Figure 11.1 The 1929 International Exhibition. Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, day and night.
In 1929, a group of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs founded the Asociación Española de Luminotecnia (AEL). The association aimed to spread ‘modern’ methods for the ‘scientific’ use of light and its practical application to hygiene, traffic regulation, decoration and home comfort.2 Just a year later, in 1930, the AEL published a short story that described how electricity had changed the everyday life of the average Barcelona citizen (‘for the better’).3 In the advertising tale, a fairy brought a man into a technophilic world in which the evident benefits of electricity in the home – in the bathroom, dining room and entrance hall – and in the city – on the tramway, in the office and factory – were presented. The story accentuated the man’s transportation into a ‘dream’, only comparable to that of visitors to the Exposición de la Luz (EL, Exhibition of Light) in the context of the city’s 1929 International Exhibition.4 This short story was part of the AEL’s broader marketing campaign to attract new customers, as well as a sign of the enormous public impact, already exerted by the new source of power and light in Barcelona in 1929: from the Montjuïc electric magic fountain and the spectacular electric lighting on the exhibition grounds, to the promising application of electricity to street lighting and pioneering household appliances.
The first evidence of electric lighting in Barcelona stretches back to 1875, in a spotlight at the city dock. A Gramme dynamo moved by a frigate fed an arc lamp to light about 750 metres of La Rambla: from the Porta de la Pau to the Opera, the Liceu.5 In the same year, a permanent installation was built to light the foundry in La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima, a metallurgical factory set up in the neighbourhood next to the seafront, La Barceloneta.6 Electricity also became an exciting novelty at the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exhibition, lighting a number of pavilions, streets and a magic fountain.7 The ideal ‘electric tour’’ of the 1888 Exhibition, with more than 2,000 Edison electric lamps, passed through La Rambla, Passeig de Colom (Hotel International), the exhibition, and on its grounds, the magic fountain and the night celebrations at the maritime display.
According to economic historians, 1911 was the annus mirabilis of Catalan electrification. At that time, rivalry between several firms steered the construction of thermal and hydroelectric power stations and lowered the cost for new users.8 Against this backdrop, the 1915 International Exhibition of Electrical Industries and their Applications was initially conceived to celebrate the city’s early electrification. In spite of its failure – World War I put an end to the project – it can be considered to be a symbolic antecedent of 1929.9 Following the war, from 1918 to 1927, electricity production grew by 220 per cent.10 The annual consumption per inhabitant in Catalonia in 1922 was 232 kWh, more than twice the Spanish average (92 kWh), but far from the 870 kWh per capita in Canada, 550 kWh in Norway or 485 kWh in the United States.11 Subsidiary electricity companies such as AEG, Pirelli, General Electric, Westinghouse, Brown Boveri and Phillips grew considerably in the Barcelona area. They sold their products to Spanish markets and attracted a qualified labour force.
From the 1880s onwards, in Barcelona and elsewhere in western industrialized cities, electricity played a crucial role in the profound technological changes that progressively transformed urban landscapes and citizens’ habits.12 However, this was seldom a process of linear, uncritical progress and ‘modernity’. Well into the twentieth century, electric power and lighting competed with wood, gas, kerosene lamps and candles. It took decades for electricity to fully spread into urban life, and gas even won the battle for cooking and heating.13 What historian of technology David Nye describes as the transition from ‘speculative investment’ to ‘established innovations’ covered the early decades of the twentieth century and varied from city to city.14 The transition called for the development of a complex socio-technical system – in Thomas Hughes’ terms – 15 in which noteworthy agents such as inventors, experts and public administrations, but also private companies, research laboratories, educational institutions and regulatory agencies became crucial for the building of the electricity grid.16
The success of these daring urban enterprises was closely linked to private firms and their expert ‘electricians’ (engineers and physicists), but also to the appropriation attitudes of householders and users. As Graeme Gooday showed some years ago, beyond popularization campaigns, attempts to introduce electricity into the home were cultural projects that deserve closer examination.17 Beyond academic experts, engineers, entrepreneurs and urban elites, any analysis of that complex technological change cannot disregard the role of electricity users,18 consumers, amateurs and even journalists – the latter acting as mediators in the spreading of new electrical knowledge across society. This is therefore the story of a complex dissemination of knowledge and skills that should be carefully analysed in every local context, Barcelona in this case.
