Introduction
On January 8, 1916, L. J. Wilhoite’s lecture to the Chattanooga (TN) Railway and Light Company salesmen filled the pages of Electrical World, the premier electricity industry journal of its time. The “sermon,” as the journal called it, given by a rising industry leader was a statement on the attitudes and behaviors he saw as necessary for the success of central power stations.Footnote 1 Often badgered by complaining customers and their grievances in an industry marked by tumultuous and opaque changes, utility men heard about high or inaccurate bills, faulty meters, and lights that were too dim. Wilhoite understood that every central station man would find it trying to listen to these same old complaints, as “entertaining as seeing the same moving-picture show several times during the same day,” but he did not mince words: the men needed to find it within themselves to “kill these complaints with courtesy.”Footnote 2 He told the men that they needed to develop a proper attitude toward customers with a “kick” (i.e., complaint). Servicemen should show real interest in users, resist negativity, and—when in doubt—agree with them. If workers found that “a customer’s complaint really does exasperate” them, such that they “can’t help feeling that such complaints are nuisances,” Wilhoite advised them to “seek employment in a line where you will never hear about ‘high bills.’”Footnote 3
Like many other electrical commentators and leaders during the turbulent transitional years of the first four decades of U.S. electrification, Wilhoite recognized that good public relations and courteous interactions were key to a successful business.Footnote 4 But just how critical were these efforts to the flourishing of electric utilities and their grids? When and why did “electrical men” come to believe them to be so?Footnote 5 And what lengths did they go to in their quest to “kill complaints with courtesy”? For electrical men to have been so deeply obsessed over the minutia of interactions with ordinary users, the history of U.S. electrification had to have rested on far more precarious margins than these men would have readily admitted.
Formative histories of centralized power systems, including the relationships that were integral to their development, have been built on Thomas Hughes’ 1983 overarching Western account.Footnote 6 Taken from the perspectives of engineers, politicians, investors, and other “systems builders,” these stories explain the progress of electrical grids through war- and Depression-era economic mobilization, national securitization, battles of ideas and egos, and technological momentum buoyed by increasing numbers of system builders.Footnote 7 Historians like David Nye examine the broader sociocultural dynamics that central power stations leveraged, such as spurring electrical consciousness (and desires) through lavish showrooms and lighting exhibits and mobilizing vast networks of salespeople during the postwar booms.Footnote 8 Reckoning with what Ruth Schwartz Cowan termed “outside in” studies on electric power networks,Footnote 9 these histories shed light on companies’ “agents of diffusion” who worked tirelessly to persuade consumers (often “the housewife”) to “live better electrically” by leveraging notions of cleanliness, safety, comfort, and convenience.Footnote 10 , Footnote 11 Although rich in newfound angles, these histories by and large rely on a historical misconception: that profitable urban centralized grid systems could have emerged as self-sustaining, as opposed to rural networks, which were seen as needing more substantial support and intervention.Footnote 12 Considering the influence of Hughes and his proposition that large sociotechnical systems like electric grids carry intrinsic forces that keep them growing, the presumption of a self-evident commercial demand for centralized grid services is hard to avoid.
In contesting the inevitability of all electrical grids, this paper emphasizes everyday experiences with and reservations toward electrical living over fifty years, while following work that questions the user–designer dichotomy.Footnote 13 In doing so, it explores physical infrastructures and social experiences as being dynamically “co-produced” and extends a small but growing strand of scholarship on the everyday history of electrification, which in the United States primarily focuses on rural areas and the New Deal era.Footnote 14 , Footnote 15 By arguing that American grid networks were far from inevitable, I reveal how users’, or rather nonusers’, resistance to electrification manifested and became legible across a vast network of low-level workers and managers.Footnote 16 To this end, this paper traces the power of customer complaints and the resulting “courteous” labor that frontline “agents of diffusion” (e.g., meter readers, electricians, repairmen, billing clerks) had to perform.Footnote 17 Ultimately, I show that by training and conditioning users to speak out during electrical problems, the industry achieved a level of customer satisfaction and electrical reliance that enabled the symbolic and material success of their systems.
