But, they were expensive.Īccording to the IRS, the average per capita net income in 1920 was about $3,269.40., or about $272 a month. And, as the availability of power spread, so did the prevalence of home appliances and conveniences. In cities, the percentage was much higher. By the end of the 1920s, the overall percentage of wired homes grew to 68 percent. Still, electric power was spreading rapidly. Even by 1940, only one-third of farms had electricity.

In many cases, electric lines wouldn’t reach farms and homes in remote areas for another twenty or thirty years. At the beginning of the decade, only 35 percent of homes in the United States were wired for electricity. However, the average American in the 1920s didn’t live like Jay Gatsby or the occupants of Downton Abbey.

There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb. You may recall in The Great Gatsby, set in the year 1922, narrator Nick Carraway marveled at the electric juicer at millionaire Jay Gatsby’s famous lawn parties:Įvery Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York - every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. The gadgets seemed to be just a little bit magical. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that electricity, along with a growing middle class and consumer culture driven by advertising and mail order catalogs, made home appliances possible, desirable, and easily obtainable - for those who could afford them. Likewise, many home appliances had already been invented, such as the vacuum cleaner (1901), electric iron (1905), washing machine (1907), and electric toaster (1908). In that decade - now 100 years in the past - innovations in home appliances promised to make life easier and better.īy 1920, telephones, gramophones, and automobiles had been around for decades. The TV show is fictional, but the technological changes during the 1920s were real. Patmore replaces the icebox with a refrigerator? Or when the Downton household gathers around the radio to listen to a broadcast of the king’s speech?

Remember the scene in Downton Abbey where Mrs. (Photo from the FDR Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Ruth cowan more work for mother