International scholarship has mainly focused their attention on North American and European metropolises such as Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Berlin,19 but smaller cities such as Barcelona in the 1920 and 1930s were not taken into account. What were the specific features of that local electricity culture, if any? A painstaking analysis of the impact of electric lighting at the 1929 International Exhibition would be useful here to address the city’s electricity culture as a whole.20 All sound data that follow in the next sections of this chapter are framed within David Nye’s hypothesis on the growth of electrical landscapes in industrial cities as a sort of imitation of displays at world fairs and amusement parks.21 In fact, as we wish to examine here in the case of Barcelona, in the early decades of the twentieth century, world fairs acted as testing grounds, as a driving force, as a model for further development, for the progressive electrification of the city lights.
We therefore begin here with a general description of the Barcelona 1929 International Exhibition, and then move on to the impressive display of the EL. In fact, the EL became a microcosm of the city’s larger projects, and a laboratory for the dissemination of electrical knowledge among experts, entrepreneurs, advertisers, consumers and the general public. In addition, beyond the EL, electricity firms, electricity associations and their experts campaigned for the supposed benefits of electric lighting, and shaped the manner in which the city as a whole was lit. Shop windows, streets, public squares, showrooms, public and private buildings, neon advertisements, among many other urban places, became the new containers of electric light. Beyond the average landscape described in the AEL leaflet of 1930, this marked a fundamental change in Barcelona’s culture of electricity in the early twentieth century, which this chapter seeks to examine in detail.
The 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition took place from 20 May that year to 15 January 1930 on a huge area on Montjuïc hill, which was transformed into a public park.22 Compared to its ‘cultural’ achievements, the scientific content has not yet received sufficient scholarly interest.23 Standard accounts often focus on exterior spaces, but never explore the pavilions’ content, thus mirroring the photography of the event in the censored official press, which only depicted surfaces such as façades, official celebrations and openings.24 The impressive Palacio Nacional, which held a major exhibition on Spanish art; the Pueblo Español (Spanish Village), which displayed national arts and crafts from different regions, and replicated 320 buildings from all over Spain; and the German pavilion, designed by the famous Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, have constituted the preferred topics of study thus far. This can be seen in the 1929 L’auca del senyor Estevet, a typically Catalan comic strip, in which the images of technology at the exhibition are limited to the magic fountain and the electrical spectacles.25 The exhibition was conceived by the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie, during General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–1930). However, in the end, it was organized by the Spanish government with the ambiguous collaboration of the Catalan elite. Apart from being a Spanish nationalist celebration of a declining military dictatorship, it aimed to show Barcelona and Spain’s industrial development, and to become an industrial forum in which the country could appropriate foreign technological achievements. In 1929, public street lighting shared electricity and gas supplies, but a large number of the electric lamps were still only provisionally installed.26 In that fragile context, the application of electric lighting in the exhibition became a laboratory test that combined electric, practical, urban and aesthetic factors.27
There is a consensus that the installation of electricity was one of the most thrilling developments in the interwar period and that its success meant a turning point in the public image of the engineering community that had made it possible (see Figure 11.1).28 In December 1929, after the closing of the exhibition, the journal Electrical World pointed out that:
The spectacular and extraordinary effects exceed everything that have been tried in colour and mobile lighting; its splendour presents a marvellous natural view and attracts the interest of thousands of people that visit the International Exhibition of Barcelona [...] It is probably the first trial that the engineers of lighting applied to a so vast exterior lighting, a centralized control.29
The spectacle of light was regulated by the centralized control of local technicians and Westinghouse experts;30 the electric magic fountain was also a good example of that collaboration.31 The spectacle of light, colours and water tinged the illuminated magic fountain with a good dose of electrical sublime.32 Designed by engineer Carles Buigas (1898–1979),33 the setting displayed a spectacle in which light and water transformed the whole street from red to green in a few seconds.34 The magic fountain provided the final touch for the visitors’ excitement,35 and Buigas enjoyed tremendous popularity. Catalan newspapers referred to him as the ‘wizard of light and waters’.36 The entire spectacle offered two hours of entertainment based on water, light and colour, and turned unpopulated daylight displays and pavilions into an attractive, unmissable experience at nightfall.37 Some interviews conducted with local female staff confirm this hypothesis:
As night falls, the lighting of the Palacio Nacional turns on. Reflectors are projected. Fountains and cascades get coloured. Lighting signals shine on the track. So many new and extraordinary phenomena take place, that’s why in my opinion the night is the most beautiful part of the Exhibition.38
National and international newspapers described the spectacle as excellent, splendid, magnificent, amazing, impressive, highly entertaining to conquer visitors’ minds,39 and a good example for other cities that were to organize similar world fairs in the following years.40 Not without resistance, various appropriations of all those electric lighting displays contributed to stimulating further installations on the streets, beyond the exhibition grounds.41 At the heart of that urban ‘laboratory’, the EL emerged as a very particular site, which was placed at the core of local elites’ cultural message to visitors and citizens at large. It strongly encouraged a rapid domestication of electric light in shops, streets and homes.
Under the auspices of the AEL and the local Comité de Difusión Luminotécnica (CDL), the EL was funded by the two major Spanish electricity suppliers, and displayed on the first floor of the Textile Art Pavilion. Productores y Distribuidores de Energía Eléctrica de España and Grandes Fábricas de Material Eléctrico spent 400,000 pesetas on the project. Additional public funds came from the Diputació de Barcelona Provincial Council (50,000 pesetas) and the City Council (50,000 pesetas). The space, light, water and scientific instruments (with a total estimated cost of 300,000 pesetas) were lent to the AEL for free.42
The EL seminal idea was mainly due to the engineer Martín Arrúe Astiazarán (1893–1976).43 Trained in Germany, Arrúe worked at the OSRAM company and managed to obtain scientific support from the Institut für Luminotechnik in Karlsruhe. Commissioned by the AEL, he conceived the EL as a place to ‘educate’ visitors on the new electricity culture.44 In fact, the EL was devoted to popularizing everyday electric lighting applications on the streets, in shops, factories and homes. Its opening on 30 October brought together a large swathe of Barcelona’s elite.
Engineer Manuel Vidal Españó (1905–1984) described details of a visit to the EL. Via a path of carefully designed rooms, the visitor experienced the virtues of ‘luminotechnics’, and the material culture of consumerism.45 At the entrance, the word ‘Luminotecnia’ was displayed, and, at the bottom of the stairs, a lighting arrow indicated the way to the reception hall with several coloured lights. In the centre of the hall, there was a torch, blown with hidden fans. A whole section of the EL was devoted to the ‘History of Light’, from the biblical episodes to the use of modern electrical lamps. It described a lineal and continuous succession of human achievements, which culminated in Barcelona’s electric lighting. A set of dioramas described technological progress: from the creation of light by God, primitive bonfires, torches, oil lamps, candles, gas lighting, Edison and the invention of the incandescent lamp, and then the lighting of a modern boulevard, the modern harbour, the Barcelona Exhibition and its electric magic fountain.46 In a deterministic framework, electric lighting was presented as an agent of change from night into day,47 as a driving force for social habits and values and was intimately linked to modernity.48
From the central hall, the visitor enters the theatre and its impressive stage, ready for the electrical imitation of natural wonders such as clouds, storms, sun and rainbows. After that came the highlight of the exhibit: the ‘Street of Light’ (see Figure 11.2). It was a reconstruction of an illuminated street with its starry sky and full of well-lit shop windows. Since the effective lighting of window displays was supposed to hold a direct relation with sales figures, entire shops were reproduced in full detail. Automatic mechanisms illuminated each set, alternatively, with correct and incorrect solutions. Shopkeepers were strongly encouraged to hire one of the new expert ‘electricians’. Even a contest to appraise the lighting of shop windows was organized.
Beyond the Street of Light, visitors passed through the home section, which reproduced details of kitchens, dining rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms. The same procedure was used to spread the correct lighting of factories. Finally, visitors reached the scientific section, which displayed instruments related to light, experiments from the Laboratorio de Fototécnia de Madrid, as well as optical illusions and demonstrations of optical effects.