These contingencies and the dynamics of customer interaction and satisfaction speak broadly to the history of modern business. Business historians have argued that at the turn of the twentieth century when the American way of life was being radically transformed by industrialization and mass production, people had to be “converted into a national market” through marketing schemes that pit smaller, local companies against emerging behemoths.Footnote 18 Large companies relied on powerful tactics that went beyond words and symbols adjusting business models and products along the way.Footnote 19 These practices became paramount to their success. Similarly, there were always contingencies in the development of energy services, not only for electricity but also for coal and gas. Thus, an important question remains: if the spread of electric grids and their services was not inevitable, what alternative energy futures might have been? We might, after all, have ended up with gas refrigerators.Footnote 20
Indeed, we continue to live in a mixed energy economy in the present. In contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), although electric utilities and centralized power stations have existed in many cities for more than a century, households and businesses continue to rely heavily on charcoal, wood, kerosene, and diesel in their everyday lives, despite grid connections. Distinct cultural and political dynamics notwithstanding, looking at contemporary grid services in SSA, which are characterized by frequent black and brown outages, forces us to reckon with the historical rise of electrical reliance in Western contexts—imagining that it could have gone differently. While it is both entwined with and like other energy histories, the historical development of electrification deserves particular attention. After all, centralized gird services require a high level of continuous and coordinated use to function at such large and technologically complex scales, which implies a unique set of everyday, relational dynamics.
To understand the importance of cultivating the “right” relationships for the success of early twentieth-century American grids, this paper examines everyday interactions with ordinary users as mediated by both industry workers and the physical networks themselves (from household appliances and wiring to distribution transformers and conductors). This paper traces the lengths that electrical men went to before and during the Great Depression to produce satisfied users, which enabled the production of unconscious, unconstrained consumption.Footnote 21 I argue that only by confronting consumer dissatisfaction was it possible for good grids to be built. “Good grids” here serve as a symbolic and physical manifestation of the reliable and frictionless system, benchmarks against which other systems and histories have been judged. Problematic services reveal the forgotten history of reliable grid systems: infrastructure built not on the logic of mere cost recovery but instead on the continuous and laborious practice of relationship building and practices that (re)shaped these ideal electrical relationships.
Dire Conditions of Central Power Stations
A cursory look at the history of omnipresent grid systems in the United States reveals that central power stations are challenged by the politics of expansion, the economics of cost recovery, and the fears of diminishing returns amid larger societal transformations.Footnote 22 From 1890 to 1920, industry leaders were caught between the management of corporate debt and the accumulation of new wealth, and they bet large on an electrified society. The first three decades of uncertain development were marked by the realization that their largest user base, the domestic user, could offer central stations safeguards against rapid depreciations of their expensive assets, difficulties in securing cheap financing to scale their business, and precariousness of their operating margins when powerful holding companies siphoned earnings.Footnote 23 While the hope was that domestic consumers could provide stable revenue, this would require years of manipulation to reach the level and type of consumption, or load, that utility operators believed they needed to guarantee financial success. Not all utilities would find it.
Within their first four decades of operation, countless new central stations across the United States went bankrupt or came close, while some private companies avoided bankruptcy by becoming municipally operated.Footnote 24 , Footnote 25 The panics of 1893 and 1907 doomed many companies, including the Westinghouse Electric Company, which went bankrupt.Footnote 26 , Footnote 27 A few years later, an Oklahoma newspaper claimed that many plants in the state had gone bankrupt, followed by many more companies whose mounting liabilities far exceeded company assets.Footnote 28 , Footnote 29
The relationship between stock busts and electric utility bankruptcies was not simply one of cause and effect. They were also both symptoms of the same underlying problem: the need to profit and secure funds in fast-changing times. Even after staggering banking instability and unpredictable financial panics led to the demise of countless companies, fierce competition continued to unsettle the industry. Multiple utilities (gas and electric) were operating within the same cities and towns, each desperately vying to serve the same customers.Footnote 30 Competition forced operators to lower rates or provide free services to keep their business attractive to ambivalent clients.Footnote 31 , Footnote 32 A growing grid also meant the need for more and more capital to fund expansion, which drove competition over investment funds.Footnote 33
Attaining a local monopoly did not guarantee financial success. Rapid progress in technologies along the grid and quickly outdated equipment such as local transformers have led to precipitous depreciation of utility assets.Footnote 34 This calculus was on the minds of Vinita Electric Light and Power Co. of Oklahoma when, in March 1910, it informed the public that although the company had not gone into bankruptcy, it had not made any money either.Footnote 35 Leaders were desperate to prove that times were indeed hard, in case they had to increase their rates down the line.Footnote 36
Larger companies that seemed to be doing well remained financially precarious, in part because of their ties to other fast-changing public services. The most notorious, perhaps, was the electric streetcar. “Autos Driving Electric Lines to Poorhouse,” declared the front-page headline of the December 1919 New York Tribune. Footnote 37 The fact that streetcars were known to be operating at revenues falling to a “vanishingly low point” meant that their financial woes also affected electric companies, which provided their power in return for steady revenues.Footnote 38 Some blamed the demise of a company, like the Washington Railway and Electric Company (WR&E) in Washington, DC, on problematic and corrupt management, while others saw the decline of streetcars as a business reality that would require them to seek a new foundation for profit-seeking.Footnote 39
Historians William Hausman and John Neufeld write extensively about the challenges that power stations faced during their first thirty years of development. They argue that in the United States, the lack of financial stability, “let alone exorbitant profit,” led to a rise in utility holding companies and the urban consolidation movement beginning in the early 1910s to help companies resolve some of their financing problems.Footnote 40 This was the case for both WR&E and Vinita in Oklahoma and for countless other operating utilities that would become controlled by massive holding companies.
