Retrotech 1925: Domestic Technologies and Municipal Infrastructure

 

The Twenties.  An era of Prohibition (and gangsters)…jazz…flappers…The Great Gatsby…and an accelerating stock market. I thought it might be fun to take a look at the state of technology as it stood a century ago, in 1925.  This fourth post of the series is focused on domestic technologies and municipal infrastructure.  (The first post focused on communications and entertainment,  the second post on transportation,  and the third post on calculating and information management systems.)

Illumination.  For all of history until fairly recently, nightfall was a lot more significant than it has since become. Lighting was limited and expensive. (In one of the Hornblower novels, the protagonist stays up late in his hotel room and wonders how large the charge for ‘light’ will be on his hotel bill when he checks out.)  Gas lighting (using gas made from coal) was introduced in the early 1800s and had significant advantages over torches, candles, whale-oil lamps, and similar solutions, but also had disadvantages: principally smell, soot, and heat. After Thomas Edison’s development of a practical light bulb and a system for power distribution, electric lighting gained popularity rapidly. In 1925, about 90-95% of urban homes were electrified…the proportion was much lower for rural homes, estimated as low as 10%.

Heating.  Most homes relied on coal or wood-burning stoves or furnaces for heating. Central heating with coal-fired furnaces was common in urban middle-class homes, distributing heat via radiators or hot air ducts.  In rural areas or older homes, fireplaces or wood stoves remained prevalent. Gas and oil heating were starting to appear in wealthier urban homes but were less common.

The idea of the thermostat goes back to when the Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel (the creator of the first submarine in history) invented an oven to incubate eggs, whose temperature was controlled by a mercury thermostat and an air intake that allowed larger or smaller quantities of hot air to pass through. A thermostat that could regulate the output of coal furnaces was developed by Albert Butz and Mark Honeywell between 1883 and 1906: these devices operated by opening and closing the damper to regulate the rate of combustion. They still seem to have been fairly rare in home heating systems in 1925, so maintaining a comfortable temperature must have taken frequent adjustment, in addition to occasional coal-shoveling.

Cooking.  Cooking was usually done on stovetops or in ovens, with cast-iron cookware common. Open-hearth cooking was nearly obsolete but persisted in some rural homes.  Something like 5-10% of homes used gas for cooking (this was usually “town gas”, i.e., gas made from coal, rather than natural gas)..they greatly reduced the labor required for cooking with a coal or wood stove–the phrase gas-stove wife reflected the additional leisure that the owner of such an appliance might expect to have.  There’s an interesting article here about the social and culinary impact of easier cooking.

Electric stoves had been commercially introduced circa 1900, but in 1925 they were still pretty rare. These stoves were expensive, costing $100–$300 compared to gas stoves ($50–$100) or coal/wood stoves ($20–$50). (Multiply by 16 for equivalents in today’s money.) Moreover, they required higher-capacity electric service than was required for lighting.

Refrigeration. The most common method for keeping food cold was still the icebox.  Regular ice deliveries were required, and there was an industry providing this service. About 80% of homes used iceboxes in 1925.  Electric refrigerators were available but they were expensive–about $500, equivalent to $8000 today.  Gas refrigerators–which had no moving parts–had been invented but were not yet commercially available at any scale. Ammonia was commonly used as the refrigerant; this resulted in several tragedies, one of which motivated Albert Einstein and his then-student Leo Szilard to invent an improved refrigerator which used an electromagnetic pump. Their invention never made it to commercialization, though.

Laundry. Manual washing was a time-consuming task. Owen Young, a farm boy who grew up to be chairman of General Electric, explained to his biographer what Monday–wash day–had been like back on the farm:
He drew from his memory a vivid picture of its miseries: the milk coming into the house from the barn; the skimming to be done; the pans and buckets to be washed; the churn waiting attention; the wash boiler on the stove while the wash tub and its back-breaking device, the washboard, stood by; the kitchen full of steam; hungry men at the door anxious to get at the day’s work and one pale, tired, and discouraged woman in the midst of this confusion.
The electric clothes washing machine was first introduced in 1908, but by the mid-1920s they were still only in about 5% of homes. And for farm families like those Owen Young spoke about, there was likely to be no electricity available..some people hooked up washing machines to small gas engines, but these were probably fairly uncommon. So circa 1932, when Young spoke with his biographer, the wash-day situation on most farms would have been still pretty much the way he remembered from his boyhood.

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Questions for Our Time

I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.

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Elections and Atom Blasters

“It’s a poor blaster that won’t point both ways”
Issac Asimov, Foundation

U.K. Orders Apple to Let It Spy on Users’ Encrypted Accounts:

“Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

“The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.”

The 2024 US election marked a choice between two alternatives, between a chance at restoring the constitutional republic and a continued, perhaps even accelerated, slide into progressive materialism.

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Is ChatGPT Just A Fancy News Aggregator?

The other day I ran across this article: Behind the Code: Unmasking AI’s Hidden Political Bias.  Recent studies employed several tests. The first compared ChatGPT responses to Pew Research Center questions to actual polling data and found “systematic deviations toward left-leaning perspectives.” The second posed questions on “politically sensitive themes” to ChatGPT and the RoBERTa AI. “The results revealed that while ChatGPT aligned with left-wing values in most cases, on themes like military supremacy, it occasionally reflected more conservative perspectives.” Lastly we come to this.

The final test explored ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities. Themes from the text generation phase were used to prompt AI-generated images, with outputs analyzed using GPT-4 Vision and corroborated through Google’s Gemini.

“While image generation mirrored textual biases, we found a troubling trend,” said Victor Rangel, co-author and a Masters’ student in Public Policy at Insper. “For some themes, such as racial-ethnic equality, ChatGPT refused to generate right-leaning perspectives, citing misinformation concerns. Left-leaning images, however, were produced without hesitation.”

To address these refusals, the team employed a ’jailbreaking’ strategy to generate the restricted images.

“The results were revealing,” Mr. Rangel said. “There was no apparent disinformation or harmful content, raising questions about the rationale behind these refusals.”

No, this article was not what provoked the question in the title of the post. That honor goes to my own misadventure with ChatGPT.  

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Quote of the Day

Palmer Luckey:

DeepSeek is legitimately impressive, but the level of hysteria is an indictment of so many.

The $5M number is bogus. It is pushed by a Chinese hedge fund to slow investment in American AI startups, service their own shorts against American titans like Nvidia, and hide sanction evasion. America is a fertile bed for psyops like this because our media apparatus hates our technology companies and wants to see President Trump fail.

We have so many useful idiots uncritically reporting Chinese propaganda as fact because on some level, they want it to be true. They love seeing hundreds of billions of dollars wiped off the market cap off our largest companies.