According to the local conservative newspaper, La Vanguardia, the EL was ‘one of the best and surprising displays at the fair’.49 The liberal El Progreso described it as ‘an awesome exhibition from every point of view’.50 On the other hand, the Diario de Barcelona, also from a conservative point of view, pointed out how the EL caught professional and laypeople’s interest, and combined technical and spectacular demonstrations.51 The estimated visitors’ figure was 600,000, and included more than 500 school visits.52 On 13 and 14 January 1930, delegates from France, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy and Sweden as well as Spain attended an international conference at the EL to debate and deliberate over strategies to popularize electric lighting in their respective countries.53
The CDL had planned a broader popularization campaign on electric lighting, targeting different audiences: public lectures for experts and technicians, other lectures for industrial workers and tradesmen, but also a series for the general public that had to be broadcast on the radio. All those efforts were complemented by the publication of several technical leaflets and articles in the daily press.54 In the local context, the CDL’s executive board brought local academic scientists, entrepreneurs and journalists together. Academic scientists worked in close conjunction with engineers and popularizers. In the EL theatre, a specific series of public lectures constituted a useful meeting point for socialization and business. Broadcast by Radio Barcelona and reviewed in newspapers, they played an important role in the scientific legitimization and domestication of the new applications of electricity. The list of speakers comprised a number of engineers and professionals working on lighting in private companies, such as Arrúe himself, as the director of the EL but also OSRAM’s representative.55
Arrúe’s talk introduced several lighting problems as an object of display at the exhibition, discussed its effects in specific sites, and reproduced some of the experiments in the scientific section.56 Arrúe was also interested in electric lighting for shops.57 In an article published in Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, he even stressed how, in some US cities and in Berlin, electric lighting campaigns had shops keep their lights switched on until midnight to encourage new habits on the street.58 In a Taylorian framework, Vidal Españó described how lighting methods shaped the capacity to read small letters, and the perception of the speed of change and, in the end, enhanced efficiency at work.59 Francisco Vidal Burdills, José Mañas Bonví and Jaime Bachs focused on the right lighting for shop windows as a new driving force for advertising and marketing.60 They emphasized how new electric lighting technology could provide new professional opportunities and new potential markets for the new expert ‘electricians’. In their views, lit shops led to further street lighting. Like many other cities, they also shaped new urban habits and daily practices in the city. Radio Barcelona broadcast the lectures, together with 15 minutes of brief clips for the general public, in prime time, from 8.45 to 9 pm.61 In one of these clips, Arrúe stressed that good lighting was not a luxury but a ‘necessity’ for modern urban life.62 The CDL was the seed for the future Comitè Català de Luminotècnia (CCL), a local association linked to AEL that organized conferences on lighting in the following years. CCL members were academics, engineers and other professionals such as designers, glaziers, psychologists, businessmen and, some years later, architects and decorators, all of them truly interested in electric lighting. Despite their lack of funding, they kept their agenda of public lectures, radio shows, and the publication of articles in the daily press and technical journals.63 As at the EL, they reproduced several domestic spaces featuring the right and wrong lighting systems in pictures.64 Some years later, after the exhibition, the publication of the journal Luminotecnia y Decoración on January 1935, coincided with the end of the CCL activities, after its persistent electric lighting popularization campaign. The journal was devoted to showing ‘all things that can be done with light’, and was illustrated generously with hundreds of photographs of spaces lit by the members of the committee.65
Since the cost of electricity became a bottleneck for its use in lighting, it had to be transformed as efficiently as possible into a basic commodity.66 The context of the exhibition and the impressive display at the EL were designed specifically to serve these aims, and led to further campaigns for domestic appliances as described in the following section.