Yet historian Daniel Robert reminds us that this consolidation movement would not have been easy for central power stations, like WR&E, who, in serving customers, would come up against the deep distrust of monopoly power in the Progressive Era.Footnote 41 , Footnote 42 Moreover, although operating utilities controlled by holding companies benefitted from cheap financing, they were also susceptible to holding companies’ pyramid schemes. Sitting at the bottom of the pyramid, operating utilities suffered from “imprudent” decisions from the top that trickled down to them, while their income “flowed” upward.Footnote 43
By the mid-to-late 1920s, the one enticing lead for producing a stable revenue stream was the industry’s massive (and relatively new) domestic user base. Between 1920 and 1927, more American homes were electrified than during the three decades prior;Footnote 44 by 1927, 75 percent of power stations’ total customers were residential users. Judging by measures of current sold, however, the industry’s most important consumers continued to be large power and light users (e.g., city lights);Footnote 45 domestic users were still only consuming 450 kilowatt–hours (kWh) per year on average, merely enough to power their lights.Footnote 46 Austin Monty, a Philadelphia industry leader, put it bluntly: anyone consuming less than 400 kWh was considered unprofitable.Footnote 47 In a 1929 letter to the editors of Electrical World, a manager at a company in Delaware warned leaders that mandatory consumption levels were necessary to address the problem of unprofitable domestic users.Footnote 48 Such concerns have echoed growing alarm within the industry. The relatively low rates that had originally helped utilities attract consumption could prove their undoing if customers were allowed to consume so little.Footnote 49 Thus, all-out “load building,” in which central stations would focus on increasing domestic user consumption (the “domestic load”), would become the unofficial motto of the industry for years.
Early Load Troubles
Load building presented a twofold problem that threatened to overshadow the utilities’ aspirations for financial stability. First, the more kilowatt–hours coursing through the wires and transformers of central systems, the more companies needed to worry about maintenance and equipment upgrades. Second, the physical pressures on the system limited the possibility of free-flowing electrons. Even household wiring could create physical friction, limiting what people could readily consume. Moreover, the industry’s evolving billing and wiring system could impede continuous consumption. Together, a broken bulb or socket, a faulty meter, a rude meter reader, or a curiously high bill could serve as a form of disconnection, threatening utility prosperity. To overcome such profit-limiting frictions, industry men would need to publicly come to terms with their problematic services. Users’ troubles would become industry men’s opportunities in their quest for profits.
User awareness of subpar and perplexing services came early. Ever since metered electricity began, the fall season brought about confusion for users. The gradual and subtle nature of daylight decline masked the steady rise in household light use. By the end of October, people would be turning on their evening lights an hour earlier than they did at the beginning of the month and leaving them on for longer in the morning. Given how incredibly expensive each kilowatt–hour was at the time, such subtle shifts in consumption made their mark. Users, frustrated over rising bills for what seemed like the same amount of service, kicked—or complained.Footnote 50 By 1891, even elite residents were “inclined to kick and [object] very seriously” to bills they thought were not commensurate with the service they believed they were receiving.Footnote 51 High bills had well-to-do users clamoring at the doors of utility offices. Although the introduction of mechanical meters helped to more precisely track usage (in comparison to the old contract system, where people paid per number of lights owned), this did not assuage bill complaints. The public appeared to distrust meters, fearing they were inaccurate;Footnote 52 according to one electrical man’s account, “without a moment’s notice” users would blame high bills on faulty electric meters.Footnote 53
Electrical men also noticed that it was not just high bills that people complained about but also inferior service.Footnote 54 , Footnote 55 In newspapers across the country, the public called the new electric systems unreliable, leaving their cities in “darkness.”Footnote 56 With multiple lighting sources common in the first two decades of the century, electric lights were cast against gas and even oil lamps, believed to provide at least consistent and reliable services.Footnote 57 An article in Electrical World in 1893 bluntly suggested that electric companies were taking their gas competitors too lightly, especially when customers could so easily point to a case of poor lighting from a nearby incandescent lamp.Footnote 58
How station heads managed these instances of distrust and uneven services from customers depended in part on the customers themselves. “In one [case] [sic] the consumer has probably had the courage to insist on being furnished with the candle power he contracted for; in the other case, the central station is probably waiting until the patience of the customer is exhausted and he makes a vigorous ‘kick.’”Footnote 59 As Chas E. Scott, head of bookkeeping for a light and power company in Pennsylvania, confessed in 1891, his company “only [gave] rebates back to men who kick so outrageously that we cannot get rid of them.”Footnote 60 Those who kicked sufficiently strongly earned the industry’s ire because, as Scott acknowledged, businessmen at the time showed real indifference when it came to complaints.Footnote 61 Other commentators agreed: “impatience,” “indifference,” and “high-mindedness” characterized central stations’ attitudes toward complaints.Footnote 62 These half-hearted self-critiques foreshadowed industry efforts that gradually trained customers to kick on purpose.
