By the turn of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that the American home did not function efficiently. With increasing interest in efficiency, homemaking became more scientific. Instead of assigning more domestic servants to the task, home economists and other observers began analyzing the processes of the home and how they could be carried out more effectively. This sensibility provided the crucial entré for technological innovation to find its way into the American home.

Household technology, especially in the form of electric appliances, radically altered the American home in the twentieth century. These innovations, of course, relied on the inventions of Thomas Edison and others who would perfect the generation and transferral of electric energy for home use in the early 1900s. Many American homes would remain without electricity through World War II, but the American ideal of the electrified home had clearly been put...