My father bought a Coleman one-cylinder generator in 1930, which made 32 volt D.C., stored in a row
of batteries. Had to run the generator every Saturday, during which time no one within a mile could listen to a radio. This could run a refrigerator, toaster, radio - I don’t remember which we had, since the highline came through while I was pretty young. I lived for a while in a house in which the second floor rooms had only a bulb on a wire from the center of the ceiling, and no outlets. The first floor had only outlets that had been added as needed through the years.
My house was built in 1930, half is upgraded and half is the old screw-in fuses.
You can always pull off the switch and outlet covers and look inside (warning - you can be electrocuted if you touch the wires inside, so standard warnings and disclaimers and big red warning stickers and all that apply) and you can look around the breaker box or fuse box. Knob and tube used completely separate wires. Romex will have wires bundled inside of a common insulation jacket. Older romex type wiring will have paper insulation. Newer wire will have plastic. In many places, armored cable is now required, so the type of wire that you see will often indicate the rough age of the wiring.
It’s not all that uncommon for old knob and tube wiring to be only partially replaced throughout a house, so you may have more than one type of wiring hiding behind your walls.
The Edison base was invented sometime around 1880 and by about 1910 or so it had pretty much become standard.
The two prong plug was invented around 1905 or so and was fairly common by around 1915, though even up through the 20’s you had a lot of stuff still plugging into Edison bases. 2 prong adapters that screwed into Edison bases were common in the 10’s and 20’s.
The current 3 pronged plug was invented in the mid 20’s but didn’t really become standard in homes until the 60’s.
Some info on Hearthstone, a very early electical installation:
Brian
When I was a kid in the U.K. in the 1950s, and I think still into the early ‘60s, we had adaptors for plugging things into light sockets. They were the bayonet type (still used for a lot of lightbulb sockets in the UK) rather than the screw in ones. We did have wall outlets too, but maybe there were not enough, or maybe my parents just had these adaptors left over from an earlier time and an earlier dwelling that I don’t recall. I think I recall Mum running her electric iron off the light socket adaptor. There was a mixture of plug types too. These days all plugs in Britain are large, 3 pin affairs with rectangular pins, but I recall both three and two pin types, with round pins. My Dad had a big box of wires and adaptors for various plug types.
We did not have a fridge until the lateish 1960s - I remember going to London to buy it - although most people we knew had one long before, although most people we knew had fridges well before that (I am not sure whether the issue was poverty or technophobia - they never did get a car, even though Dad had learned to drive in the army during WWII). We had a TV though that I think my parents had before most of the other people they knew. The trouble was, it only got one channel (BBC), and we still had it well into the 1960s, long after everybody else had TVs that got two channels (BBC and ITV). Mum told me once that they had a TV even before the single channel one that I remember, and that it projected the picture in some way. (No it wasn’t a zero channel TV, I guess it too was BBC only.)
We got a new TV eventually about the time the third British channel (BBC2) opened in the mid 1960s. However, our roof aerial, could not get the new channel, just the two older ones. We had an indoor stick aerial (about 6 ft long) to try to recieve BBC 2, but it got very poor reception. Eventually (I do not remember when) they got a new roof aerial installed. Altough colour Tv stared in Britain in 1967, my parents did not get a colour TV until long after I had left home, in the 1980s or even the early '90s I think.
We had a radio and a record player back in the '50s though, and an electric clock, as well as electric radiative and fan heaters. Also we had a film strip projector (not movies, still frames). It was probably bought for my older sister originally, though I got quite a bit of use out of it. It comes to mind because it was one of the things that ran off a light socket adaptor, although it would also take batteries.
Also, I recall when my Dad first bought electric Christmas tree lights. Before that, we used to light the tree with candles clipped on with special metal clips that incorporated trays to catch the dripping wax. :eek::eek:
Sorry for the off topic rambling. My mother just died (95) so I am feeling a bit nostalgic.
When I was at college for the third year in 1981 I roomed in a 19th c. town house that had only been lightly modernised. The widow who owned it took in lodgers, and there was no electric socket in the room at all and I remember using those plug-in adaptors for the pendant light socket - you could get splitter ones that ran two appliances at once, though I think they were hard to find even then. You cooked on a single gas ring in your room (which leaked slightly) and could have a bath once or twice a week.