Soon, electrical men began to recognize that their flippant responses to customer complaints were costing their business. George N. Stroh, the adjuster at San Francisco Gas and Electric Company in 1903, said his company lost many customers to early competitors because of “the sarcastic, high-hand treatment they had been compelled to endure for years at the hand of one of its employees.”Footnote 63 Moreover, the common assumption was that each new residential customer would not immediately become lucrative for the central station; after all, each addition required new distribution lines, home electrical wiring, and electric meter installation, along with accompanying labor and materials. Thus, making the most of existing customers would be necessary for central stations to turn profits.Footnote 64 The already connected, and yes, disgruntled, users were about to gain considerable attention.
Electric companies began encouraging customers to report their complaints. In the summer of 1906, on the side of a road in St. Louis, MO, residents could see a huge sign with the word “Kick” squarely placed in the middle of a freshly painted black billboard. Written just above were equally large and imposing words, painted in sharply contrasting white: “THE PUBLIC IS ENTITLED TO.” This billboard was part of an ad campaign by the city’s Union Electric Light Power Company to increase profits by getting customers “to make their grievances known.”Footnote 65 The strategy was sufficiently logical. Satisfied consumers and better-quality services meant greater profits for central stations.Footnote 66 In 1908, a commentator in Electrical World lauded how companies were implementing this strategy by putting “so-called service supervisors” to work “on nothing but old consumers and discounted services.”Footnote 67 , Footnote 68
Customer satisfaction strategies could be extreme. One California company, leveraging the fact that it had relatively few residential customers, made one of its employees peruse local newspapers for any signs of customers having “parties, receptions, dances, etc.” When a customer complained, the employee could point to “an entertainment at such a date” as the reason that the customer’s bills had run unusually high.Footnote 69 At another company in the Southwest, a manager amassed a sizeable library of technical journals and books to use as references for complaining customers. On the off chance that a customer complained about “his watt-hour meter,” the manager could look at his references to show him “what a small per cent of meters were actually found to register fast or in error.”Footnote 70 Industry men turned to these strategies early on to manage the slew of issues new customers were facing.
As cities electrified, user troubles became more complicated, exposing unforeseen tensions with central stations. Upset about the free bulbs given to him by Seattle City Light, G. C. Lingenfelter wrote to the City Office. According to Lingenfelter, he heard from a shopkeeper who sold lamps that City Light was giving out bulbs that consumed more electricity than standard tungsten Mazda lights, and that the company was doing so to avoid “a deficit” without the increased consumption drawn in by their free lamps.Footnote 71 Lingenfelter ended the complaint letter by reminding the City Office that unlike the private Puget Sound Power & Light (PSP&L) company also operating in Seattle, City Light “is the people’s plant” and that it was in its best interest to have a policy that would not only “save current” but, Lingenfelter assumed, cost less to maintain as a result.Footnote 72
In many ways, the shopkeeper was perceptive. Utilities looked to increase consumption to avoid running a deficit—and they often resorted to giving away electrical accessories, including motors, fixtures, and wiring, to force higher levels of energy consumption.Footnote 73 Nevertheless, Lingenfelter’s assertation that saving kilowatt–hours would in turn save the company money was starting to prove compelling to industry leaders. After all, expansion required not only more fuel but also larger wires and transformers to allow all those electrons to flow unimpeded. If utilities did their job right, they might even succeed at getting users to consume more overall, just staggered across times of the day, which would allow for a smooth flow of electrons.
Smooth, however, was the specter-like caveat in the great electrical experiment. Frustrated over the boom-and-bust nature of their material predicament, one electric company in Oklahoma stated in 1910 that “the faster a business grows the greater” chance their machinery becomes “out of date or too small,” and pointed to the “large number of plants in [Oklahoma] cities [that] have become bankrupts [sic] trying to do that very thing.”Footnote 74 This editorial also represented an attempt to get ahead of public relations problems; the public needed to know that service issues were simply part and parcel of the dire tradeoffs central stations faced. Over time, the industry’s troubles seeped into public consciousness, requiring leaders to address them head-on to overcome their material woes.
The Rise of Trouble Divisions
Large industries coming of age in the early 1900s were forced to confront disgruntled customers to compensate for their shrinking margins. “A disgruntled customer, though still using service, does more damage to new-business prospects than can be overcome by weeks of work,” said a central station manager at a professional meeting in 1910.Footnote 75 As industries grew increasingly complex—bureaucratically, managerially, and technically—some feared that the American public was growing increasingly dissatisfied. Yet those who seldom formally complained did no good for business if left unattended. People could not be left to simply badmouth businesses anonymously in newspapers, for instance, when something was “wrong in the complex routine” of their daily lives.Footnote 76 Thus, utilities turned to the profit-saving potential of systemized and meticulously tracked grievances, which gave rise to what companies called their “trouble divisions” and a focus on the work performed by low-level workers who were at the front lines of utilities’ expanding services.
H. H. MacPherson, an industry commentator who, beginning in 1908, regularly wrote for and edited trade journals, was one of the first central–station leaders to detail these profit-saving insights in Electrical World. Footnote 77 MacPherson thought that trust, once broken, was impossible to repair.Footnote 78 Unfortunately for utilities, broken trust costs money. According to MacPherson, “[high-bill] complaints in some cases cost a company directly $10,000 per year and upward,” as meter readers were called on repeatedly to verify bills or fix perfectly working meters.Footnote 79 In an attempt to advise utility men, MacPherson detailed that careless practices from an over-read or under-read meter, or a bookkeeper, could leave their mark on customers if left unchecked.Footnote 80 Central stations took to the argument that distrust was bad for their bottom line, heeding the advice of bookkeepers who insisted that even the smallest detail out of place could create innumerable losses for their fledgling businesses.
Nor were billing grievances the only troubles. Reports of transformers that “caught fire” when overloaded soon began appearing in local newspapers.Footnote 81 With large numbers of electrical users turning on multiple lights and appliances at the same time, there was a good chance that a given wire would start drawing too much current for its size, or that a smaller transformer would be forced to do the work of a larger one. Overloaded equipment resulted in anything from inconveniently dim lights to dangerous fires. Customers across the United States were starting to wonder out loud why their services were so poor, and in particular why the lights grew dim at the exact time they needed them most: nighttime. The expanding roster of complaints in 1910 thus reflected not only the increasingly bureaucratic complexity of electrical management but also the material vulnerability of interconnected and increasingly load-bearing systems.
To address such nuanced points of friction, central station men had to render their systems intelligible to laypeople. Customers were trained to speak engineering jargon as electrical discourse expanded to average citizens.Footnote 82 In Connecticut, at a meeting in October 1913 to appease townspeople who had grown fed up with the city’s “failing” lighting system, the company admitted that the trouble was overloaded transformers and, thus, improper voltage.Footnote 83 In Florida, meanwhile, a city’s electrical committee put out a 1911 report to acknowledge complaints over poor lighting, saying that while the system voltage was “up to 118 nearly all the time,” it was also true they had “overloaded transformers.”Footnote 84 No engineering details seemed too esoteric if they helped customers make sense of appliance malfunctions and electrical bills that were not adding up to quality services.
These tactics followed the advice given to utilities by experts and managers who believed that detailed explanations for complex conditions would help quell rising customer frustrations. Even clerks, experts said, “should be familiar with conditions causing a variation in voltage at different parts of the system,” which would allow them to tell customers whether their trouble was at the transformer level or inside the home.Footnote 85 Therefore, all company men could help assuage customer dissatisfaction by empowering users with technical knowledge, up to a point.
Customer empowerment also meant that electrical men had to acknowledge the limits of their offerings. As one Oregon manager in 1916 insisted, “Inducing a customer to overrate [your electric] range is just commercial suicide.”Footnote 86 Taken together, lowering service expectations while building an understanding of the intricate work entailed in delivering service was essential to increasing profits over the long term. In a 1921 Arkansas newspaper, one electric utility embraced this approach. The February 11 advertisement said:
The new management took charge of the idea and understood that every customer wanted better lights. They also knew they were producing 110,000 kilowatts of electricity at the plant and only collecting payment for about 40,000 kilowatts. This was not the consumers’ fault but the result was the consumers were not getting efficient lights and that several of our transformers were overloaded and only producing 80 to 90 volts at your light globe where you should have 110 volts. With these conditions, we went to work equalizing the transformer loads by changing some customers from overloaded transformers to some that were not so heavily loaded. The result was that you get lights that are as good as can be found in any city and at a small increase in cost to you.Footnote 87
The advertisement is astonishing in the level of electrical knowledge it synthesizes for the casual reader, as well as in its acknowledgment that losses associated with inefficient systems were the company’s fault, not the customers’. As the advertisement explained, the company was only collecting compensation for a fraction of what its generators were putting out because households’ power had been diminished by overloaded networks. In showing that the company respected its customers’ capacity to understand detailed explanations, the company hoped customers would be satisfied because the company was providing a “service to the best of [its] ability.”Footnote 88 Importantly, the company tried to show customers proof of this effort by linking infrastructural changes with tangible improvements in light quality—while admitting it was the best it could do.
