Without Electricity!

Most of Us Would Starve.

Wood powered Cook Stove

Can you possibly imagine what life would be like in our world if there was no electricity … what if there never had been?

I can recall as a rather small lad when my grand-parents installed their first electric powered cooking stove, Grandmother was not as pleased as you might expect, in fact she refused to allow the installers to remove her more “reliable” wood burning cooking stove as she put it.

Although she finally gave-in to the convenience of the new cooking invention in time, I cannot recall how long it took for her to arrive at such a conclusion, in hind-sight I am more surprised that she used it at all.  After all this is the same grandmother and grandfather who always set in the dark and would only turn on the radio to listen to an occasional news report or the “Hubert W Armstrong” religious broadcast because as they put it: Electricity cost money therefore with the lights & radio off money is not wasted.

I expect that I should have told them that the new stove used a lot of electricity, but I probably liked to eat the food grandmother cooked or baked with that stove as well as the next member of the family, although for the life of me, I can not recall anything especially grand that she fixed other than perhaps her corn bread; at that tender age I probably didn’t realize that her more “reliable” stove could do just as good a job, but then, there’s no doubt that it required considerably more effort. So I guess it’s just as well that I never thought to bring the added costs associated with the new stove to their attention.  

I think you should know that I cared for both my grandparents a great deal even though the above remarks may suggest otherwise.  I can recall a good deal of happiness associated with a visit even if it didn’t include spending the night. Not to mention the endless supply of store bought Moon Pies and a popular root-beer drink I simply called a Frizzy (it worked just like today’s Alka-Seltzer only it tasted good), which I truly enjoyed.

They always seemed eager to listen to what I had to say and grandfather “Poppy” as most everyone called him (grandmother was “Mommy” to all of us grand kids as well as her own adult children) had great stories to tell about his pioneer day as a school teacher.

Anyhow, when Benjamin Harrison was president in 1891 the White House was first wired for electricity. As you might expect he didn’t welcome the new invention with open arms. It was reported that his wife had requested the electricity, but they were both afraid of being shocked by the light switches on the wall, so they continued to use the old gaslights.

Although the majority of people living in larger towns and cities had electricity by 1930, only 10 percent of Americans who lived on farms and in rural areas had electric power available. In fact the electric suppliers of the day didn’t believe it was economically feasible to string / construct electric lines to rural residents and beyond that, they argued that farmers could not afford it anyway.

If the truth be told, they probably knew my grand parents and therefore knew that while they could afford it, they wouldn’t use it, because it was too expensive in those early days. After all, they were in the electric business to make money, so why invest in ‘penny-pinching’ farmers who were located few and far between.  

With the historical since of electricity of any kind in mind, the first mention of anything remotely related to the principal of electricity was first written about in 600 BC when the description of a charge was described by swiftly rubbing amber; this was a description of what we now call static electricity; of little use to anyone I expect, unless you count perhaps an added attraction for a “magic trick” show.  Regardless well over  a thousand years lapsed before in 1660 AD a machine was invented that produced static electricity.

92 years later in 1752 Ben Franklin conducted his famous Kite with a key experiment and proved that lightning is in fact electricity, but a kind that’s a whole lot more powerful than that created by simple static. Since lightening had long been a major cause of wooden structures catching a-fire, within that same year, Franklin invented the lightening rod which was a big hit.

The first battery was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta of Italy and the first electric motor was invented by Michael Faraday of Great Britain in 1821.

So you can see,  after it was determined that electricity could be harnessed, things really started to move along rather swiftly.  At least, when compared to how life style’s improvements had progressed in the past.  In fact, with this new “toy” it must have seemed anything was possible. Even the medical community got in on the act by trying to revive those among the dead with the new energy source.

By 1878 the Edison Electric Light Company was formed in the US and in Canada the American Electric and Illuminating Company was founded.  As I already indicated above, in 1891 Republican President Benjamin Harrison and his wife Caroline (his first of two) had electricity installed in the White House which they seldom used.  Although most historians claim they were both afraid of being “shocked” by turning on / off the lights, perhaps they were really afraid of the likelihood of a huge electric bill.

Sources …

http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/electricity_3.htm         

http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/a/electricity_timeline.htm              http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_was_electricity_first_installed_in_the_white_house#ixzz1aoSx6u2D                                                                                            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen