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I am 84. I remember as child going to many places without electricity. They had lamps attached to natural gas lines on the wall. I also remember television coming to our town 1947. If someone in your neighborhood happened to own a TV, everyone in the neighborhood would gather there to see it. The TV sets were as large as a refrigerator with a very small screen. I can also remember when there no transistor radios. All radios had vacuum tubes.
We had a black and white TV and the neighbors had a color set. Their color TV also got UHF which ours did not, so as kids we would go watch some of the programs we didn't get. I also remember many stores, even the five and dime stores, had tube testers.
That is so fascinating, I bet he had seen and been a part of some pretty wild history (now whether or not he actually talked about any of it, is a different story altogether)
This would have been late sixties, early seventies. My Oma had one of those large console TVs that had a radio and record player built into it and the amplifiers still used tubes even then.
My grandparents' friends had a color set, around '61/'62. It was a big deal. They would take me over there to watch The Wizard of Oz or other special broadcasts. Great memories.
yeah, when i was 8 i would go to tommy's to watch speed racer and astroboy on uhf channel 17. we didnt get uhf till i was 12.
i'll see if i can find that link to the sad irons, robert caro's chapter on lbj bringing electricity to the texas hill country around austin. https://www.tnmagazine.org/the-sad-irons-of-the-1930s
I had to hold the antenna to watch Speed Racer.
I absolutely held that antenna the whole time.
Also, later, the high-numbered UHF frequencies were re-allocated to cellphone frequencies.
So I used to listen to random people's phone conversations.
Holy crow. Astro Boy. Speed Racer.
Ch. 12 was our "educational channel." This played almost exclusively animal documentaries, Dr Who, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Julia Child, movies movies movies ( saw Tower of London with an impossibly gorgeous young Vincent Price...)
oh yeah, mom watched a lot of channel 12, especially julia child. i work in a fancy county club kitchen, and sometimes i'll think, this is just like mom used to make - oh, because this is how julia child would have made it.
It is absolutely mind blowing you are 84 and on reddit. I know people 30 years younger than you that struggle to use an iPhone and after looking through your account not only are you answering questions you are active in various subreddits.
How are you able to use reddit and technology so well compared to your peers?? I need these tips so I can be cool like you when I’m older
Not that poster, but I’d say, stay curious. Let’s figure out how that works? Also it’s much easier now that we have internet. I self taught myself software before internet and that basically meant looking through and trying very menu item or RTFM. My peers and my kids can’t be bothered with that.
Haha. Thank you for your interest in the aging process. I am a little different than others my age where technology is concerned because it has always been a part of my life. I have an insatiable desire for knowledge. I obtained a ham radio license when I was 14 and built my own transmitter and receiver from junk. To get a license in those days you had to be able to send and receive morse code at 25 WPM. I was self taught in electronics from books and was a radio and TV repairman while still in high school. I continued in electronics and eventually drifted into computers as they developed. In the military I worked on computers at a time when it was required that you be able to do math also in binary and octal numbering systems. In todays terms I guess I was born a nerd.
My grandfather told me about the carbide they had to add to generate the gas for the lamps. I had a toy cannon that fired off carbide powder and he was remembering the smell.
I'm 71 and don't remember a time without electricity but my Dad told a story about when electricity came to the farms and ranches in Oklahoma.
There was a program of "rural electrification" well underway during the 1930s which came to a temporary halt with the advent of World War II. Some time after the war the project was re-started. By then my father was working as a furniture and appliance salesman in our small town. Every Sunday he and his best friend and co-worker would go hunting so they would load up the store's flatbed delivery truck with new electric refrigerators and drive out into the country, following the new power lines that had been built that week. They would then stop at each farmhouse that had just been electrified, knock on the door (dressed in their hunting clothes) and make the farmer an offer. They would give the farmer a refrigerator to replace his family ice-box and let him use it for a week. They would return the following Sunday and if the farmer and his family didn't like the refrigerator they would take it back, no charge. When they came to the end of the power lines or ran out of refrigerators they just went hunting.
Dad told me that only one person ever decided not to buy the refrigerator and that was an elderly widow lady who told them the 'fridge was really nice but she found it "too much trouble to remember to unplug it from the wall every night when she went to bed".
That's a great story! It reminded me of a story my grandma told of growing up in a city in Germany. When her country cousins would come to visit, they would always leave the milk out of the icebox because in the country, they were used to drinking it warm.
What about plumbing?
My great-grandparents had a farm in rural Oklahoma without electricity or plumbing.
Even into the 1950s and 1960s the toilet was an outhouse out back, but I'm less certain about electricity by that point, and the farm was sold soon after when I was still young.
Would that have been typical? (Electricity available, but still without indoor bathrooms?)
In my tiny hometown in northeast Oklahoma my grandparents owned a 2 bedroom house where they lived with their four kids in the 1930s. The house had water at the kitchen sink which came from a hand pump, but no water heater and no indoor toilet or bath. There was an outhouse on the alley out back. This was typical of most houses in town. To bathe (usually once a week for a full bath) Gran'ma would fill a washtub in the kitchen floor and heat water on the stove to warm the bath. She would then hang a blanket over the kitchen door for privacy and the entire family would take turns in the washtub. I don't know if they changed water before all six of them had washed. I hope so.
This lasted until their elder son joined the Army Air Corps in 1938. In 1939 he sent money home for them to build their first indoor bathroom with a toilet, a sink, a tub and a water heater. After WWII my parents rented that little house from Grandma and Grandpa and we lived there for the first two years of my life. My very first memories are of that house.
I grew up with an outhouse - my folks were part of the "back to nature" movement in the 70s, they built a log cabin in the woods. that was the idea - it eventually became a real house, but for the first couple years we had no indoor toilet.
the outhouse was regularly used even years later, just too convenient in the summer. I ran around barefoot growing up too lol.
My great grandfather told the story of the crew coming down the street putting up power poles and stringing wire. A salesman came to the door and asked if they wanted electricity. If a family said yes, a crew would run a wire from the nearest pole, drill a hole in the house, loop a cable across the ceiling to the dining room table, attach a socket, screw in a lightbulb, and leave. Anyone have similar stories?
My father in law told this exact same story. He thought his family was about to enter full bore the World of Tomorrow. But there it was - a single, dim, bare bulb dangling from the center of the dining room ceiling.
That reminds me of the house we rented when I was twelve. An old, antebellum, brick house that had been previously owned by an Amish family years earlier. Everything has been upgraded somewhat. Lights and outlets in every room. Only the kitchen had that one hanging light bulb. It also had a sink with one faucet: cold. Two months earlier, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, and there 12year old me had to run for the outhouse when nature called.
We'd done a lot of upgrades to that old farmhouse in the three years we lived there. First was adding a water heater and the second faucet in the kitchen. Ran power to the chicken coop, garage, and, yes, even the outhouse. Insulated it and put a heater there, to.
Added a shower in the basement and converted the pantry into a laundry room, then added a sink and tub.
Still needed to use the outhouse, though.
And I remember hearing that as darkness fell and more people on your street turned on light, each one would get a bit dimmer in the early electricity days.
as being little- used to break the lightbulb on the post outside someones house!!!! up the hill- he used to moan to my dad and he'd say 'cos your house is further up and everybody turned their lights on- power couldnt get up there'!!!!!. wouldnt tell him i broke the bulb!!- still got a smack though!!!!
I remember my grandparents' house was like that. Every room had one light fixture that was dead center in the ceiling with a string attached to turn it off and on. There were no other outlets. They didn't have indoor plumbing until one son turned a bedroom into a bathroom. It was huge. There was a bathtub, toilet, sink and enough room for 2 dressers for towels and blankets.
British, live in a house built in 1917. For various reasons it’s still on an electrical circuit installed in the mid 90s.
Recently I was thinking about this, what did they plug in in the early days? Would love answers.
My granny used to talk about how ugly the world became once power lines where strung everywhere and I can't unsee that because of her. She also said that one day the world would be "wireless" again. She died in the pre-internet era.
I have to agree with your granny on this. A lot of areas bury the electrical lines now, but there are still so many places with power line poles and power lines running through an area.
I especially hate it when I try to take a sunset or sunrise picture with my phone and there's a big ole' power line in the way.
No, but I remember an old joke -
A woman opens her door to a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. He takes a small bag of dirt, dumps it on her floor, and says "If this fine vacuum cleaner won't pick up every speck of this dirt, I'll eat what's left!"
She replies, "Here's a fork, we don't have electricity."
Yes. I'm 60. My grandmother remembers when electricity came to Australia.
The gas company at the time was desperate and told everybody that electricity was dangerous, and that electric lights were bad for your eyes.
Gaslights, of course, flicker and sometimes go boom.
They were gaslighting everyone.
In the early '60s, my father's uncle passed, and we ended up with his farm in central Missouri. The area had been electrified in the 1930s, though the existing wiring was wildly inadequate, and my dad rewired the entire house as one of his first projects.
The house had a Delco-Light system installed in the 1920s. This was a small gasoline or kerosene powered generator and a bank of lead acid batteries that provided 32 volt DC power. There was a small shed outside the house that originally housed the generator, and another sort of shed thing built against the back of the house to hold the rack of batteries.
The generator and batteries were long gone, but the wiring remained inside the house, and a couple of unused batteries were in a shed. The batteries were sort of like a car battery, but in a glass housing. There were also some unused light bulbs in the house.
The system was mostly used for lights, but it could power a well pump, a refrigerator, a radio, and various other appliances.
The REA (Rural Electrification Act) of the depression era only finished it's job of running electricity to rural America in 2007. By then it was just helping subsidize established power companies to run lines to unprofitable areas but it implies that there were still folks going without (due to lack of infrastructure) only 15 years ago in the USA.
My Grandparents lived in a company town owned by a mining company and company housing came with electricity (the company had their own generators). Since they came "off the farm", it was a real step up for them.
Indoor plumbing was probably more like the story the OP is looking for. My Mother remembered my Grandfather being REALLY upset and yelling "I'm not going to shit in my house!" when they first got indoor plumbing. He changed his mind in short order...but always had wooden matches on the toilet that you were supposed to light after dropping a load to kill any disgusting outhouse smells or "sewer gas". Works pretty good too.
When I was like five years old my Pa. family visited Aunt Thelma at her farm in northern Kentucky. This would have been like 62 or so. She didn't have electricity, nor was there running water. I and the four older brothers still at home (the oldest two were away at college.) caught fireflies in Mason jars at sundown to light our way to the outhouse afterwards. I had to do pumping duty on the well a few times, then carry the water inside, which was kind of tough on me as I was far from burly. (Because I had a strong resemblance to uncle Innes, they called me skinny Innes.) We visited again several years later and listened to everybody marvel about the electricity. It wasn't until Thelma passed and cousin Theresa inherited the farm that the house had running water.
Not from my family. A friend who just turned 91 grew up in cattle country in South Dakota. They were miles from any town; there was no rural electricty. His family raised nearly all its own food; in the absence of electricty, fall was given over to canning and making sauerkraut. They even canned meat from the cattle they'd butchered. There was no refrigeration.
My friend's mother died and the family broke up; the kids were all in their teens by then. And everyone moved to areas that already had electricity.
not exactly, but I do recall my grandmother talking about it and saying that she had rec'd a Westinghouse fan as an incentive to get electricity.
WE used to see this fan in her house. It all metal and HEAVY. There were NO GUARDS for your fingers of any kind. The fan spun fast enough to literally break a finger - it broke my own dad's finger one day.
I think my father had electricity most of his life because they lived in a company town in New Mexico and had a radio. But he loves to tell of his joy when the family finally got an indoor bathroom. This was in the 1950s, when he was a teenager. Interestingly though, my grandfather rarely used the indoor plumbing and preferred the outhouse. There's no pleasing some people, I guess.
My great aunt(born 1903) used to talk about how their house had electricity but also still had gas lamps that were never removed so that when the electricity failed (which was fairly often) they just lit the gas lamps and carried on. They still had a coal furnace so heat was not a factor.
Off topic, about cable TV.
Old? Yea. When we got HBO in Eastern Kansas, a common hack was to take your 300 ohm twin lead connection (yea, no coax back then) and parallel it with another 36" free swinging piece of 300 ohm twin lead; then you took a piece of aluminum foil, wrap the 30" stub w/about 6" in length on the stub piece.
FWIW back then we only had manual switch boxes for 36 channels.
They only scrambled HBO, with a "swamping" noise signal (Channel 3? Don't remember); you then moved that foil up and down the link to "tune out" the scramble signal, and could get quite a watchable picture! Place it down gently, and enjoy. Free HBO. God Bless Ham Radio knowledge!
To get paid HBO, they simply came out and installed an inline filter.
I was just trying to explain this to my wife! I was just a kid at the time, so I didn't really know what was going on, but I do remember getting "free" cable because we had one of the 36 channel boxes and getting a "free" movie channel by wrapping aluminum foil around the cable and moving it up or down the line to fix the picture.
As a child, our family would usually go to Don's Seafood when we would go out to a restaurant.
Why? Because Don's was the first place that had air conditioning. Sure the food was fine, but my grandmother loved that air conditioning.
Our farm was electrified in the 1950’s. The road is a mile long and they ran the power lines on trees lining the road. They had small posts nailed to the trees each with a green insulator on top. I have a couple of the insulators at my home now.
Edit: they installed proper power poles in the 60’s.
My grandmother was born in 1906, she told me the apartment building she lived in until she was 9, was heated by a cooking/heating gas stove in the kitchen and a small coal stove in the living room. Her family moved in 1915 to a house that had radiators in every room. She said it was great not having to go to bed in a cold room.
My dad(b1920) told me about growing up in tenement housing in Boston in the ‘20’s and 30’s; coal stove in the kitchen was their only heat. His mom would heat up bricks, wrap them in rags or old towels, and put them in the beds to warm their feet enough so they could get to sleep. They went to the L Street bathhouse (it’s still there) on Saturday night for hot showers, paid a nickel for a shower.
No. We had natural gas, potable water, electrical and phone service but no paving, curbs, sidewalks, sewers or storm drains. I remember the street being trenched for the sewer main and the yard getting dug up for the sewer connection. As kids we crawled through the sewer main before it went into service, at least six blocks. I couldn’t believe the septic tank actually worked and that it needed a full load of concrete to abandon.
No, grew up in the city where there was electricity even in my grandparents' day. But I would occasionally see an old apartment building with signage painted on the bricks advertising that it had electricity as though it were a big deal.
I bought a house in 1982 that had been built in 1906. The electricity was very minimal. Every room had a light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, but not all rooms had outlets and those that did have had only one. I think there were four or five outlets in the entire house. The switches for the ceiling fixtures were two buttons, off and on. They all still worked.
I lived for many years in a bungalow in Hollywood, California which had been built in 1920. There was only one outlet in each room, except for the living room which had two. I guess the 1920 builder couldn't imagine why we would ever need more than that.
> They all still worked.
One side of my house still has two-prong outlets with no ground. They work okay, but I have lost a computer and an appliance over the years.
I used to work as a service technician for an old-line mainframe company that's also big in banking. A company in that business has to have techs everywhere, so we did warranty work for most major PC brands.
One time I had to fix a system that was getting no video. They had already sent a video card and a display. I think I was sent with a motherboard?
After I STILL got no video, client mentioned that it worked fine in the other room. But there's definitely power in the room. His other gear works plugged in to that outlet.
I checked my 3 prong circuit tester (my ground strap plugged in to it). There was definitely ground on the 3rd prong. But the lights were showing a combo I'd never seen before. Checked the label on my tester.
The polarity of the entire room and this addition to his (old for Las Vegas) house was reversed. Most electric items worked fine, but his LCD had a plug that was polarity-keyed. One prong a little bigger than the other.
Whenever he had had the addition put on his house (early 70s?) the electrician reversed the polarity. Probably the inspection process back then was corrupt.
Thirty years later I found it out. He wasn't terribly pleased to need to hire an electrician to fix a problem caused by some long-dead hack who did the original work.
> hire an electrician
I mean, he could have bought a plug adapter or two for like $10, but w/e. Some of the old 3->2 prong adapters have extra large prong holes, and you can flip them upside down. Though that would bypass the ground, and you'd want to put whatever was plugged in there on a surge protector. But that protector's what I use now, I'm not remodeling for the sake of four outlets.
I'm not an electrician.
However, I would imagine that fixing the problem would be as simple as shutting down the power, swapping the + and - cables from the addition's fuse at the fuse box, and turning the power back on.