Over time, as electrical devices became more varied and widespread, electrical failures and dissatisfaction became more prevalent, and users began wondering what was happening to their “high-tech” appliances. In this way, radios replaced lights as bellwether indicators of service delivery gone wrong; instead of lights going dim, users now complained of static interrupting their cherished radio hours. In The New York Times, readers linked their radio problems to bad utility services, saying: “It is an unfortunate fact [that] the line voltage in some localities vary [sic] considerably with the distance from the central station or from the transformer station.”Footnote 89 The paper’s technical explanation of the problem helped users refine their complaints to companies that had groomed customers to come to them with any issue. Because of this cultivated public consciousness, electrical men would need a more methodical solicitation scheme to handle complaints.
By 1920, fully operational “trouble divisions” were established at utilities across the nation. “Trouble-men” in these divisions kept track of empty sockets, broken lightbulbs, and fixtures in need of repair or replacement, as well as blown fuses, “skimpy wiring,” and overloaded networks, all in addition to simple disconnections resulting from nonpayment. They conducted investigations and parsed root causes.Footnote 90 “Irregularities” in electrical services could be caused by anything from a door missing on a meter box, thereby exposing it to the weather, to a local transformer with faulty connections caused by dirty insulators, to a delinquent bill turned disconnection.Footnote 91 In the eyes of the central station, these seemingly diverse troubles, manifested through such a variety of complaints and user practices, came to represent a form of friction jeopardizing the bottom line, driving the station to act through its frontline workers.
One company stood out for its outward commitment to maintaining uninterrupted connections through obsequious service. “Perhaps nowhere in the United States has the slogan of ‘Perfect Service and Perfect Public Relations’ been more widely used than on the Pacific Coast.”Footnote 92 John A. Britton delivered these bold words in a lecture at Princeton University in 1923. Having worked up the ranks of the electric industry, from debt collector to the first president of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Britton took pride in his company’s motto, “Courteous and Continuous,” even having it painted on the side of PG&E’s first building in 1909.Footnote 93
For the lower-level employees of PG&E, however, his motto implied a warning. In the company’s internal publication, Pacific Service Magazine, the manager of the publicity division, J. Charles Jordan informed employees in 1923 that selecting good workers meant choosing “those who will do certain tasks with the least amount of friction.”Footnote 94 As he warned, any employee could be guilty of causing such injurious friction; for instance, “a lineman who calls on a ‘no light’ complaint and because the consumer does not have 15 cents in change to pay for a fuse leaves him in darkness.”Footnote 95 Looming darkness served as an ominous admonition to company practices.
Like at PG&E, frontline employees across the country had their work cut out for them. In 1915, a St. Louis company told all 65,000 of its customers that even the most modest users among them “had ready access to the office of any department head as well as to the office of the general manager.”Footnote 96 In Manhattan, where the troublemen were trained not “to wait for complaints, but [instead] to anticipate and ward them off,” journalists reported that complaints were coming in “every three minutes of the day”—totaling upward of 50,000 a year.Footnote 97 Companies were pitching themselves to ordinary users with the promise of prompt and comprehensive service: “[I]f a customer calls the trouble department night or day, one of these men will speedily arrive at the scene of the trouble.”Footnote 98 There, a troubleman might be found at the transformer fuse plugs, investigating whether they had been damaged by current surges or overuse, or perhaps even inside the home, repairing a toaster or another appliance in disarray.Footnote 99
At a company in Portland, OR, which installed 5,190 electric ranges in 1925, 5,553 customer complaints poured in over 6 months—a total of more than one complaint per new electrical range.Footnote 100 Smaller appliances, like “burned out” lamps, also needed to be addressed. The St. Louis company that sold 80,000 discounted lamps during its September 1915 “empty-sockets” campaign conceded that the company would soon have to replace plenty of them.Footnote 101 Yet true to their word, trouble divisions spared no effort in their quest to make domestic users’ every complaint legible, a profit-maximizing scheme cloaked in good Samaritanism.Footnote 102
Meanwhile, in January 1929, the head of the Seattle City Light Trouble Division could not help but comment on how even the credit department’s priorities were starting to creep into his department’s work.Footnote 103 The fact that the troublemen were being asked to collect payments from delinquent users (or, conversely, disconnect them for nonpayment), a job that would normally be the responsibility of a metering or collections department, reveals how determined this central station had become to get every last employee to help shore up its profits.