From 1929 onwards, new sites and practices spread the EL model to the city as a whole. Advocates of electric lighting endeavoured to replicate the atmosphere of the exhibition in the city centre. In 1930, the mayor of Barcelona, Joan Pich i Pon (1878–1937), supported public contests revolving around the electric lighting of shop windows and buildings’ facades. Pich i Pon belonged to the exhibition’s government body, had worked in his own electricity firm, and was keen to pass a municipal bill for tax exemptions on lit facades.67 In addition, the City Council organized a contest to award a price of 10,000 pesetas to the best-lit shop window. Thirty-six shops entered the contest with varied results. The press noted that the panel of judges was benevolent towards participants but unanimously praised Radio Lot’s display, centred on the Frigidaire refrigerators, the most coveted electrical device of the time.68 The aim of the contest was again to convince shopkeepers – as users and consumers – that good electric lighting contributed to better sales figures, although substantial achievements in this area did not come to fruition until the mid-1930s.69 The project was part of a broader ambition to transform Barcelona into ‘Europe’s City of Light’. In 1931, la Cambra de Propietat spearheaded the proposal to organize a Light Fortnight, which aimed to reproduce the atmosphere of the exhibition’s lighting. The initial programme included a shop window and facade light competition, light shows and nightly parades.70
However, public reluctance to the new ‘determinism’ of electric lighting was also frequent. The installation of a large lit column in the centre of Plaça Catalunya sparked public controversy. The satirical weekly L’Esquella de la Torratxa, for instance, published cartoons ridiculing the lit obelisk. It was a sign of mixed feelings, of the pros and cons of electric light. On the one hand, a character in front of the obelisk sarcastically proclaimed, ‘we are already better than Paris’.71 But some cartoons questioned its utility, aesthetics and high cost (see Figure 11.3). When it was finally dismantled, the satirical press described a critical celebration in which citizens opposed the City Council, threw stones at the electric obelisk and demanded a new urban reform of Plaça Catalunya.72
The growing use of electric lighting on the streets of Barcelona aroused both satisfaction and uneasiness or scepticism. At a busy intersection in the neighbourhood of Sant Gervasi, many objected to the City Council’s decision to replace an electric spotlight with a new gas lamppost,73 but new electric lighting was celebrated in the Poble Sec neighbourhood.74 At the same time, the opening of lit facilities such as the Sociedad Sportiva Pompeya’s tennis court, stimulated new social activities after nightfall.75 Catholics considered electric light awkward for liturgical proposals,76 and liberal urban classes perceived it as an inconvenience in theatres77 and on the streets.78 Nevertheless, in spite of this controversy, the core of engineers that promoted the CDL’s activities assessed the progress of electric lighting. Again within a deterministic framework, they considered that electric lighting had changed citizens’ lives in theatres, cinemas, restaurants, shops, in short, on the streets.79
The pictures published in the journal Luminotecnia y decoración convey the atmosphere on La Rambla, where the canopies belonging to Bar Automàtic or Dancing Excelsior illuminated a significant part of the footpath and road. Electric lighting at the Pompeya music hall in Paral·lel, Hollywood Bar on the street Conde del Asalto or Cinema Mayland in Plaça d’Urquinaona attracted new customers and showed their ‘modernity’. Shop windows belonging to Almacenes Jorba on Avinguda del Portal de l’Àngel were a continuous showroom of lighting in a shopping area. Marian Rubió i Bellver (1862–1938), engineer and former technical director of the 1929 International Exhibition, considered that the spectacle of Barcelona streets was simply admirable, from dusk to the moment shops close, and shop windows lit up at night. To prevent the daily sales from plummeting, the lights at night had to appear brighter.80 Beyond the city centre, the Canódromo park facilities on Travessera de les Corts or Joyería Roca on Avinguda Diagonal spread new urban uses to other areas. At that time, the majority of the city centre’s buildings had full electric wiring.81
After the exhibition, showrooms, as mediating spaces between expert and laypeople’s electrical knowledge – lighting and power – rapidly spread throughout the city. Showrooms provided spaces for exchanging electrical knowledge between experts and laypeople, between salespeople and customers as visitors and potential users. However, private firms used showrooms as part of their marketing strategy for new electrical devices. Despite this technophile image of electricity in ads, showrooms helped consumers to manage it and to check out new products by themselves. They exhibited lamps, lighting procedures, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, all aimed at piquing potential customers’ interest. Around 1930 there were up to 15 private showrooms in Barcelona city centre, most of them devoted to refrigerators (10) and other domestic electrical appliances (2), and electric lighting applications (3): The Compañía de Aplicaciones Eléctricas in Plaça Catalunya, the Compañía General Española de Electricidad. Lámpara ‘METAL’ on Ronda de la Universitat and the Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad on Carrer de Girona.82
Advertisements and articles in local newspapers and journals – in particular, at the Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica –83 allow us to trace back details of Barcelona’s local electric culture. In 1930, for instance, Jaime Bachs, the showroom manager of the Compañía de Aplicaciones Eléctricas described his audience (see Figure 11.4). In Bachs’s view, among the 6,000 daily visits, there were many bystanders, but also people actually interested in installing some of the lighting solutions in their homes, factories, shops or workshops. Again, imitating the EL, kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms were reproduced in detail, to later show how lamps had to be properly installed;84 the showroom of the Compañía General Española de Electricidad. Lámpara ‘METAL’ reproduced shop window displays with correct and incorrect lighting.85 Lámpara ‘METAL’ engineer, Rosendo Pich, described his campaign for better lighting, which included visits by school children, and even portable showrooms to spread the progress of electric lighting across Catalonia.86 The Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad’s showroom coached professional architects and electricians on specific lighting projects.87 It was mainly an electric power company, and did not sell appliances, its main goal being to increase electricity supply. The Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad had another showroom in Plaça Catalunya devoted to new domestic devices.
