Question #2d5a5
2 Answers
It improved living conditions considerably by reducing the effort required for many normal daily activities.
Explanation:
As the inhabitants of New York, Chicago, and other cities across the country enjoyed the gleaming lights and the new labor-saving devices powered by electricity, life in rural America remained difficult.
On 90 percent of American farms the only artificial light came from smoky, fumy lamps. Water had to be pumped by hand and heated over wood-burning stoves. Virtually every chore required manual labor; for many farm wives the most tiresome of all was the seemingly endless backbreaking drudgery of washing and ironing the family's clothes and linens.
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The 1920s “witnessed a rapid increase in the use of power appliances in the home, primarily by fractional horse-power electric motors”. For the most part, these motors powered washing machines, sewing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners.
Estimates claim that, at the beginning to the 1920s decade, the number of people living in homes with electricity increased from about 35 million to around 85 million at the end, or “from 33 to 70 per cent of the total population.
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Electricity changed where people worked and lived.
Explanation:
Electric trolleys allowed people to live further from the center of the city and still get to work. The suburbs were born. Electric lights meant that the factories could now work 24 hours straight. Workers now worked the late and night shifts as well as the day shift.
Electricity allowed factories to be build far away from the sources of energy that powered them. Many smaller centers of industry developed, causing the development of small cities where only villages and towns had existed before. Rural communities could build canning factories and food processing centers creating more local jobs, using the electric power grid.
Night life illuminated by electric lights developed a whole new set of niches for people to occupy. Not only the night shift factory worker, but the all night dinner, the movie theater, Friday football games, night baseball, and of course criminal activities.
Before electricity people went to bed for the most part when it got dark and woke up with the sunrise. With electricity people could stay up late into the night, reading, playing games, then listening to the radio and watching TV. Electricity created a major change in the cultural activities of the American people.