If the trouble division had started to do work that the credit department or even the metering department could have been doing, so too did other departments start doing the work of troublemen. Companies encouraged their commercial wiring, appliance, and metering divisions to keep meticulous records, which often overlapped with the efforts of official trouble divisions. By the 1930s, the Great Depression would force utilities to further elevate the customer service efforts of these other divisions because their employees were the ones most actively involved in customer-facing work like selling and maintaining appliances and building indoor wiring. Thus, salespeople and jobbers would soon assume the role of troublemen to ensure the steady, frictionless use of appliances in American homes.
Courteous and Continuous Services in the Depression Years
Beginning in the 1930s, the electric industry’s financial gains and growing stability were threatened by the adverse conditions and attitudes created by the Great Depression.Footnote 104 Previously, overall use had been steadily increasing, propelled in part by all the work that utilities had been doing during the previous decade to satisfy the demands of those already connected. The Depression temporarily curtailed sales and slowed the industry’s expansion.Footnote 105 , Footnote 106 Yet despite strong financial indicators, electrical men across the United States continued to grapple with the deeper residual misgivings created by the Depression and the broader changes it brought to their industry.Footnote 107 As the number of domestic customers seemed to approach saturation, some grew increasingly alarmed that growth was tapering.Footnote 108 In this context, the prejudices and fears emblematic of twentieth-century American society would reveal the industry’s fickle commitment to “courteous and continuous” services in the name of profits and the limits of the perceived goodwill of the industry.
Faced with falling revenues, stagnant demand, stricter regulatory conditions, and hesitant investors, Depression-era power delivery challenged public and private utilities alike.Footnote 109 , Footnote 110 Seeing few avenues for utilities to turn around their shrinking margins, the editor of Electrical World stated in 1932 that “[t]he job of the industry is a selling job.”Footnote 111 Even during a period described as “retrenchment in all directions,” utilities like the investor-owned monopoly PG&E and the public Seattle City Light mounted an aggressive and coordinated selling program.Footnote 112 By 1934, Electrical World observed that utilities were using “[m]ore salesmen, more advertising, more merchandizing to build more load” than the year prior.Footnote 113 That same year, PG&E welcomed an increase in residential consumption of 2.7 percent from its previous 1931 peak; the company’s annual report gladly informed shareholders that all its efforts had paid off, and credited such long-awaited financial success to intrepid tactics: “Such a degree of stability could not have been maintained, particularly because of the reduced public purchasing power and of rate reductions during the interim, except for our undiminished and unremitting sales effort during this period.”Footnote 114
Within this paradigm of ever-increasing appliance use, utilities working to satisfy user problems had to intensify their efforts. In 1936, Seattle City Light detailed just how many ranges, water heaters, ironers, washers, refrigerators, and smaller appliances they had installed, including how many later encountered problems. Their records show more than 50,000 trouble calls on electric ranges alone that year, a massive number considering that the company only had 79,889 domestic accounts at the time.Footnote 115 Meanwhile, PG&E began featuring contests in 1935 in P.G.E. Progress, the company’s customer-facing magazine mailed directly to its hundreds of thousands of customers, soliciting customers’ opinions on service problems and company workers, reflections that would be culled and revealed back to them in a curated fashion. Both “Contest on Complaints” and “I Called a P.G. and E. Service Man”Footnote 116 featured winners that exemplified the ethos of the company’s motto, showcasing how increased courteousness and attentiveness to troubles facing customers’ appliances, wires, and fuses would promote continuous usage. PG&E workers were portrayed in the magazine as both “heroic,” turning up at all hours of the day and for any situation (e.g., during fires), and domesticated, avoiding messes (e.g., not trampling flowerbeds) and cleaning up after themselves.Footnote 117
For their part, Seattle City Light managers saw this sort of undaunting and laborious work as feasible only from its male employees, especially considering local competition.Footnote 118 This was their argument in a September 29, 1936, meeting conducted by the Civil Service Commission after a Seattle woman named Gertrude Gillmer filed an objection against the utility for not hiring her despite her stellar examination performance. Appearing before the Commission, a manager argued that the company employed a sizeable number of women, “even though it could operate, in most cases, more efficiently with men”; yet with its “everpresent [sic] contract fight with [its] competitors,” with its salesmen having to make “many rush and emergency calls, such as to turn on the meter, test fuses, (which may be in attic, basement, or on porches), estimate wiring and plumbing costs, personally deliver small appliances sold, etc.,” a man should be hired “whenever possible.”Footnote 119 In siding with Seattle City Light, the Commission agreed with the company’s logic that making services as reliable as possible was necessary for the company’s success and was best achieved with men, upholding discriminatory practices and gendered norms of the time.
