This book is about the cultural problems of early attempts to bring electricity into the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is thus a study of the domestication of electricity in two distinct but inter-related senses. First it concerns why and indeed whether householders decided to allow electricity into their homes, specifically to illuminate their houses with incandescent lamps. This is the issue of domestication construed as a matter of discretionary appropriation and incorporation of a new technology into the order of household life. In a closely related way this book is also about the extent to which electricity was interpreted as sufficiently tamed to be safely, reliably and comfortably introduced to the home. That is the issue of domestication qua technocratic control over the enigmatic natural agency of electricity. In this regard the uncertain identity and risks of electricity as well as the controversially glaring appearance and indeterminate prospects of its associated lighting technologies were serious problems. Accordingly I study the efforts by both ‘electricians’ (as both electrical physicists and engineers were non-disparagingly described during the late nineteenth century) and other male and female allies to deal with these problems, whether successfully or otherwise.

While the geographical focus is on Britain, comparative reference is made to the USA both to avoid national parochialism and to highlight the international dialogue and common cultures in the early domestication of electricity, as well as some key transatlantic contrasts. Put more broadly this book asks why, if electrical consumption has (still) not come to monopolize the cultures of transport, cooking, heating and traction in those two countries, how far and why did electricity ever accomplish unique predominance for domestic lighting and power? To raise this question in a provocative manner, I suspend the assumption that electrification was historically inevitable – an assumption which in any case cannot be supported either by empirical evidence or by counterfactual suggestions that the modern world is inconceivable without electrification.