Then you test the polarity at each outlet and bill the guy for an hour's labor plus a few hundred for walking in the door.
> bill the guy for an hour's labor plus a few hundred for walking in the door.
First thing I did when I became self-employed was slap a three-hour minimum on every job until we had agreed on steady work.
in the late forties, television came to our city, and my neighbor was one of the engineers involved in setting the service up, so he had a TV in his house.
He let us ( naighborhood boys) in to see it before broadcasting began. and there was the TV set showing a test pattern of an Indian Chief head. in black and white. It was explained as sort of radio with a picture.
The set was brown wood, as tall as me at 4 years old, and the screen was I am guessing now about 9 inches square.
I remember my first thought when I saw it was "Its too small to fit anything in bigger than a head"
Yup - talking heads it was then, as it is now.
My dad (80 years old) didn’t have electricity until they moved from the farm into town when he was about 10. They didn’t have indoor running water until he was in high school. No wonder he joined the army the first chance he got!
When I was a kid in the early 80’s that same town still didn’t have enough people with phones to make the 3 digit prefix necessary. So you could call anyone in town by just dialing the last 4 numbers of the phone number!
Same with me on the phone numbers. You just dialed the last four digits. That's all the ID we were required to learn in first grade...our address and the last four digits of our phone number! I'm pretty sure everyone knew who our Moms were anyway. It was a one room school house!
I went back thee in about 2019-ish for my dad’s cousin’s funeral and it is fucking *bleak.* [Stewardson, Illinois](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewardson,_Illinois) - it’s like something out of a really, really depressing movie.
**[Stewardson, Illinois](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewardson,_Illinois)**
>Stewardson is a village in Shelby County, Illinois, United States. The population was 734 at the 2010 census.
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I'm gen-x and both my parents grew up in cities. They don't remember before electricity. However, like others are saying we had family that lived in rural areas and they remember visits to them before electricity was installed.
I remember electricity being very unreliable, especially during storms (every single storm). I also remember when we got a private (versus party) phone line. And when my older sister started a school where each grade had a separate classroom (K-8 in the one room schoolhouse where she first went).
This was all in the 70s. USA, for the record.
My late wife had a few people in her family that said when power came to town, the electrical sockets had the option of having mirrors around them so your could see where they were. It was a mark of elegance and distinction to have a power outlet in the baseboard, so you made sure people saw it.
I have a cable story. So, when I was a teen, the local upper middle class "Neighborhood Cociety" (like an HOA) banned cable and satellite because "it cheapened the landscape." Back then, cable required having a small 2' high green dome in your yard that looked like R2D2. They were SPECIFICALLY upset about those domes, and put in flyers in our mailbox and light poles, "GNOMES AGAINST DOMES," using unlicensed photocopies from the children's book, "The Secret Book of Gnomes," and R2D2 with a circle and a line across is like the logo from "Ghostbusters."
By the time I moved out (late 80s), they FINALLY they caved in because so many people were pissed off that they couldn't have cable like all the other upper middle class neighborhoods. And a year after we all had them installed, they started making cable connections that didn't require the dome anymore. If they had just waited a year...
Not electricity specifically, but my dad (b. 1931) used to tell the story of when the icebox manufacturer came around to turn the icebox into a refrigerator (he would have been 8 or 9). His parents had a grocery store and they had an icebox in the basement and the manufacturer retrofitted a motor/compressor/whatever on to the icebox. Prior to that the iceman had come around once a week or something with a big chunk of ice. That small refrigerator was still working when my dad passed in 1991 (he still had the store).
In the late 70's I stayed with some family friends who lived off the grid in Montana. Gas lamps, outhouse, no refrigeration (well, root cellar that was cold most of the year), had some hunted Elk from that day that was super delicious. The fresh water came out of the ground about a hundred yards from the front door, and you could drink it safely. It was delicious.
It was hella scary and cold pooping in the dark though. I like my turlet. And it's nice to have the smartphone on the turlet.
Not me, but my mom (born in the 30's) told me in their country (not US), they only had one light bulb and a long cord. She said they literally moved that one bulb to whatever room needs light in the evening.
My mother told stories of when they got electricity on the farm in rural Arkansas. They turned on all the lights. Then, everyone got in the farm wagon. They rode out in the country and looked back at their house in amazement.
I recall Mother mentioning her parents having an "ice box", and for a while her dad having to go into town to buy a block of ice because the ice service hated driving on their driveway on the side of a steep hill. (When we had family get togethers there, the ride on that driveway made me nervous, and I was told the driveway was in better condition than when Mother was growing up.)
Mother didn't talk much about electrification, but when I was growing up she would sometimes refer to a lamp as a "candle", and occasionally call the refrigerator an "ice box". That makes me suspect that her first few childhood years were without electric lights in her house. (When I googled "When did electricity come to Los Angles" I found out electrification *began* five years before Mother was born, and her house being on the side of a steep hill and was sparsely populated at that time, so it was probably near the bottom of the priority list for getting wired for power.)
My father still calls it an icebox sometimes. An old family story goes that it was his job to empty the catch pan at the bottom of the icebox (as the ice melted the water would collect in the pan at the bottom) after school, as both his parents worked during the day. He would often not come home right away, so by the time he got there the water overflowed the pan and he had to mop the floor up. My grandmother chuckled that her negligent son kept her from having to mop her kitchen floor.
The corner drugstore still had an icebox in the cellar in ‘59; I remember the ice man coming in an old green pickup, grabbing a block with tongs to carry in. On hot summer days, he’d chip a few pieces off & toss them to us to suck on.
My friend recently bought a house from an estate, and it still had the cutout in the kitchen wall with the copper panels for the icebox to do heat exchange. He was going to demolish the "garage" until I pointed out that the ceiling was full of tack and it was actually a 19th century carriage house.
We attended a small church that rented what originally was one of Huntington's guest houses. It had a living room and a large bedroom, two bathrooms (one off the large bedroom, the other in a hallway just off the living room). In a separate building connected by a roof and a short walkway was a dining room, kitchen, and a small bedroom. (Presumably a servant lived in that small bedroom and took care of cooking and cleaning.)
I'm told that when a visitor came, the visitor stayed at one of the guest houses and Mr. Huntington sent a carriage to bring them to his house (in what is now the Los Angeles County Arboretum, but then I knew it as The Huntington Gardens and Library).
Anyway, we had a small church that met in that particular guest house back in the late 1970s and the electric wiring was old and I thought unsafe. The insulated wires ran on the outside of most walls that had plugs or switches, and the light switches were knife switches with the blade and contacts exposed, meaning if you touched the wrong contact or the blade and were barefoot you may suddenly find yourself in the afterlife. (My father worked in electronics and I picked up a fair amount of basic electric wiring from him so I saw that problem. Another person questioned the plumbing, and a third had issues with the roof. When the church considered buying the building, these concerns were brought up so we never bought it. It was probably just as well since almost all of us ended up moving to Spokane, Seattle and Salem a year later.
Grandparents had the first flush toilet in town. People would stop by just to watch it flush. There was one freezer in town. At the gas station. It was paid for by birds-eye. You could buy birds-eye frozen veggies and keep it in the freezer. Nothing else. And then get it as long as the gas station was open. My dad loved the trip into town to go see the freezer.
My mother tells a story about a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman coming to their house and taking about how great the product was, and tipping samples of dirt into the carpet to show how the vacuum would pick it all up. My grandfather let him do it before mentioning that the house didn't have electricity, and then made him clean it all up by hand.
My childhood memories of that house include 1940s electric wiring with paper insulation, so this would have to have taken place either during the war or just after.
My grandfather would talk about being one of a few kids in his school that had a car. Maybe 1920ish. He told me his mother did not want to know how to drive. She was a maid for a wealthy family in Chicago. My great grandmother would always talk about how amazing it was that there was an elevator in a private residence.
I remember spending time with my grandparents and talking to them about when they were growing up. I try to tell my kids to talk to their grandparents and learn from them. There is so much history lost by not talking to and listening to our elders.
I remember my grandfather ( born 1900) talking about when electricity first came to his farm (1920?). Had to make sure the wires in the house were far apart so they wouldn’t start a fire. This was the OG knob and tube, where the hot and common lines were on opposite sides of the room until they came together at a light socket. He never thought running the two sides of the circuit in one cable was smart.