Other industry leaders still struggling to turn their business around during the Depression would put aside their “good will” to come up with derogatory terminology for customers who seemed to be getting in the way of profits. By the mid-1930s, “ancient bugaboo” or “unprofitable” domestic users were making headlines in Electrical World in full force. Termed “small,” “scant,” these customers who consumed little were deemed “reliefers,” “liabilities,” or “loss customers.”Footnote 120 These terms came to dominate Electrical World to construct an image of intensely unfavorable domestic customers. When Francis Perkins, the Labor Secretary and main architect of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, tried to recast Americans who were still relying on financial assistance in 1937 as in “the process of rehabilitation,” Howard Ehrlich, the vice president and editor of Electrical World, showed little sympathy, saying “Under any name, these people present a problem to the utility company.”Footnote 121
To industry leaders, the downtrodden were at once intolerable and incomprehensible, and yet at the same time indispensable to future dreams of ever-greater expansion. In the mid-1930s, utility managers were sounding the alarm that nearly half of domestic consumers were paying less in bills than what their houses cost to service.Footnote 122 Austin Monty, the manager of merchandising at the Philadelphia Electric Company, calculated that in his city, a whopping 51.7 percent of domestic customers remained unprofitable. Yet, in looking to address his company’s “unprofitables,” Monty declared, “It must be remembered that these people do not understand us or our business.”Footnote 123 He warned that their usual advertisements would “have no effect, for they do not read them, and would not understand them if they did.”Footnote 124 Customer hostility appeared in the industry’s premier journal in unadorned display.
What made these customers especially concerning was that they comprised demographics that the industry had largely ignored but which were now connected: low-income and marginalized users who had been devastated by the Depression and those who had been trivialized long before. As Monty, the Philadelphia manager, put it, the industry still needed to know “Who He Is, What He Is, His Likes and Dislikes.” This objectifying rhetoric showed how dehumanized some customers were to the industry, which allowed them to justify negative attitudes and eschew the empathic commitment they had curated for the well-to-do.
For a generation of industry men, these unprofitable users activated deep-seated prejudices and primal fears long prevalent in American society. In North Carolina, in 1934, companies deliberately decided not to expand their grids to service Black residents because they were deemed to be more likely to be unprofitable than White residents.Footnote 125 Heads of companies rationalized these practices through racist and classist views until they began conceding that even “loss-customers” “on the wrong side of the tracks” (e.g. nonwhite and nonupper-class women) wanted electricity and could use it, “if properly trained.”Footnote 126 Yet it was these customers who finally forced utility leaders to admit that their “dependable” networks were defined by wide-ranging discriminatory practices and disenfranchisement, physical and otherwise, and for whom “courteousness” would be put to the test.
Conclusion
Everyday problems defined the origins of the U.S. grid, from its networks of wires and transformers to the appliances it powers. Good, frictionless grids could only become commercially and rhetorically possible by requiring domestic users to consume more and more, which in turn required full recognition of the troubles of a nascent and rapidly changing industry. By confronting users’ worries, utility managers learned to make sense of the trouble areas that jeopardized their business. Yet the interactions and relationships between users and utilities’ frontline workers were not merely performative; they brought about systematic changes that proved pivotal to the development of good grids, though not for all.
The history of “killing complaints with courtesy” described in this paper also reveals a failure of imagination in understanding the dynamics behind contemporary grid services such as those in SSA. With brown outages and blackouts and utility insolvency understood to be common in electrified cities in SSA, the dominant assumption is that these conditions are partly the fault of so-called entitled users who steal or do not pay and who make it hard for utilities to recover costs and deliver good services.Footnote 127 Despite the emphasis on problematic users, little evidence links entitlement to poor services and economically failing systems. Ironically, entitlement might have been central to the development of “good” grids and a business tool to break ties with other energy services.
Amid eroding infrastructure, worsening climate catastrophe, and staggering global inequality today, a fully reliable and “good” grid appears elusive—no more than a rhetorical construction meant to impugn a “lesser” and “other” grid system. To imagine that we can make sense of unreliable grids simply by looking at the faults of users (or more broadly, the faults of past and present politicians, elites, and technicians) is to ignore the possibility that so-called good grids were never really planned as such—and that their dependability was the result of a much more prolonged and cultivated set of practices and relationships than any cost recovery discussion could ever capture. In the end, the story we tell ourselves about the differences between good and bad infrastructure, along with our prevailing sense that economic inequality is both unavoidable and inevitable, undermines our ability to develop an understanding of our collective global electrical networks, their past, and their future.
Acknowledgements
I thank the knowledgeable and generous scholars who offered me important feedback and intellectual support, including Mark Rose, William Hausman, Julie Cohn, Derek O’Leary, and Daniel Robert. I also thank the Energy History Working Group within the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, who provided valuable input on the initial version of this paper.
Open access
