IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-03443-7_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Electrification of the Home: the Golden Age?

In: Electricity before Nationalisation

Author

Listed:
  • Leslie Hannah

    (Emmanuel College)

Abstract

At the end of the First World War the use of electricity in the home was almost exclusively for lighting purposes and was confined to the rich: only half a million houses, perhaps 6 per cent of the total, were wired for electricity. Despite four decades of development, there was still enormous unfulfilled potential for expansion of use to new purposes in the more prosperous homes, and for the spread of electric lighting to the homes of the middle classes and the better-off among the working classes. Already by the end of the war there was a considerable backlog of potential demand, for wartime restrictions had held up new connections, and some undertakings had also tried to stifle new demand by insisting on high minimum guaranteed payments for supply in order to avoid further pressure on their already overloaded mains. With the end of restrictions and falling electricity prices, however, the extensions of systems and the connection of new consumers would resume; and even more new houses, and older houses converting from gas, would demand a supply.

Suggested Citation

  • Leslie Hannah, 1979. "The Electrification of the Home: the Golden Age?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Electricity before Nationalisation, chapter 6, pages 186-212, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-03443-7_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-03443-7_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-03443-7_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.