CEO blog: Life before electricity: "It was a very dark place indeed"
In preparation for WH’s 75th anniversary next month, I have enjoyed reading the yellowing clips and documents in our archives that record the milestones of bringing power to this area. That prompted me to explore other sources of information about the development of electricity itself.
One of those sources was a delightful book by Bill Bryson titled At Home: A Short History of Private Life. An Amazon review described At Home this way:
“While walking through his own home… Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing extraordinary stories behind the seemingly common place, he examines how the everyday items – things like ice, cookbooks, glass windows, salt and pepper (and electricity) – transformed the way people lived and how houses evolved around these new commodities.”
I will use this post to share excerpts from the At Home chapter on electricity. I think it will give you an interesting perspective about what life was like before WH extended power to rural Wright County and western Hennepin County in 1937. The book starts out like this:
“We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle – a good candle – provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt light bulb. Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. (Back then,) the world at night was a very dark place indeed.”
In making that point, Bryson calls attention to a 1642 Rembrandt drawing – Student at a Table by Candlelight. It shows the student “all but lost in a depth of shadow and gloom that a single candle on the wall beside him cannot begin to penetrate.” He presents other drawings from that time depicting family members “sitting companionably at a table sewing or reading by the light of a single candle…trying to get a tiny bit of light to fall more productively on a page or a piece of embroidery.”
At Home then goes on to describe the difficultly of any kind of movement outside the home after dark prior to the introduction of electricity. Often times, the book reported, the utter darkness of a large city meant grave danger.
“As one London authority noted in 1718, people were often reluctant to go out at night for fear that they might be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed. Thieves were at large everywhere. To avoid smacking into the unyielding, or being waylaid by brigands, people often secured the services of linkboys – so called because they carried torches known as links made from stout lengths of rope soaked in resin or some other combustible material – to see them home.”
As street lighting evolved, Bryson added this insight about life before electricity:
“Even after gaslights became widely available for city streets in the mid nineteenth century, by modern standards it was still a pretty murky world after nightfall. The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb. Moreover, there were distantly spaced…thus they didn’t so much light the way as provide distant points of brightness to aim for.”
A fascinating point to think about is that until the late 18th century, the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for 3,000 years! Bryson said:
“Lighting was of many types, all pretty unsatisfactory by modern standards. The most basic form was rush lights, which were made by cutting meadow rushes into strips about a foot and a half in length and coating them in animal fat, usually mutton. These were then placed in a metal holder and burned like a taper. A rush light typically lasted 15 to 20 minutes, so a good supply of rushes and patience was required through a long evening.
"For the better off, the usual form of lighting was candles. These were of two types – tallow and wax. Tallow, made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that it could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal and so it was cheap. But during times of hardship, peasants generally didn’t have animals to slaughter, thus they often had to pass their evenings not only hungry, but in the dark.
"Tallow was an exasperating material. Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to 40 times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow candle got, the more malodorous it grew.
"Far superior were candles made of beeswax. These gave a steadier light and needed less trimming, but they cost about four times as much and so tended to be used only (by the rich).
"Dung was also gathered and dried out to be used as an illuminant and fuel. The loss of fertilizing dung from the fields left a lot of land impoverished and is said to have accelerated the agricultural decline (in Europe).
"Some people were luckier than others. In (northern Scotland,) the oil-rich shale (found) on the beach burned like coal, could be gathered for free, and actually provided a better light.
"For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient options, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy.”
As time passed “these things were displaced by another wonder of the age: gas.”
“Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gas lit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. …Gas blackened ceilings, discolored fabrics, corroded metal, and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence, and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph.
"Gas had one irresistible advantage, however. It was bright – at least comparable to anything else the pre-electric world knew. The average room with gas was twenty times brighter than it had been before. It made reading, card playing, and even conversing more agreeable. Diners would see the condition of their food. One could drop a needle and find it before daylight. Book titles became discernible on their shelves. People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books and sheet music.”
Lighting for home use prior to electricity was one thing, but illumination for public places was another. Here, something called a calcium light was used based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time – that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a very hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. One could heat a ball of lime no larger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away! The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but was also taken up by theaters as spot lights – which is where the phrase “in the limelight” comes from. The downside, Bryson reported, was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than 400 theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly 10,000 people were killed in theater fires in Britain.
By the mid-1800s, early pioneers were experimenting with electric light. Filaments were the problem early on. By 1877, Thomas Edison was on the job; in 1882, he demonstrated the first large application of electric light by illuminating 800 bulbs in 85 businesses on Wall Street that had signed up for the demonstration.
And the rest is history.
“Electric lighting was ultimately irresistible. It was clean, steady, easy to maintain, available instantaneously and in infinite amounts in the flick of a switch. Gas lighting had taken a half a century to establish itself, but electric lighting caught on much more quickly. By 1900, in cities anyway, electric lighting was increasingly the norm – and electrical appliances ineluctably followed: The electric fan in 1891, the vacuum cleaner in 1901, the washing machine and electric iron in 1909, the toaster in 1910, the refrigerator and dishwasher in 1918. …The annual use of electricity in the United States went from 79 kilowatt hours per capita in 1902, to 960 in 1929, to well over 13,000 today.”
Electricity was a game-changer. For residents of rural Wright and western Hennepin counties, it improved a lifestyle that hadn’t changed much from when the colonists came to America.
We will be celebrating the history of electricity in Wright and Hennepin counties with a professionally produced video during the 75th Annual Meeting on March 29. I hope you will be able to join us.