Made In America (43 page)

Homes, too, became notably better equipped with conveniences like furnaces and artificial lighting than those of Europe, though the severity of the American climate made comfort an elusive goal even among the wealthier classes. In January 1866, the businessman George Templeton Strong lamented that even with both his furnaces and all the fireplaces going he couldn’t get the temperature in his house above 38°F.
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Even so, such matters are relative, and foreign observers continually remarked about the intolerable warmth and stuffiness of American households. The British consul-general in Massachusetts noted with quiet wonder that in the finer American houses ‘an enormous furnace in the cellar sends up, day and night, streams of hot air, through apertures and pipes, to every room in the house’ to the extent that ‘casual visitors are nearly suffocated’.
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Summers could be equally unbearable. Not only was there no practical way of getting rid of the heat, but the lack of proper sanitary services in towns, and the proliferation of horses and other animals, meant that flies, mosquitoes and other insects thrived to an extent unthinkable today. At least, food could now be kept. By the 1840s many middle-class homes enjoyed the benefits of an icebox (an Americanism first recorded in 1839), and the ice industry was huge. By mid-century Boston alone was shipping out 150,000 tons of ice a year, some of it going as far as India and China.

Improved lighting remained a constant preoccupation. Until the late 1700s illumination was limited to tallow candles and whale oil, but both were inefficient – it would take a hundred candles to create as much light as a single modern light-bulb – and beyond the means of most households. Until the early 1800s the average American
home existed in nearly total darkness once night fell. For the middle classes, illumination improved dramatically with the invention in 1783 of the Argand lamp (named for its Swiss creator), which had greater intensity and less flicker. The next step forward was the invention of kerosene by a Canadian, Abraham Gesner, in 1858, and by petroleum a year later.
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But the big transformation came with gas. Initially gas was used to light streets – Baltimore had gas-lamps as early as 1816, before Paris or Berlin – but the dirt, odours and volatility of gas meant it could not be safely relied on for domestic purposes until after the Civil War. Once these problems were dealt with, gas swept the nation. Each gas outlet, or gasolier, provided as much light as a dozen candles. By 1895, it was estimated, the average middle class home was twenty times better lit than it had been at mid-century.
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Even cleaned up and made more stable, gas remained dirty and dangerous. It emitted unpleasant, potentially lethal fumes that required special vents to clear the air. Even in the best-ventilated homes the carbonic acid and smoke that seeped from them took a heavy toll on books, curtains, wallpaper and soft furniture, as well as the eyes, lungs and clothes of the inhabitants.

What was really needed was electricity, and not just for lighting but for scores of other appliances that Americans had the prosperity to buy if only the means existed to make them practical. Before electricity, labour-saving devices had about them a certain air of the ridiculous, most notably a rudimentary vacuum cleaner consisting of two bellows that the user wore like shoes. As the user plodded about the room, the exertions on the bellows created a suction action of sorts, which could be used to sweep up dust and crumbs. It was, as you might imagine, not terribly efficient. Simpler, quieter and far less exhausting was the carpet sweeper, an invention of the 1860s. Other offerings of the pre-electrical age were a gas-heated iron and an elaborate contraption called the ‘Water
Witch’, which operated with pressurized water and which the makers boasted would not only vacuum the carpets, but could be employed to dry one’s hair and massage aching muscles.
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In 1882, domestic electricity at last became a possibility when Thomas Edison began providing electricity on a commercial basis. By mid-decade 200 of New York City’s wealthiest households were enjoying the illumination of 5,000 light-bulbs – or
electric lamps
as the Edison company called them. Only the very wealthiest could afford such an indulgence. A single bulb cost a dollar – half a day’s earnings for the average working person – and cost up to twenty cents an hour to run.
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Nor was household electricity a hit with everyone. After spending thousands of dollars and suffering much disruption to walls, floorboards and ceilings having electricity installed, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt ordered every inch of it torn out when it was implicated (very possibly wrongly) in a small fire.
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Outdoors, however, it was another matter. Almost overnight America became the most illuminated country in the world. By the 1890s Broadway was already being described as ‘the Great White Way’ because of its dazzling lights (almost all of them advertising products). People came from all over just to see the lights, which included the world’s first flashing sign, for Manhattan Beach and its hotels. Standing 50 feet high and 80 feet wide, the sign would light up line by line and then flash rhythmically before starting the cycle over again. It seemed a wonder of modern technology. In fact it was manually operated by a man in a rooftop shack.

