Kitchen - Edison and Electricity

Kitchen - Edison and Electricity

Like other rooms in the house, the Kitchen had electric lighting.  The difference versus the other rooms, is that here, on the servants side of the house, the fixtures were much less expensive.  These light fixtures for example are from the 1910 Sears Roebuck catalogue. 

Until the dawn of electricity, only the rich had a means to save labor - their servants.  This changed dramatically when electricity became widespread and devices like this 1909 toaster were invented.

Notice that it is plugged into a light fixture.  There were no outlets when this house was built.  The only electricity came for lighting (though plugging it in over the sink might not be the best idea).  So adaptors and other methods had to be used.

In fact, it was not until 1904 that Harvey Hubbell patented the electric plug that became standard in the US.  His plug replaced a variety of round pin ones that started making their way to the market in the Eighteen Eighties. The standard plug revolutionized the way electrical wires were connected or disconnected from a power supply.  Before the outlet, post terminals would extend out from a wall and every electrical device had to be hardwired to the power source.  The new approach offered interchangeability.

It’s hard to believe but this toaster, and other electrical appliances like it, were truly revolutionary.  They literally turned the social structure upside down.  This is because toasters, and other new “labor saving devices” like coffee pots and vaccuum cleaners, gave middle class women something they had never had before – “free time!”  All of a sudden middle class women could live almost as well as upper class women who had servants.

This created vast changes in the social structure and had one monumental impact... Toasters, and the like, led to women getting the vote.  When middle class women were no longer tied to house work and kitchen work, they had time to read, to do charity work, or to work on causes like suffrage.  Electricity changed women’s suffrage from a movement of rich women (imagine five women lobbying at the court house) to a mass movement of middle class women (now there were five hundred women lobbying for the cause).  With the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment in 2020, it is important to remember the role that electricity, and hard work of suffragettes, played in the process.

Thomas Edison saw the liberating potential of electricity.  He began inventing and producing “Hotpoint” appliances so that women would be “domestic engineers” who directed work, not engaged in it.  A massive change in society resulted.

Electricity was truly revolutionary.