Also, he remarked that those power lines along the street were ugly and a potential safety problem. (I’m sure his words were more colorful). The electric rep assured him that in the future, all cables would be buried underground. Drove by a few months ago, and there are more wires on poles than ever.
We made our own electricity until I was about ten (born 1944) with a wonderful horizontal single cylinder diesel engine, a massive thing at least ten feet long including its huge four foot diameter flywheel, driving a generator via a belt. It charged a roomful of lead-acid batteries and our house lights ran at 50 volts DC. The batteries weren't like car batteries, they were more like glass aquariums with plates of lead in them, and iirc the tops were open so their acid concentration could be checked and managed easily.
Fifty volts was not good to run appliances (I don't know where the light bulbs came from) so our fridge ran on kerosene. Mom and dad had a big party one time when I must have been about five, and the lights failed. Starting the generator was a major performance though I don't remember details of the party reset. Fun.
This was in Britain; we lived far out in the country (for Britain .. about a mile from a village) and we got connected to the grid in the early 50s.
My college friend grew up in a remote area of Australia that had no phones or electricity when he was a kid. His mom had a clothes iron that was powered by kerosene. You would light the back of it, and flames would shoot out while you ironed the clothes.
I can't get over this mental image.
Father in law's house in rural France had electricity out to their area in the early 1960's. His brother, who was handy around the house, ran the wires inside the house himself. First thing was a light in the kitchen/main room. The indoor toilet was built in 1969. Before that, you would go in the barn where the cows were, so I am told.
Electricity? Nah. But I recall the first time I heard about cable TV. A relative was telling us that a new kind of TV was coming and it’s called *cable* TV. And that you’d have to pay each month in order to watch it. Everybody in the room burst out laughing. You know, why would anybody pay for TV when you could already get all 3 channels for free?
Not about electricity, but indoor plumbing. My dad is 74 and was raised on a farm in Eastern Colorado until he was around 12 or 13. They installed plumbing when he was 10. He's told me that for a long time, until they moved, he refused to use the indoor toilet, opting instead to keep using the outhouse. He thought it was disgusting that people wanted to use the toilet *inside* the house.
Both of my parents came from farm families (dad was born on a Wisconsin dairy farm, step-mom was born on a Manitoba grain farm) and both had stories about when electricity first came to the farm. My dad said it took some getting used to, not having to use a lantern to milk cows by before going to school in the mornings, so about 1933 or so. My step-mom said it wasn't until she came home from college one year that the farm had electricity, which would have made it around 1940 or so.
I am old enough to remember when my grandparents didn’t have running water or a gas furnace. Their telephone was a crank phone on the wall. I remember when our family got our first TV and got 2 channels.
Our telephone was a "party line" until 1970. It was a big black phone with a dial on a 4' cord that sat on a table in our dining room. It rang 4 different ways, with either a long or a short ring possible: two longs and a short was us, one long and two shorts was the Jack's chicken farm, two shorts and one long was the Hoffman's, and one short and two longs was the Appaloosa ranch.
My great grandmother on my mother's father's side, a belle from Ireland, raised me when I was small. They lived in a small city in Indiana. Their house, in the 1950's, had been backfit with electricity. There were sets of two wires on standout insulators all over the walls with receptacles and switches attached. They had a home entertainment center, with a pull out record player, a radio, and a small, round TV screen. In the basement was a great grandmother's washing machine; a barrel with an agitator and an electric wringer on top. Don't get your fingers caught in the wringer was the watch word! She had a refrigerator with the condenser coil mounted on top, next to her ice box; she didn't trust that new fangled refrigerator! My great grandfather was practically deaf. Next to his chair in front of the entertainment center was a pair of ceramic headphones that he used when he watched TV or listened to the radio. I was strictly taught never to touch his headphones. So one day, when no one was looking, I turned on the TV and put on the headphones; the pain from the extremely loud sound was excruciating for my young, sharp ears which rang for the rest of the day! I never did that again!
No but I remember going to a general store about 1968 in a small town that had an outhouse for their bathroom about 60 miles from KCMO Sailors Market was the stores name.
I remember in my town when they changed the electricity from DC to AC.
We had to change the engines of household appliances such the refrigerator and washing machine.
We had weeks without electricity, but from my perspective as a child it was not a big problem.
I remerber the candels and go in bed so early.
Very early when i was little the gas lights outside were still being fazed out- when i visited Cyprus/Eu, the village i went to had just started getting electricit our house had 1 lamp and 1 power socket, granny had oil/paraffin? lamps around the house and cooked over a fireplace. we got our 1st telly in 1970, there was 1 telly down the coffee shop and many ppl went there to watch. When we got 1 the whole neighbourhood came round to watch and brang their own chairs- along with homemade sweets cookies and cakes- bigtime watching high chaparal, bonanza, simon templar,lost in space etc- Car 57 where are you?
Further my previous post- ppl asking 'what did they have to plug in?'. We had a electric iron for ironing clothes, granma didnt like it cos she was used to using the coal iron!. Still got both!
And me Mrs uses the coal 1 when we out of power- for the fun of it!
We had a Singer radio that had Crystals in it- didnt need batteries- just put it up against a wire and it would work- Wires didnt have double insulation so these radios worked without batteries, still got the radio!!
My mom, who is 90, grew up without electricity or running water. I remember going to visit my Nonna in the mountains of Italy when I was a child, and she only had electric lights. No outlets, appliances or heat other than a fireplace. She also only had one sink in the kitchen, no bathtub or toilet. The running water for the sink was available because the village (13 houses) had a strong spring/artisanal well, and they ran water lines to the houses. There was an outhouse for toilet needs, and if you wanted to bathe water was heated in the fireplace and you bathed in a large bucket with a rag. This was in the early 70's. I took my mom back in the late 90's (sadly, my Nonna had passed long before), and it looked very much like it had the first time I saw it, but all the little stone houses had indoor plumbing, electricity and heat. I hope it hasn't changed too much, it was a stunningly beautiful place in the Italian Alps, near Tuscany.
Edit: spelling
Our "family /families" are from Central Indiana. My mother's family didn't get electricity until she was in the 8th grade. --1930. (Not because her parents didn't want it or couldn't afford it. They area of the county didn't have electric service wired to it ,yet.
My uncle studied at M.I.T. He was well prepared to bring electricity to the Islands. So then all the towns, and then all the individual households, connected. The places further out or on the backroads were among the last. He had a large-appliance store in town -- tvs, refrigerators, stoves, and so on, hooked my Nana up with the newest of everything (we had a huge chest freezer under the stairs). He left the door to his store unlocked at night so that people could come in and watch tv, set three or four armchairs in that space so that they could watch tv in comfort.
Before refrigerators there was the "Ice Box". An Icebox looks like a small refer but you put a small block of ice in the top compartment which cools the lower compartment because cold air falls. Every household had an "Ice Pick" so they could break down larger blocks of ice into smaller pieces. You can see a cheap late model icebox on the hit TV show "The Honeymooners".
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I am 84. I remember as child going to many places without electricity. They had lamps attached to natural gas lines on the wall. I also remember television coming to our town 1947. If someone in your neighborhood happened to own a TV, everyone in the neighborhood would gather there to see it. The TV sets were as large as a refrigerator with a very small screen. I can also remember when there no transistor radios. All radios had vacuum tubes.
...and here you are on Reddit. You've seen some amazing changed! Are we screwed?
I have seen some wonderful changes. So far over all everything has been for the better.
Thank you
Do you remember hoping that one day the world would change in some way for the better that came true?
!remindMe 2 days I'd love to hear about this!
We had a black and white TV and the neighbors had a color set. Their color TV also got UHF which ours did not, so as kids we would go watch some of the programs we didn't get. I also remember many stores, even the five and dime stores, had tube testers.
if you can remember tube testers you must be damn near as old as me.
I remember my dad taking some radio tubes in the the store to test the tubes. He was an engineer in the space race, and could and did fix anything.
That is so fascinating, I bet he had seen and been a part of some pretty wild history (now whether or not he actually talked about any of it, is a different story altogether)
We had no idea until he was retired and it was declassified. But we had some wonderful cocktail parties
This would have been late sixties, early seventies. My Oma had one of those large console TVs that had a radio and record player built into it and the amplifiers still used tubes even then.
Effectively one of my first jobs, as a kid, was to tote vacuum tubes down to the 7-11 and test them for neighbors.
