ABSTRACT
The various technologies of the home are, perhaps particularly complex; for as well as going through the stages of invention, innovation and diffusion (Roy and Cross, 1975), they are dominated by housing tenure and physically tied to the housing stock. By 1914 the structure of the house was established in its recognizably twentieth-century form, and most of its services were in place. But it was for all practical purposes still in its pre-electric phase. The electric home dominated the rest of the century down to the 1980s, when it began to develop into the electronic home.