From a gender perspective, messages such as ‘Electricity raises you to the throne of the utmost comfort’88 sought to disseminate the idea that electrical appliances would replace the female workforce in domestic tasks. The actual benefits of the use of electrical appliances for early twentieth century housewives have been repeatedly questioned by historians.89 However, it is also the case that women became a central target of the companies’ marketing campaigns in the early twentieth century.90 In spite of the apparent lack of local users’ associations, electricity firms paid special attention to women in order to increase electricity consumption. Radio, daily press and specialized magazines spread information on the introduction of electricity in houses, shops, factories and on streets. The transformation of the urban space that electricity had brought about in other European and American cities a decade earlier began in Barcelona in the early 1930s.91
In the showrooms, expert electricians standardized what women supposedly had to know about electricity: the vocabulary associated with electricity, the limitations of the electrical system, security notions to tackle risks and uncertainty, and, more obviously, an optimization of the cost of electrical appliances and incandescent lamps.92 They also provided specific guidelines for consumers when buying light bulbs: the ideal voltage and power and cleaning for better efficiency.93 Women, and users in general, often acted as mediators and active electricity agents in private homes.94
As experts identified the cost of electricity supply as the main critical point for stepping up the use of electrical appliances, companies’ salesmen organized public shows on the consumption of electrical devices. They compared the cost of good lighting at home, in shops and in industry to well-known costs of more mundane things such as a family celebration, the publication of an advertisement in the press or the cost of wasted time by factory workers. The showroom belonging to the Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad, for instance, displayed a set of basic experiments to assess the power expenses of different appliances.95
Although neon lights did not reach Barcelona’s public sphere until the mid-1930s, they had already had an impact on the city centre. The company Luminosos Neón installed 75 per cent of Barcelona’s 1,000 neon lights.96 An illuminated chocolate ad in Plaça Catalunya exerted a great impact, not only for the company that funded it (Chocolates Juncosa), but also for its contribution to the shaping of the city’s public image. Simultaneously, neon red lights in a brothel in the Barrio Chino transformed a narrow, dark and dirty street into an unrealistic scenario.97
Shop windows underwent a profound cultural change in the city, affecting public consumption and even lifestyles. Moreover, neon lights, street and traffic lights progressively built an exciting and cosmopolitan city by night.98 Barcelona mirrored itself in cities such as Paris, Berlin or New York, which had begun transformations in electric lighting a few decades earlier, but the city’s urban transformation through lighting that had begun with the 1929 Exhibition was well on its way in the 1930s.99
Our winter short story of 1930 effectively revealed how experts and firms campaigned for the use of electricity as a decisive agent in shaping everyday life in the city.100 It was written following the impact of the 1929 Exhibition, which represented a landmark in the development of modern electricity culture. The EL, the fascinating combination of electric light and water on the exhibition grounds, the public lectures, the millions of visitors, constituted a model to be replicated by expert electricians, to be subsequently extrapolated to the city at large, through municipal campaigns, companies’ showrooms, and press advertisements. In all these campaigns electrical knowledge circulated widely between expert and lay actors, and shaped the growth of the electricity grid in modern Barcelona.