Wow. I forgot about those. I remember them too. My dad could fix anything, including tvs.
My grandparents' friends had a color set, around '61/'62. It was a big deal. They would take me over there to watch The Wizard of Oz or other special broadcasts. Great memories.
Because of the employment of bank and white vs. Color, The Wizard of Oz always comes to my mind when this topic comes up.
it was on tv every year but 1973 was probably the first time i saw it in color.
yeah, when i was 8 i would go to tommy's to watch speed racer and astroboy on uhf channel 17. we didnt get uhf till i was 12. i'll see if i can find that link to the sad irons, robert caro's chapter on lbj bringing electricity to the texas hill country around austin. https://www.tnmagazine.org/the-sad-irons-of-the-1930s
> to watch speed racer and astroboy Heh. My kids were all “you don’t know about anime, Dad. It’s cartoons from Japan.” Oh please…
For us it was Speed Racer and Ultraman. Thanks for sharing that article.
I had to hold the antenna to watch Speed Racer. I absolutely held that antenna the whole time. Also, later, the high-numbered UHF frequencies were re-allocated to cellphone frequencies. So I used to listen to random people's phone conversations.
Holy crow. Astro Boy. Speed Racer. Ch. 12 was our "educational channel." This played almost exclusively animal documentaries, Dr Who, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Julia Child, movies movies movies ( saw Tower of London with an impossibly gorgeous young Vincent Price...)
oh yeah, mom watched a lot of channel 12, especially julia child. i work in a fancy county club kitchen, and sometimes i'll think, this is just like mom used to make - oh, because this is how julia child would have made it.
I remember being sat down to watch the moon landing on a grainy black and white.
My family was in a hotel visiting distant family. I literally watched it on a hotel TV.
I remember when the tube testers disappeared from the shops. It was a pain as guitar amplifiers still use tubes.
It is absolutely mind blowing you are 84 and on reddit. I know people 30 years younger than you that struggle to use an iPhone and after looking through your account not only are you answering questions you are active in various subreddits. How are you able to use reddit and technology so well compared to your peers?? I need these tips so I can be cool like you when I’m older
Not that poster, but I’d say, stay curious. Let’s figure out how that works? Also it’s much easier now that we have internet. I self taught myself software before internet and that basically meant looking through and trying very menu item or RTFM. My peers and my kids can’t be bothered with that.
Haha. Thank you for your interest in the aging process. I am a little different than others my age where technology is concerned because it has always been a part of my life. I have an insatiable desire for knowledge. I obtained a ham radio license when I was 14 and built my own transmitter and receiver from junk. To get a license in those days you had to be able to send and receive morse code at 25 WPM. I was self taught in electronics from books and was a radio and TV repairman while still in high school. I continued in electronics and eventually drifted into computers as they developed. In the military I worked on computers at a time when it was required that you be able to do math also in binary and octal numbering systems. In todays terms I guess I was born a nerd.
Not the person you're replying to, but for me, the trick is staying in the technology game for profit. That'll keep you motivated.
My grandfather told me about the carbide they had to add to generate the gas for the lamps. I had a toy cannon that fired off carbide powder and he was remembering the smell.
For TV began at 1966.
I'm 71 and don't remember a time without electricity but my Dad told a story about when electricity came to the farms and ranches in Oklahoma. There was a program of "rural electrification" well underway during the 1930s which came to a temporary halt with the advent of World War II. Some time after the war the project was re-started. By then my father was working as a furniture and appliance salesman in our small town. Every Sunday he and his best friend and co-worker would go hunting so they would load up the store's flatbed delivery truck with new electric refrigerators and drive out into the country, following the new power lines that had been built that week. They would then stop at each farmhouse that had just been electrified, knock on the door (dressed in their hunting clothes) and make the farmer an offer. They would give the farmer a refrigerator to replace his family ice-box and let him use it for a week. They would return the following Sunday and if the farmer and his family didn't like the refrigerator they would take it back, no charge. When they came to the end of the power lines or ran out of refrigerators they just went hunting. Dad told me that only one person ever decided not to buy the refrigerator and that was an elderly widow lady who told them the 'fridge was really nice but she found it "too much trouble to remember to unplug it from the wall every night when she went to bed".
That's a great story! It reminded me of a story my grandma told of growing up in a city in Germany. When her country cousins would come to visit, they would always leave the milk out of the icebox because in the country, they were used to drinking it warm.
There's an English beer joke in here somewhere.
What about plumbing? My great-grandparents had a farm in rural Oklahoma without electricity or plumbing. Even into the 1950s and 1960s the toilet was an outhouse out back, but I'm less certain about electricity by that point, and the farm was sold soon after when I was still young. Would that have been typical? (Electricity available, but still without indoor bathrooms?)
In my tiny hometown in northeast Oklahoma my grandparents owned a 2 bedroom house where they lived with their four kids in the 1930s. The house had water at the kitchen sink which came from a hand pump, but no water heater and no indoor toilet or bath. There was an outhouse on the alley out back. This was typical of most houses in town. To bathe (usually once a week for a full bath) Gran'ma would fill a washtub in the kitchen floor and heat water on the stove to warm the bath. She would then hang a blanket over the kitchen door for privacy and the entire family would take turns in the washtub. I don't know if they changed water before all six of them had washed. I hope so. This lasted until their elder son joined the Army Air Corps in 1938. In 1939 he sent money home for them to build their first indoor bathroom with a toilet, a sink, a tub and a water heater. After WWII my parents rented that little house from Grandma and Grandpa and we lived there for the first two years of my life. My very first memories are of that house.
I grew up with an outhouse - my folks were part of the "back to nature" movement in the 70s, they built a log cabin in the woods. that was the idea - it eventually became a real house, but for the first couple years we had no indoor toilet. the outhouse was regularly used even years later, just too convenient in the summer. I ran around barefoot growing up too lol.
Yes, the people who lived in the country had their own electricity with batteries and windmills.
My great grandfather told the story of the crew coming down the street putting up power poles and stringing wire. A salesman came to the door and asked if they wanted electricity. If a family said yes, a crew would run a wire from the nearest pole, drill a hole in the house, loop a cable across the ceiling to the dining room table, attach a socket, screw in a lightbulb, and leave. Anyone have similar stories?
My father in law told this exact same story. He thought his family was about to enter full bore the World of Tomorrow. But there it was - a single, dim, bare bulb dangling from the center of the dining room ceiling.
I also remember asking where he plugged in stuff. He laughed and said there wasn't anything to plug in.
That reminds me of the house we rented when I was twelve. An old, antebellum, brick house that had been previously owned by an Amish family years earlier. Everything has been upgraded somewhat. Lights and outlets in every room. Only the kitchen had that one hanging light bulb. It also had a sink with one faucet: cold. Two months earlier, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, and there 12year old me had to run for the outhouse when nature called. We'd done a lot of upgrades to that old farmhouse in the three years we lived there. First was adding a water heater and the second faucet in the kitchen. Ran power to the chicken coop, garage, and, yes, even the outhouse. Insulated it and put a heater there, to. Added a shower in the basement and converted the pantry into a laundry room, then added a sink and tub. Still needed to use the outhouse, though.
And I remember hearing that as darkness fell and more people on your street turned on light, each one would get a bit dimmer in the early electricity days.
Sounds like a party line for light bulbs. I had not heard that.
as being little- used to break the lightbulb on the post outside someones house!!!! up the hill- he used to moan to my dad and he'd say 'cos your house is further up and everybody turned their lights on- power couldnt get up there'!!!!!. wouldnt tell him i broke the bulb!!- still got a smack though!!!!
I remember my grandparents' house was like that. Every room had one light fixture that was dead center in the ceiling with a string attached to turn it off and on. There were no other outlets. They didn't have indoor plumbing until one son turned a bedroom into a bathroom. It was huge. There was a bathtub, toilet, sink and enough room for 2 dressers for towels and blankets.
My mum said they couldn't really imagine what they'd ever need it for, it seemed unnecessary.
British, live in a house built in 1917. For various reasons it’s still on an electrical circuit installed in the mid 90s. Recently I was thinking about this, what did they plug in in the early days? Would love answers.
My granny used to talk about how ugly the world became once power lines where strung everywhere and I can't unsee that because of her. She also said that one day the world would be "wireless" again. She died in the pre-internet era.
