The Residential Adoption of Electricity in Early Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

The commercial development of electricity in the late nineteenth century brought about a technological revolution comparable to, if not exceeding, the development of the steam engine more than a century earlier. While the steam engine laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution and altered the social, economic, and political framework of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western Europe, the development of electricity had an equally significant impact in a later era.