ABSTRACT

By 1928, when the national grid and the Central Electricity Board passed into law via the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926, the endorsement of electricity for agricultural purposes in Britain was already widespread.1 Seven years before the national grid had been made fully operational, Borlase Matthews had already published Electro-Farming: or the Application of Electricity to Agriculture (1928) to encourage farmers to stimulate crop growth using electric cables, to light their poultry, and to heat and sterilise dairy equipment.2 The Electrical Development Association encouraged rural demand in the context of the 1926 Act by finding new uses for electricity on the farm, including the farmhouse, and produced the Practical Cinematograph Film on Rural Electrification: Showing How a Public Supply of Electricity in Rural Areas Can Be, and Is Being, Used, to demonstrate the uses of electricity both on the farm and in the farmhouse.3 However, expectations about the possible value of electricity in the countryside were already high among innovators and early enthusiasts, and tapped into wider discussions at home and abroad. In the case of illustrations such as those advocating the use of arc lighting to illuminate night-time harvesting in E. M. Alglave and J. Boulard’s La Lumiere electrique (Paris 1882), or the rather more practical discussion of ‘isolated installations’ (i.e. factories and great country houses) in F. C. Allsop’s Practical Electric Light Fitting, (first edn. 1892, and originally a series of articles in the English Mechanic), these ideas had long preceded the 1920s legislative framework designed to underpin the infrastructure of electrification,4 and belonged to the wider early debate about what electricity was and what it was for.5