In 1910 Broadway got a sign that was a wonder of electrical engineering. Rising the equivalent of seven storeys above the rooftop of the Hotel Normandie and incorporating 20,000 coloured light-bulbs, it offered in intricate detail the illusion of a 30-second chariot race, complete with cracking whips and flying dust. People were so agog over it that squads of
police had to be assigned to the area to keep pedestrians and traffic moving lest the whole of Manhattan grind to a halt.
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Almost as arresting were the lights of Luna Park on Coney Island. Two hundred thousand bulbs picked out ornamental patterns and the outlines of the towers and minarets at the amusement park, turning it literally into a night-time wonderland.
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Even now it looks quite wonderful in pictures.

By 1896 electricity had become such an accepted part of life that people were familiarly referring to it as
juice.
But the expense held people back. In 1910 just one home in ten had electricity. By 1930, however, 70 per cent of American households, some 20 million homes, had electricity – more than the rest of the world combined. The proportion would have been higher still except that rural electrification took so long to complete. As late as 1946, barely half of American farm homes had electricity. (But then only a tenth had an indoor flush toilet.)

As electricity became more widely available, electrical products began to come on to the market. Singer introduced the first electric sewing-machine in 1889. The electric fan appeared in 1891, the electric iron in 1893, the electric vacuum cleaner in 1901, the electric stove – sometimes called a
fireless
cooker – in 1902, the electric washing machine in 1909, the electric toaster in 1910, and the electric dishwasher in 1918. By 1917 the American householder could choose between fifty types of electrical appliances and eagerly did so. In that year, Americans spent $175 million on them.
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Within a little over a decade, that figure would rise to no less than $2.4 billion a year.
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The new and fast-changing market for electrical appliances often gave small companies a chance to thrive. After General Electric turned down the idea of an automatic washing machine, a small outfit named Bendix, which had no experience of manufacturing household appliances, took up the idea and within a decade had become one of America’s
biggest manufacturers of appliances. Much the same happened with a small subsidiary of General Motors called Frigidaire, which saw an opening for domestic refrigerators and so successfully seized it that the name almost became generic.
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The idea of the refrigerator might have been new but the word wasn’t. It had existed in English since 1611, and had been used as a synonym for
icebox
since 1824.
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Refrigerators, rather surprisingly, were among the last common electrical appliances to catch on. Frigidaire began production in 1918, but the first models were ungainly and expensive. The cheapest cost $900 – as much as a good car. As late as 1921, just 5,000 were made in America. Then things took off. By 1931 a million refrigerators were being produced every year and by 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, the number was nudging 3 million.
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But no product was more successful than the radio.
Radio,
in the form of
radio-receiver,
entered the language in 1903. Earlier still there had been such specialized forms as
radiophone
(1881) and
radioconductor
(1898). As late as 1921 the
New York Times
was referring to the exciting new medium as ‘wireless telephony’. Others called it a ‘loud-speaking telephone’ or simply a ‘wireless’. When a leading golf club, the Dixmoor, installed radio speakers around the course so that its members could listen to church services (honestly) while playing their Sunday morning round, it referred to the system simply as a ‘telephone’.
Radio
in the sense of a means of communication and entertainment for the general public didn’t enter the language until 1922 and it took a decade or so before people could decide whether to pronounce it
rādio
or
rădio.

Until as late as 1920, all radio receivers in America were homemade. A crystal set involved little more than some wire, an oatmeal box, an earphone and a piece of crystal. The earliest commercial sets were bulky, expensive and maddeningly difficult to tune. The big breakthrough for radio
was the Dempsey-Carpentier fight of 2 July 1921 – which is a little odd since it didn’t actually involve a radio transmission, though it was supposed to.

It is difficult to conceive now how big an event like a heavyweight boxing fight could be in the 1920s, but the Dempsey-Carpentier fight was
huge
– so huge that the
New York Times
devoted virtually the whole of its first thirteen pages to reporting it (though it did find a small space on the front page to note the formal ending of World War I). The day before the fight, under the lead front-page headline ‘Radio Phones to Tell Times Square of Fight’, it noted that an operator at ringside in New Jersey would speak into a ‘wireless telephone transmitter’ and that his words would be transmitted instantly to halls in several cities and to crowds outside the New York Times Building on Times Square. Although the headline used the word
radio,
the article never did. On the day of the fight, ten thousand people jammed Times Square, but because of technical difficulties the radio transmitter wasn’t used. A ticker-tape was pressed into service instead. Even so, most of the people in the crowd
thought
they were receiving their eyewitness account live by the miracle of radio from New Jersey.
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The very notion of instant, longdistance verbal communication was so electrifying that soon people everywhere were clamouring to have a radio. (Dempsey knocked Carpentier out in the fourth round, incidentally.)

In just three years, beginning in 1922, over four million radio sets were sold, at an average price of $55 In 1922. only 1 home in 500 had a radio. By 1926, the proportion was 1 in 20, and by the end of the decade saturation was nearly total. Radio sales went from $60 million in 1922 to almost $850 million by 1929.
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Radio buffs pored over specialized magazines and formed clubs where they could swap tips and bandy about terms like
regenerative circuits, sodion tubes, Grimes reflex circuits, loop aerials, rotary sparks
and
neutrodynes.
Companies that made radios became monolithic corporations seemingly overnight. In one heady year the stock of Radio Corporation of America went from 85¼ to 549. By 1928 people could even listen to broadcasts in their cars after a little company called Motorola invented the car radio.
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The first broadcasters were ham operators using Morse code, but by the 1910s experimental stations were springing up all over. KDKA of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was opened by Westinghouse in 1920, has the distinction of being the first true radio station in America, though the credit is sometimes given to a station without call letters operated by the San Jose College of Engineering and Wireless, which began regular transmissions of news reports and music to receivers set up in local hotel lobbies in 1909. The station eventually moved to San Francisco and became KCBS. Most of the early stations were distinctly amateurish. KDKA featured musical renditions by the chief engineer’s young (and not notably gifted) sons. Another early Westinghouse station, WJZ of Newark, broadcast from a curtained-off area of the ladies’ restroom at a Westinghouse factory, apparently because it was the quietest place in the building. To say that most of these early stations were low-powered would be to engage in riotous understatement. Many transmitters used less wattage than a single light-bulb.
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By the middle of the decade, however, radio was taking on a more professional air and even producing its first celebrities, like Harold W. Arlin of KDKA. For reasons that seem deeply unfathomable now, Arlin and most other broadcasters developed the custom of donning a tuxedo for evening broadcasts, even though – patently – no one could see them.
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In 1926 RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse got together to form the National Broadcasting Company. (It actually comprised two networks, one known as the Red network, the other as the Blue.) A year later the Columbia
Broadcasting System was born. At first some effort was made to bring higher values to radio. In the 1920s and early 1930s the government issued 202 licences for educational stations, but by 1936, 164 of those – some 80 per cent – had closed down or become commercial. ‘Accordingly,’ in the ponderous words of a radio historian, ‘in the critically formative first two decades of its utilization, the radio spectrum had only the most limited opportunity to demonstrate its capabilities for human resource enhancement.’
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