Willing Servants: The Growth of Appliances in the 1930s

Abstract

The interwar years, particularly the 1930s, are usually thought to have been ones of depression. While it is true that in the UK unemployment leaped during the 1921 recession and didn’t come down again until World War II, it doesn’t tell the whole story.¹ Even in America, where the effects of the 1929 stock market crash rippled through the economy, still the majority of the population was in work. However, the problems were great enough to temporarily halt the rise of electrification of homes as can be seen in Fig. 12.1.

We have learnt that electricity is before all things the greatest labor saver, and a little investigation shows that in the application of electricity to the requirements of the home we have open to us a field almost unimaginably wide.

Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti