ELECTRIFYING HOMES

Matamata Record, Volume VII, Issue 515, 10 March 1924, Page 8

ELECTRIFYING HOMES

TEN YEARS’ ADVANCE, “Modern electrified social life in America is very different from what such unelectrified life was before the Great War (writes Thomas Ammerford Martin in the North American Review). No ordinary coincidence lies in the upward swinging curves of electrical appliance sales as contrasted with the downward swing curves of female immigration and the decline in the rate of population increase. A social revolution is also seen in the combined higher cost of living and the greater scarcity of labour. It will take a long time, if it ever happens at all, to bring back the rate of population gain of about 14 per cent, in the decade 1910-20 to the 30 per cent rate of 18770-80. American families will have to be larger than they now are, and European ‘quotas’ will have to be altered before ‘domestic help’ is once again in fuller, cheaper supply. At least 10 million American homes are now wired for electric current, and each of these is a customer for current consumption apparatus of which there are now endless varieties. It was stated not long ago that, whereas there were only 10,000 electric ranges for cooking in use in the United States in 1915, that number would have reached half a million by 1922. It is stated also that in an ‘eight hour kitchen’—electrical, of course—a family of three can have their average meals a day cooked on an electric range at a cost of only 2.01 cents a meal for each person.”