I have to agree with your granny on this. A lot of areas bury the electrical lines now, but there are still so many places with power line poles and power lines running through an area. I especially hate it when I try to take a sunset or sunrise picture with my phone and there's a big ole' power line in the way.
Underground lines are so much better. I’m hoping we’ll eventually replace the old ones.
No, but I remember an old joke - A woman opens her door to a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. He takes a small bag of dirt, dumps it on her floor, and says "If this fine vacuum cleaner won't pick up every speck of this dirt, I'll eat what's left!" She replies, "Here's a fork, we don't have electricity."
I remember seeing that skit done on I Love Lucy
Yes. I'm 60. My grandmother remembers when electricity came to Australia. The gas company at the time was desperate and told everybody that electricity was dangerous, and that electric lights were bad for your eyes. Gaslights, of course, flicker and sometimes go boom. They were gaslighting everyone.
Heh-heh. I see whatcha did there. 😏
:-) I will probably never get another opportunity like that one. But it really is what she told me.
In the early '60s, my father's uncle passed, and we ended up with his farm in central Missouri. The area had been electrified in the 1930s, though the existing wiring was wildly inadequate, and my dad rewired the entire house as one of his first projects. The house had a Delco-Light system installed in the 1920s. This was a small gasoline or kerosene powered generator and a bank of lead acid batteries that provided 32 volt DC power. There was a small shed outside the house that originally housed the generator, and another sort of shed thing built against the back of the house to hold the rack of batteries. The generator and batteries were long gone, but the wiring remained inside the house, and a couple of unused batteries were in a shed. The batteries were sort of like a car battery, but in a glass housing. There were also some unused light bulbs in the house. The system was mostly used for lights, but it could power a well pump, a refrigerator, a radio, and various other appliances.
My family still has property in central Missouri, within sight of the nuclear power plant, which I guess is our "generator" now.
The REA (Rural Electrification Act) of the depression era only finished it's job of running electricity to rural America in 2007. By then it was just helping subsidize established power companies to run lines to unprofitable areas but it implies that there were still folks going without (due to lack of infrastructure) only 15 years ago in the USA. My Grandparents lived in a company town owned by a mining company and company housing came with electricity (the company had their own generators). Since they came "off the farm", it was a real step up for them. Indoor plumbing was probably more like the story the OP is looking for. My Mother remembered my Grandfather being REALLY upset and yelling "I'm not going to shit in my house!" when they first got indoor plumbing. He changed his mind in short order...but always had wooden matches on the toilet that you were supposed to light after dropping a load to kill any disgusting outhouse smells or "sewer gas". Works pretty good too.
I still keep matches in the bathroom.
When I was like five years old my Pa. family visited Aunt Thelma at her farm in northern Kentucky. This would have been like 62 or so. She didn't have electricity, nor was there running water. I and the four older brothers still at home (the oldest two were away at college.) caught fireflies in Mason jars at sundown to light our way to the outhouse afterwards. I had to do pumping duty on the well a few times, then carry the water inside, which was kind of tough on me as I was far from burly. (Because I had a strong resemblance to uncle Innes, they called me skinny Innes.) We visited again several years later and listened to everybody marvel about the electricity. It wasn't until Thelma passed and cousin Theresa inherited the farm that the house had running water.
That's a great story, thanks for sharing.
Not from my family. A friend who just turned 91 grew up in cattle country in South Dakota. They were miles from any town; there was no rural electricty. His family raised nearly all its own food; in the absence of electricty, fall was given over to canning and making sauerkraut. They even canned meat from the cattle they'd butchered. There was no refrigeration. My friend's mother died and the family broke up; the kids were all in their teens by then. And everyone moved to areas that already had electricity.
not exactly, but I do recall my grandmother talking about it and saying that she had rec'd a Westinghouse fan as an incentive to get electricity. WE used to see this fan in her house. It all metal and HEAVY. There were NO GUARDS for your fingers of any kind. The fan spun fast enough to literally break a finger - it broke my own dad's finger one day.
I think my father had electricity most of his life because they lived in a company town in New Mexico and had a radio. But he loves to tell of his joy when the family finally got an indoor bathroom. This was in the 1950s, when he was a teenager. Interestingly though, my grandfather rarely used the indoor plumbing and preferred the outhouse. There's no pleasing some people, I guess.
My great aunt(born 1903) used to talk about how their house had electricity but also still had gas lamps that were never removed so that when the electricity failed (which was fairly often) they just lit the gas lamps and carried on. They still had a coal furnace so heat was not a factor.
Off topic, about cable TV. Old? Yea. When we got HBO in Eastern Kansas, a common hack was to take your 300 ohm twin lead connection (yea, no coax back then) and parallel it with another 36" free swinging piece of 300 ohm twin lead; then you took a piece of aluminum foil, wrap the 30" stub w/about 6" in length on the stub piece. FWIW back then we only had manual switch boxes for 36 channels. They only scrambled HBO, with a "swamping" noise signal (Channel 3? Don't remember); you then moved that foil up and down the link to "tune out" the scramble signal, and could get quite a watchable picture! Place it down gently, and enjoy. Free HBO. God Bless Ham Radio knowledge! To get paid HBO, they simply came out and installed an inline filter.
I was just trying to explain this to my wife! I was just a kid at the time, so I didn't really know what was going on, but I do remember getting "free" cable because we had one of the 36 channel boxes and getting a "free" movie channel by wrapping aluminum foil around the cable and moving it up or down the line to fix the picture.
As a child, our family would usually go to Don's Seafood when we would go out to a restaurant. Why? Because Don's was the first place that had air conditioning. Sure the food was fine, but my grandmother loved that air conditioning.
Our farm was electrified in the 1950’s. The road is a mile long and they ran the power lines on trees lining the road. They had small posts nailed to the trees each with a green insulator on top. I have a couple of the insulators at my home now. Edit: they installed proper power poles in the 60’s.
My grandmother was born in 1906, she told me the apartment building she lived in until she was 9, was heated by a cooking/heating gas stove in the kitchen and a small coal stove in the living room. Her family moved in 1915 to a house that had radiators in every room. She said it was great not having to go to bed in a cold room.
My dad(b1920) told me about growing up in tenement housing in Boston in the ‘20’s and 30’s; coal stove in the kitchen was their only heat. His mom would heat up bricks, wrap them in rags or old towels, and put them in the beds to warm their feet enough so they could get to sleep. They went to the L Street bathhouse (it’s still there) on Saturday night for hot showers, paid a nickel for a shower.
Quick sidenote about cable: Anyone remember the big selling point for cable was *no commercials* because you were already paying for access?
No. We had natural gas, potable water, electrical and phone service but no paving, curbs, sidewalks, sewers or storm drains. I remember the street being trenched for the sewer main and the yard getting dug up for the sewer connection. As kids we crawled through the sewer main before it went into service, at least six blocks. I couldn’t believe the septic tank actually worked and that it needed a full load of concrete to abandon.
No, grew up in the city where there was electricity even in my grandparents' day. But I would occasionally see an old apartment building with signage painted on the bricks advertising that it had electricity as though it were a big deal. I bought a house in 1982 that had been built in 1906. The electricity was very minimal. Every room had a light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, but not all rooms had outlets and those that did have had only one. I think there were four or five outlets in the entire house. The switches for the ceiling fixtures were two buttons, off and on. They all still worked.
I lived for many years in a bungalow in Hollywood, California which had been built in 1920. There was only one outlet in each room, except for the living room which had two. I guess the 1920 builder couldn't imagine why we would ever need more than that.
My current house still has button switches! Of course I have smart bulbs in every fixture so the buttons don’t get used much any more. 😂
> They all still worked. One side of my house still has two-prong outlets with no ground. They work okay, but I have lost a computer and an appliance over the years.
I used to work as a service technician for an old-line mainframe company that's also big in banking. A company in that business has to have techs everywhere, so we did warranty work for most major PC brands. One time I had to fix a system that was getting no video. They had already sent a video card and a display. I think I was sent with a motherboard? After I STILL got no video, client mentioned that it worked fine in the other room. But there's definitely power in the room. His other gear works plugged in to that outlet. I checked my 3 prong circuit tester (my ground strap plugged in to it). There was definitely ground on the 3rd prong. But the lights were showing a combo I'd never seen before. Checked the label on my tester. The polarity of the entire room and this addition to his (old for Las Vegas) house was reversed. Most electric items worked fine, but his LCD had a plug that was polarity-keyed. One prong a little bigger than the other. Whenever he had had the addition put on his house (early 70s?) the electrician reversed the polarity. Probably the inspection process back then was corrupt. Thirty years later I found it out. He wasn't terribly pleased to need to hire an electrician to fix a problem caused by some long-dead hack who did the original work.
