in the 60s and 70s.
Most early wiring was done to provide electric lighting. Push in bulbs would be inserted in wired in sockets, sometimes there was no switch and the bulb would be removed to turn it off. Some early appliances were made to plug into the bulb sockets, and then a variety of removable plug systems were developed. Cities were wired first, and like the early days of cable television, much electricity was stolen as it only required splicing wire into the lines used by the apartment next door.
Actually, only the earliest installations had bare wires. Most installations had insulated wires (as in the the photos in Wiki and the other cites given). Just not as good insulation as nowadays. Sometimes it’s bare today – an old circuit that’s been in a hot attic for a half-century; you barely touch them and the dried-up old insulation will flake off and leave bare wires.
But they were all single wires, run through tubes when needed. No 2- or 3- conductors inside a cable like is used now. So about twice as much work to install, and quite a bit more space needed. That’s part of the reason they were replaced by other methods.
My grandparents house has been heavily renovated, so there are few traces of the original wiring left. However, there is one nifty feature left from when my great grandpa built the place… In the basement is a large battery rack, now used as shelving.
Back in the late 20s he installed a wind turbine that charged a bank of batteries, and these were used to power lights at night, along with a radio. Sometime in the 50s it was all removed when the REC brought power out there.
