Everything Electric

Abstract

For the modern smart home to exist, it’s useful to go back in history and examine the social conditions that made integrating new technologies possible and even desirable. It’s also important to look carefully at the types of technologies that have been able to find their way into the home and to question why they have been so successful. It hasn’t always come down to technological advances and entrepreneurship, and as we’ll see, much of what made the home a trampoline for new technologies was political will and policy-making. We’ll start with the heart of the ndustrialization movement: England. British industry, government, and social change contributed to the idea of home life throughout the 1800s, often in parallel. This isn’t a small feat. That unique space called the home in turn helped people in cities build a strong identity and relationship to technology.