We depend upon it
September 28, 2010 Tuesday)
September 4, 1882 marks the beginning of public electric power in the United States. The principal use of electricity in those days was lighting that soon replaced gas lights. When I was a boy, no one spoke of the “power company;” it was always the “light company.” Houston’s company was known as “Houston Power and Light,” but “the Light Company” was the usual reference.
In the thirties we used to visit our relatives in East Texas. They had no electric power at all. Kerosene lamps sufficed for light and a wood stove or fireplace supllied heat in the winter. Air conditioning or electric fans were totally unknown in most places back then.
You could always count on fans at church — the kind you held in your hand and waved in front of your face. They were usually supplied by a funeral home, with a generous supply of ads printed on the fans. Soon electric oscillating fans could be seen on the walls of many churches, where the windows were always wide open in the summer.
Uses of electricity as power for machines, etc. increased rapidly. In the Depression days, growth was limited by the lack of funds, but things like fans and washing machines (the old type) were beginning to appear in more and more places. And always there were the lights, generally suspended on a cord from the center of the ceiling in a room, supplied by two wires, perfectly visible on the walls and ceilings, unless it was new construction, which allowed for concealed wiring, generally the same two-wire arrangement but in the attic instead of the wall and ceiling.
After World War 2, use of electricity greatly increased as new inventions and work-saving machines proliferated everywhere. From radio we went to Television. Lots of movie theaters, and air conditioning. Signs outside the theaters beckoned to sweaty pedestrians: “Cool 72 degrees inside,” with pictures of icicles and snow.
Production of electricity has become a giant industry, with power being supplied by giant generators. These generators are powered by coal, oil, nuclear fission, wind, heat from inside the earth, windmills, water flowing through dams, solar panels, and in many new ways. The nation is hungry for more and more power. They say air conditioning was the main reason for Houston’s booming growth after WW2. As we all know, A/C accounts for the lion’s share of our electric bill each month.
We depend on electricity far more than we think. When power failures come to our homes and businesses, they leave us feeling helpless. We don’t know how to act or what to do. And yet it wasn’t very long ago that electric power was totally unknown. My Great Grandfather was born 34 years before Thomas Edison demonstrated his first power station in lower Manhattan. In fact, that was only 49 years before I was born.
When I was pastor in Dallas, the organist of the church and her husband bought a little house out in the country that had no running water or electric power. They loved to spend as much time as possible there. Maybe they were on to something.