Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America

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Description

Cities of Light and Heat takes us to Kansas City and Denver all through the late nineteenth century when gas and electricity were introduced to these “instant cities” of the west. With rich detail, Mark Rose shows how the new technology spread all through the next century from a couple of streets and businesses within the city limits to countless private homes in the suburbs. In Kansas City and Denver, as in most communities during the U.S., business executives, city leaders, and engineers acted as early promoters of the new technology. But by the early 1900s educators, home builders, architects, and salespersons were becoming more and more important as gas and electric utilities and appliances reached increasingly American homes. But these voices for the new technology brought with them their own social attitudes and cultural values. By mid-century, whether in the study room or in advertisements, Americans were often encouraged to fit the new technology within prevailing notions of cleanliness, comfort, convenience, and gender.

Although in hindsight the spread of modern technology might seem inevitable to us, Rose shows how even the leaders of the nation’s great gas and electric corporations with their vast production and distribution facilities were subject to geography, competing ideologies, urban politics, and even the choices of atypical consumers. Rose thus locates the driving force in the back of the diffusion of technology in the neighborhoods, kitchens, and offices of the city. Cities of Light and Heat shows the importance of culture, politics, and urban growth in shaping technological change in the cities of North The us.

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