A light-bulb era for housing
Every so often, there’s a brief span of years in which innovation comes fast. For building technology, the Roaring ‘20s was such an age. The houses of this decade were chock-full of new ideas that, quaint as they seem to us now, let Americans live more comfortably than ever before.
The homes of the 1920s were the first to truly integrate electricity. In previous years, clumsy surface installations of switches and wiring were still common, along with lighting fixtures that often consisted of little more than a naked bulb at the end of a cord. The ‘20s brought the wide use of push-button switches flush-mounted in brass plates, with the “on” button elegantly marked by a circle of mother-of-pearl.
Electric wall sconces became the lighting fashion of the day, while electrical outlets moved from jury-rigged affairs screwed to the wall to being inconspicuously flush-mounted in the baseboard. Granted, few rooms had more than one or two receptacles, but then this was an era of few electrical gadgets besides floor lamps and radios.
Another high-tech feature unique to the era was a built-in aerial serving the entertainment mainstay of the day: the console radio. Rather than mounting an ugly mast on the roof (as was later done for television), builders of the ‘20s cleverly looped wire through the attic to form a giant hidden antenna.
A simpler but equally useful convenience was the pass-through mailbox, in which letters dropped through a slot beside the front door slid into a small inside compartment behind a grillwork door. Alas, this charming device could never accommodate today’s huge quantities of junk mail.
That era also brought wide use of speaking tubes, the low-tech ancestor of intercoms. Used mainly in upscale apartment buildings, speaking tubes were simply a network of tin pipes leading from a central panel at the front door into each apartment. Each end of the tube had a trumpet-like opening, allowing visitor and occupant to communicate without need for electronics.
In better apartment houses, there was central electric refrigeration, the forerunner of today’s home refrigerators. In this system, a compressor in the basement furnished the cooling power for a small, refrigerated cabinet in the kitchen of each apartment. Cumbersome as it sounds, this was still a big advance over the standard cooling device of the era: a block of ice.
No doubt the most technically sophisticated building innovation to take hold during the ‘20s was air-conditioning, a luxury so expensive that it was initially found only in movie palaces and in the best class of public buildings. In those days, the machinery required to air-condition a building took up roughly the space of a four-car garage, and was deemed so impressive that at least one theater installed plate-glass show windows to let passersby admire their mechanical wonder from the sidewalk.
One innovation of the ‘20s that never did catch on was a patented radio speaker hidden in a chandelier -- a device that probably had more than a few startled dinner guests choking on their dumplings. Then again, even this curiosity might have succeeded if the Depression hadn’t stopped it cold, along with all the other high jinks of this exuberant era.
Thankfully, the greatest legacy of the Roaring ‘20s -- some of the most charming and livable houses in America -- still largely survives.
Arrol Gellner is an architect with more than 25 years of experience in residential and commercial architecture.