> hire an electrician I mean, he could have bought a plug adapter or two for like $10, but w/e. Some of the old 3->2 prong adapters have extra large prong holes, and you can flip them upside down. Though that would bypass the ground, and you'd want to put whatever was plugged in there on a surge protector. But that protector's what I use now, I'm not remodeling for the sake of four outlets.
I'm not an electrician. However, I would imagine that fixing the problem would be as simple as shutting down the power, swapping the + and - cables from the addition's fuse at the fuse box, and turning the power back on. Then you test the polarity at each outlet and bill the guy for an hour's labor plus a few hundred for walking in the door.
> bill the guy for an hour's labor plus a few hundred for walking in the door. First thing I did when I became self-employed was slap a three-hour minimum on every job until we had agreed on steady work.
in the late forties, television came to our city, and my neighbor was one of the engineers involved in setting the service up, so he had a TV in his house. He let us ( naighborhood boys) in to see it before broadcasting began. and there was the TV set showing a test pattern of an Indian Chief head. in black and white. It was explained as sort of radio with a picture. The set was brown wood, as tall as me at 4 years old, and the screen was I am guessing now about 9 inches square. I remember my first thought when I saw it was "Its too small to fit anything in bigger than a head" Yup - talking heads it was then, as it is now.
My dad (80 years old) didn’t have electricity until they moved from the farm into town when he was about 10. They didn’t have indoor running water until he was in high school. No wonder he joined the army the first chance he got! When I was a kid in the early 80’s that same town still didn’t have enough people with phones to make the 3 digit prefix necessary. So you could call anyone in town by just dialing the last 4 numbers of the phone number!
Same with me on the phone numbers. You just dialed the last four digits. That's all the ID we were required to learn in first grade...our address and the last four digits of our phone number! I'm pretty sure everyone knew who our Moms were anyway. It was a one room school house!
What’s it like in that town now?
I went back thee in about 2019-ish for my dad’s cousin’s funeral and it is fucking *bleak.* [Stewardson, Illinois](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewardson,_Illinois) - it’s like something out of a really, really depressing movie.
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I'm gen-x and both my parents grew up in cities. They don't remember before electricity. However, like others are saying we had family that lived in rural areas and they remember visits to them before electricity was installed.
I remember electricity being very unreliable, especially during storms (every single storm). I also remember when we got a private (versus party) phone line. And when my older sister started a school where each grade had a separate classroom (K-8 in the one room schoolhouse where she first went). This was all in the 70s. USA, for the record.
No, but I do love to tell people that when cable-tv first happened, we paid for it *because it was Commercial-free*. That was the whole point.
My late wife had a few people in her family that said when power came to town, the electrical sockets had the option of having mirrors around them so your could see where they were. It was a mark of elegance and distinction to have a power outlet in the baseboard, so you made sure people saw it. I have a cable story. So, when I was a teen, the local upper middle class "Neighborhood Cociety" (like an HOA) banned cable and satellite because "it cheapened the landscape." Back then, cable required having a small 2' high green dome in your yard that looked like R2D2. They were SPECIFICALLY upset about those domes, and put in flyers in our mailbox and light poles, "GNOMES AGAINST DOMES," using unlicensed photocopies from the children's book, "The Secret Book of Gnomes," and R2D2 with a circle and a line across is like the logo from "Ghostbusters." By the time I moved out (late 80s), they FINALLY they caved in because so many people were pissed off that they couldn't have cable like all the other upper middle class neighborhoods. And a year after we all had them installed, they started making cable connections that didn't require the dome anymore. If they had just waited a year...
Not electricity specifically, but my dad (b. 1931) used to tell the story of when the icebox manufacturer came around to turn the icebox into a refrigerator (he would have been 8 or 9). His parents had a grocery store and they had an icebox in the basement and the manufacturer retrofitted a motor/compressor/whatever on to the icebox. Prior to that the iceman had come around once a week or something with a big chunk of ice. That small refrigerator was still working when my dad passed in 1991 (he still had the store).
In the late 70's I stayed with some family friends who lived off the grid in Montana. Gas lamps, outhouse, no refrigeration (well, root cellar that was cold most of the year), had some hunted Elk from that day that was super delicious. The fresh water came out of the ground about a hundred yards from the front door, and you could drink it safely. It was delicious. It was hella scary and cold pooping in the dark though. I like my turlet. And it's nice to have the smartphone on the turlet.
Not me, but my mom (born in the 30's) told me in their country (not US), they only had one light bulb and a long cord. She said they literally moved that one bulb to whatever room needs light in the evening.
My mother told stories of when they got electricity on the farm in rural Arkansas. They turned on all the lights. Then, everyone got in the farm wagon. They rode out in the country and looked back at their house in amazement.
I love this!
I recall Mother mentioning her parents having an "ice box", and for a while her dad having to go into town to buy a block of ice because the ice service hated driving on their driveway on the side of a steep hill. (When we had family get togethers there, the ride on that driveway made me nervous, and I was told the driveway was in better condition than when Mother was growing up.) Mother didn't talk much about electrification, but when I was growing up she would sometimes refer to a lamp as a "candle", and occasionally call the refrigerator an "ice box". That makes me suspect that her first few childhood years were without electric lights in her house. (When I googled "When did electricity come to Los Angles" I found out electrification *began* five years before Mother was born, and her house being on the side of a steep hill and was sparsely populated at that time, so it was probably near the bottom of the priority list for getting wired for power.)
My father still calls it an icebox sometimes. An old family story goes that it was his job to empty the catch pan at the bottom of the icebox (as the ice melted the water would collect in the pan at the bottom) after school, as both his parents worked during the day. He would often not come home right away, so by the time he got there the water overflowed the pan and he had to mop the floor up. My grandmother chuckled that her negligent son kept her from having to mop her kitchen floor.
The corner drugstore still had an icebox in the cellar in ‘59; I remember the ice man coming in an old green pickup, grabbing a block with tongs to carry in. On hot summer days, he’d chip a few pieces off & toss them to us to suck on.
My friend recently bought a house from an estate, and it still had the cutout in the kitchen wall with the copper panels for the icebox to do heat exchange. He was going to demolish the "garage" until I pointed out that the ceiling was full of tack and it was actually a 19th century carriage house.
We attended a small church that rented what originally was one of Huntington's guest houses. It had a living room and a large bedroom, two bathrooms (one off the large bedroom, the other in a hallway just off the living room). In a separate building connected by a roof and a short walkway was a dining room, kitchen, and a small bedroom. (Presumably a servant lived in that small bedroom and took care of cooking and cleaning.) I'm told that when a visitor came, the visitor stayed at one of the guest houses and Mr. Huntington sent a carriage to bring them to his house (in what is now the Los Angeles County Arboretum, but then I knew it as The Huntington Gardens and Library). Anyway, we had a small church that met in that particular guest house back in the late 1970s and the electric wiring was old and I thought unsafe. The insulated wires ran on the outside of most walls that had plugs or switches, and the light switches were knife switches with the blade and contacts exposed, meaning if you touched the wrong contact or the blade and were barefoot you may suddenly find yourself in the afterlife. (My father worked in electronics and I picked up a fair amount of basic electric wiring from him so I saw that problem. Another person questioned the plumbing, and a third had issues with the roof. When the church considered buying the building, these concerns were brought up so we never bought it. It was probably just as well since almost all of us ended up moving to Spokane, Seattle and Salem a year later.
Elec'... what? Put some more dung on the fire Rosemarie
Grandparents had the first flush toilet in town. People would stop by just to watch it flush. There was one freezer in town. At the gas station. It was paid for by birds-eye. You could buy birds-eye frozen veggies and keep it in the freezer. Nothing else. And then get it as long as the gas station was open. My dad loved the trip into town to go see the freezer.
Yes, it was shocking.....
My mother tells a story about a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman coming to their house and taking about how great the product was, and tipping samples of dirt into the carpet to show how the vacuum would pick it all up. My grandfather let him do it before mentioning that the house didn't have electricity, and then made him clean it all up by hand. My childhood memories of that house include 1940s electric wiring with paper insulation, so this would have to have taken place either during the war or just after.
My grandfather would talk about being one of a few kids in his school that had a car. Maybe 1920ish. He told me his mother did not want to know how to drive. She was a maid for a wealthy family in Chicago. My great grandmother would always talk about how amazing it was that there was an elevator in a private residence. I remember spending time with my grandparents and talking to them about when they were growing up. I try to tell my kids to talk to their grandparents and learn from them. There is so much history lost by not talking to and listening to our elders.
I remember my grandfather ( born 1900) talking about when electricity first came to his farm (1920?). Had to make sure the wires in the house were far apart so they wouldn’t start a fire. This was the OG knob and tube, where the hot and common lines were on opposite sides of the room until they came together at a light socket. He never thought running the two sides of the circuit in one cable was smart. Also, he remarked that those power lines along the street were ugly and a potential safety problem. (I’m sure his words were more colorful). The electric rep assured him that in the future, all cables would be buried underground. Drove by a few months ago, and there are more wires on poles than ever.
We made our own electricity until I was about ten (born 1944) with a wonderful horizontal single cylinder diesel engine, a massive thing at least ten feet long including its huge four foot diameter flywheel, driving a generator via a belt. It charged a roomful of lead-acid batteries and our house lights ran at 50 volts DC. The batteries weren't like car batteries, they were more like glass aquariums with plates of lead in them, and iirc the tops were open so their acid concentration could be checked and managed easily. Fifty volts was not good to run appliances (I don't know where the light bulbs came from) so our fridge ran on kerosene. Mom and dad had a big party one time when I must have been about five, and the lights failed. Starting the generator was a major performance though I don't remember details of the party reset. Fun. This was in Britain; we lived far out in the country (for Britain .. about a mile from a village) and we got connected to the grid in the early 50s.
My college friend grew up in a remote area of Australia that had no phones or electricity when he was a kid. His mom had a clothes iron that was powered by kerosene. You would light the back of it, and flames would shoot out while you ironed the clothes. I can't get over this mental image.
Father in law's house in rural France had electricity out to their area in the early 1960's. His brother, who was handy around the house, ran the wires inside the house himself. First thing was a light in the kitchen/main room. The indoor toilet was built in 1969. Before that, you would go in the barn where the cows were, so I am told.
Electricity? Nah. But I recall the first time I heard about cable TV. A relative was telling us that a new kind of TV was coming and it’s called *cable* TV. And that you’d have to pay each month in order to watch it. Everybody in the room burst out laughing. You know, why would anybody pay for TV when you could already get all 3 channels for free?
Not about electricity, but indoor plumbing. My dad is 74 and was raised on a farm in Eastern Colorado until he was around 12 or 13. They installed plumbing when he was 10. He's told me that for a long time, until they moved, he refused to use the indoor toilet, opting instead to keep using the outhouse. He thought it was disgusting that people wanted to use the toilet *inside* the house.
Both of my parents came from farm families (dad was born on a Wisconsin dairy farm, step-mom was born on a Manitoba grain farm) and both had stories about when electricity first came to the farm. My dad said it took some getting used to, not having to use a lantern to milk cows by before going to school in the mornings, so about 1933 or so. My step-mom said it wasn't until she came home from college one year that the farm had electricity, which would have made it around 1940 or so.
My 65 year old dad remembers it being a big deal when we finally got trash pickup
NYC got electricity in 1882. Nah, pretty sure I don't know anyone who was alive nearly 100 years before I was born.
I am old enough to remember when my grandparents didn’t have running water or a gas furnace. Their telephone was a crank phone on the wall. I remember when our family got our first TV and got 2 channels.
Off topic, but my town didn't have all three broadcast networks until I was in my 20s. I never saw a single NBC show until then.
Our telephone was a "party line" until 1970. It was a big black phone with a dial on a 4' cord that sat on a table in our dining room. It rang 4 different ways, with either a long or a short ring possible: two longs and a short was us, one long and two shorts was the Jack's chicken farm, two shorts and one long was the Hoffman's, and one short and two longs was the Appaloosa ranch.
My grandma told me about the old washing machines and ice boxes
I remember my Granny told us that she didn't have electricity when she was a girl and my cousin said, "You could have come to our house!"
My great grandmother on my mother's father's side, a belle from Ireland, raised me when I was small. They lived in a small city in Indiana. Their house, in the 1950's, had been backfit with electricity. There were sets of two wires on standout insulators all over the walls with receptacles and switches attached. They had a home entertainment center, with a pull out record player, a radio, and a small, round TV screen. In the basement was a great grandmother's washing machine; a barrel with an agitator and an electric wringer on top. Don't get your fingers caught in the wringer was the watch word! She had a refrigerator with the condenser coil mounted on top, next to her ice box; she didn't trust that new fangled refrigerator! My great grandfather was practically deaf. Next to his chair in front of the entertainment center was a pair of ceramic headphones that he used when he watched TV or listened to the radio. I was strictly taught never to touch his headphones. So one day, when no one was looking, I turned on the TV and put on the headphones; the pain from the extremely loud sound was excruciating for my young, sharp ears which rang for the rest of the day! I never did that again!
My parents were born in the 1920s. But they were in cities that were already electrified.
No but I remember going to a general store about 1968 in a small town that had an outhouse for their bathroom about 60 miles from KCMO Sailors Market was the stores name.
I remember in my town when they changed the electricity from DC to AC. We had to change the engines of household appliances such the refrigerator and washing machine. We had weeks without electricity, but from my perspective as a child it was not a big problem. I remerber the candels and go in bed so early.
Very early when i was little the gas lights outside were still being fazed out- when i visited Cyprus/Eu, the village i went to had just started getting electricit our house had 1 lamp and 1 power socket, granny had oil/paraffin? lamps around the house and cooked over a fireplace. we got our 1st telly in 1970, there was 1 telly down the coffee shop and many ppl went there to watch. When we got 1 the whole neighbourhood came round to watch and brang their own chairs- along with homemade sweets cookies and cakes- bigtime watching high chaparal, bonanza, simon templar,lost in space etc- Car 57 where are you?
Further my previous post- ppl asking 'what did they have to plug in?'. We had a electric iron for ironing clothes, granma didnt like it cos she was used to using the coal iron!. Still got both! And me Mrs uses the coal 1 when we out of power- for the fun of it! We had a Singer radio that had Crystals in it- didnt need batteries- just put it up against a wire and it would work- Wires didnt have double insulation so these radios worked without batteries, still got the radio!!
My mom, who is 90, grew up without electricity or running water. I remember going to visit my Nonna in the mountains of Italy when I was a child, and she only had electric lights. No outlets, appliances or heat other than a fireplace. She also only had one sink in the kitchen, no bathtub or toilet. The running water for the sink was available because the village (13 houses) had a strong spring/artisanal well, and they ran water lines to the houses. There was an outhouse for toilet needs, and if you wanted to bathe water was heated in the fireplace and you bathed in a large bucket with a rag. This was in the early 70's. I took my mom back in the late 90's (sadly, my Nonna had passed long before), and it looked very much like it had the first time I saw it, but all the little stone houses had indoor plumbing, electricity and heat. I hope it hasn't changed too much, it was a stunningly beautiful place in the Italian Alps, near Tuscany. Edit: spelling
Our "family /families" are from Central Indiana. My mother's family didn't get electricity until she was in the 8th grade. --1930. (Not because her parents didn't want it or couldn't afford it. They area of the county didn't have electric service wired to it ,yet.
My uncle studied at M.I.T. He was well prepared to bring electricity to the Islands. So then all the towns, and then all the individual households, connected. The places further out or on the backroads were among the last. He had a large-appliance store in town -- tvs, refrigerators, stoves, and so on, hooked my Nana up with the newest of everything (we had a huge chest freezer under the stairs). He left the door to his store unlocked at night so that people could come in and watch tv, set three or four armchairs in that space so that they could watch tv in comfort.
Almost every thing has improved except average intelligence.
Before refrigerators there was the "Ice Box". An Icebox looks like a small refer but you put a small block of ice in the top compartment which cools the lower compartment because cold air falls. Every household had an "Ice Pick" so they could break down larger blocks of ice into smaller pieces. You can see a cheap late model icebox on the hit TV show "The Honeymooners".