In "The Dynamo and the Virgin," Henry Adams struggles to understand the significance of the dynamo - - a huge and awesome machine. But, technology also represents and promotes changes in everyday life. The period from 1890 to 1910 was an epoch of wide-ranging and deep diffusion of new, everyday technologies - - from the telephone to the zipper, the electric kitchen range, and mass-circulation magazines. (You can find an extensive timeline of inventions here.)
Pictured above, you'll find images of three technologies that infiltrated everyday life over the course of the 1890s: Jell-O, the typewriter, and the popular genre of science fiction writing. Ask yourself some questions about each of these three changes: what changes within the culture (or, more specifically, the office or the home) are these technologies responding to? how do they reflect new social relations? what attitudes toward technology and change do they communicate? what kind of changes within the society and culture do they promote? (Clicking on the images should take you to a helpful wikipedia page on each.)
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Jell-O and typewriters were definitely not the only new technologies being advertised to women:
"The electrification of the home proceeded rapidly after the introduction of electric lights in 1876, and predictably, women were significant consumers of electric appliances. The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine in 1889, followed in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator."
(The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, pg. 100, Rachel P. Maines, (c) 1999, The John Hopkins University Press)
The above book also notes that electric sewing machines were often considered inappropriate for women to own, since the vibration of the machine was too exciting. The vibrators being sold, though, were therapeutic and often advertised as a cure for "neuralgia, headaches, and wrinkles."
Most of these items, by the way, were procured via mail order. (Imagine ordering a "theraputic, and medicinal" vibrator via the Sears catalog!)
The decades following the invention of electricity must have been much like the current revolution surrounding the Internet and computer technologies. There were many changes, and many new inventions for the modern household.
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