Most of us don’t give a second thought to the role electricity plays in our lives, but as shocking as it is to remember, we only have to go back 100 years to find a time when electricity was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. When the principles of electric generation were discovered in the 1800s, the late nineteenth century saw several figures, including New Jersey’s own Thomas Edison, pursue the new technology commercially, making it accessible to the public for the first time.
The rate at which homes and businesses electrified in the United States is quite spectacular. According to the Cato Institute’s Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, “In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity. In 1950 about 80 percent did.” This rapid development can be seen in advertisements found in New Jersey’s newspapers. In an ad in the August 18, 1910 issue of the Newark Evening Star, the Public Service Electric Company touted electric power as perfect for the home and business, as well as a means of powering automobiles.
Meanwhile, an ad in the September 13, 1924 issue of The Pleasantville Press highlighted how a store lit with electricity could see increased sales.
Unsurprisingly, it was the home that was often the focus of these ads. The Pleasantville Heat, Light & Power Company, in an ad in the July 16, 1910 issue of The Pleasantville Press, encouraged those outside of the city to adopt the “up-to-date method of lighting the house.”
Meanwhile, an ad in the May 14, 1921 issue of The Pleasantville Press emphasized the convenience and safety of lighting the home with just a flip of a switch instead of using matches.
The idea that ads like these had to exist to convince people to bring electricity to their homes and businesses can be hard to grasp in our modern day, where it seems just about everything requires electricity. It is a testament to just how quickly electricity was adopted that life without it not so long ago seems so foreign to us today. It seems that the Atlantic City Electric Company were right when they wrote “It is really a problem nowadays to keep house without electric service.”
(Contributed by Tristan Smith)
Sources:
Institute for Energy Research. n.d. “History of Electricity.” Accessed April 7, 2023. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/history-electricity/.
Moore, Stephen and Julian L. Simon. 1999. “The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years.” Policy Analysis no. 365 (December): 1-32. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa364.pdf.