The key actors in the process of popularizing electric lighting, Arrúe, Vidal i Españó and Bachs, among others, established a network of collaboration rooted in the Exhibition. Despite becoming experts serving the interests of private firms, they sought their own professional recognition. The spectacular display of the EL captured potential customers and users of new electric lighting, whereas practical shows and demonstrations addressed the new material culture of electric appliances for new social groups. Electric lighting soon also became embedded in the work of architects and interior designers, but also in the marketing plans of numerous shops, theatres and restaurants. In addition, after the exhibition and the EL, showrooms became the new crucial sites where lay consumers were in close contact with electricity applications, and ideal places for the study of consumer behaviour. At the same time, electric lighting invaded the streets with shop windows, electric bulbs and neon lights. In spite of the lack of detailed accounts on the part of ordinary consumers and households, local consumption figures seem to indicate that the effective ‘domestication’ of electricity took place in Barcelona in the 1930s, probably as a knock-on effect of the 1929 Exhibition agenda.
Beyond consumers’ concerns regarding electrical risks and hazards – as they have been described in studies on home electrification in previous decades101– the cost seemed to be the main stumbling block to the rapid increase and intensive use of electrical appliances, including electric lighting. In fact, all the public displays and shows endeavoured to convince consumers that benefits would exceed costs. Local popularizers designed strategies to convince women to become the electricity experts at home: in maintaining the lamps, being familiar with the technicalities of the home electric installation and being able to understand details in the companies’ invoices. All these marketing efforts can be easily traced back through articles in the daily press, in specialist magazines or even in radio clips.102 In practice, electricity was integrated into everyday life, and its uncertain nature was progressively excluded from debates in the Barcelona public sphere.
As described by the fairy in our short story:
A day will come in which the laws of artificial lighting will be taught at school. Today there is no single textbook for the rational use of that little incandescent lamp that Edison invented 50 years ago, the source of the uncountable wonders we know today. The incandescent lamp, to which we owe so much, is often treated as a Cinderella, and its indisputable utility will improve, only when men learn to use it properly.103
In the 1930s, in spite of these frequent optimistic accounts and their public image as an agent of modernity, electric lighting and electric appliances had only made a preliminary step forward in their domestication process. The turmoil erupting on the streets of Barcelona in July 1936 dramatically interrupted that process. The city had still to wait decades to make the 1930 fairy tale come true, to become the ‘ciudad maravillosa’ in which electric lighting had fully spread throughout public and private settings to irreversibly shape citizens’ everyday life.104
1We would like to thank Graeme Gooday and David E. Nye for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
2This association, established in 1929, sought to ‘disseminate the knowledge, advantages and importance of modern lighting methods and the rules of scientific use of light for private and national economy: hygiene, traffic safety, decoration, comfort, etc.’., AEL, Estatutos de la Asociación Española de Luminotecnia (Madrid: Gráficas Reunidas, 1929), Article 1.
3L. S. Splendor, ‘Alegorías de la Luz. Cuento de Invierno’, Novela Luminosa, I (1), 1930. It was part of the advertisement campaign surrounding the Exhibition of Light.
4Splendor, ‘Alegorías de la Luz’, 6.
5Francesc Cabana, Fàbriques i empresaris. Els protagonistes de la Revolució Industrial a Catalunya (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1992–1994), p. 183. See also: Joan Carles Alayo, L’Electricitat a Catalunya: de 1879 a 1935 (Lleida: Pagès, 2007). Tomàs Josep Dalmau bought a Serrin’s arc lamp in France. The test was conducted on 13 May 1875.
6Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘Los pioneros de la segunda revolución industrial en España: La Sociedad Española de Electricidad (1881–1894)’, Revista de Historia Industrial, 2 (1992): 122–42. See also: Luis Urteaga (ed.), L’electrificació de Barcelona, 1881–1935 (Barcelona: Arxiu d’Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona, 2013).
7Antonino Suárez Saavedra, La Electricidad en la Exposición Universal de Barcelona (Barcelona: Tipografia de los sucesores de N. Ramirez y Cía, 1888); Agustí Nieto-Galan, ‘Scientific “marvels” in the public sphere: Barcelona and its 1888 International Exhibition’, HoST – Journal of History of Science and Technology, 6 (2012): 33–63.
8Two of them with foreign capital (Energía Eléctrica de Cataluña and Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro, S.A.) and another with Catalan funds (Catalana de Gas y Electricidad). Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘Cataluña y el País Vasco en la Industria Eléctrica Española, 1901–1935’, in Manuel González Portillo, Jordi Maluquer de Motes and Borja de Riquer (eds), Industrialización y Nacionalismos: análisis comparativo (Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1985), 239–52, p. 250.
9According to the organizers, ‘there have probably been very few markets which have offered the advantageous conditions now offered by Barcelona, for the electrification of its railways in all Catalonia will make the industry, trade, mining and agriculture of Catalonia of great importance [sic]’. International Exhibition of Electrical Industries and their Applications (Barcelona: La Neotipia, 1915), Foreword.
10‘Algunas ideas sobre el consumo de electricidad en España’, Ingeniería, 879 (30 August 1929), 189–91.
11Ibid., p. 190.
12David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990). See also: Ken G. Beauchamp, Exhibiting Electricity (London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1997); Mauren Dillon, Artificial Sunshine: A Social History of Domestic Lighting (London: The National Trust, 2002); Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013).
13David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out. A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010). See also: David E. Nye (ed.), Technologies of Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999).
14Nye, When the Lights Went Out, p. 16.
15Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
16‘After World War I, what is referred to as ‘modern society’ emerged full blown in the United States. Urban based and consumer oriented, it required huge amounts of energy to sustain a new style of life. [...] By the late twenties the use of more and more electricity, gas and oil in everyday life had become so ubiquitous as to wrap urban American in an “invisible world” of energy. Even the shock wave of the Great Depression could not halt a steady rise in household consumption of electricity, preserving the new standard of living’, Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 235–6. See also: John A. Jakle, City Lights. Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Nye, Electrifying America and David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994).
17Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity. Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). See also: Graeme Gooday, The Morals of Measurement. Accuracy, Irony and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
18Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (eds), How Users Matter. The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013); David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
19Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).
20See Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica regarding the need to instigate campaigns explaining the benefits of electrification. See also: Franciso Sintes Olives and Francisco Vidal Burdils, La industria eléctrica en España (Barcelona: Montaner y Simón, 1933).
21In David Nye’s words: ‘As advertising, floodlighting, and street lighting spread through urban society, salesmen were able to ratchet up sales of electrical signs to businessmen eager to maximize the visibility of their enterprises. An unintended result of their competition was a brilliant landscape of light that by the 1920s had transformed urban space into a new form of the sublime that hid the night sky’. Nye, When the Lights Went Out, p. 10.
22See, for example, Mª Carmen Grandas, L’exposició Internacional de Barcelona de 1929 (Sant Cugat del Vallès: Els Llibres de la Frontera, 1988); or Ignasi de Solà-Morales, L’Exposició Internacional de Barcelona, 1914–1929: arquitectura i ciutat (Barcelona: Fira de Barcelona, 1985).
23Jaume Sastre-Juan and Agustí Nieto-Galan, ‘Barcelona 1929: Science and Technology in a “Peripheral” International Exhibition’, 7th STEP meeting Galway, Ireland 2010 (unpublished manuscript).
24As can be seen in a folder full of newspaper clips with photographs from the press, collected by the Diputació de Barcelona [File 3384–3892, Arxiu de la Diputació de Barcelona].
25These auques, and comic strips in general, are good indicators of the public perception of exhibitions (for an insightful study on humour as a source for the study of the public perception of international exhibitions – with an emphasis on the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition – see Manon Niquette and William Buxton, ‘Meet me at the fair: Sociability and reflexivity in nineteenth-century world expositions’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 22 (1) (1997): 81–113). In our case, the most relevant feature is that it does not at all mention the pavilions’ technological content, and when the main character visits them he only finds art or folklore. In the author’s view, visiting the exhibition had nothing to do with science or technology, and in any case the only technological encounter the rural visitor had was a traffic jam on the streets of Barcelona.
26Barcelona: edición especial del artículo Barcelona de la Enciclopedia Espasa, dedicado a la Exposición Internacional Barcelona (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1929). Until 1966 Barcelona had confined gas and electricity to its public lighting (Mercedes Arroyo, ‘Los cambios en el proceso de producción y de distribución de gas en Barcelona y su hinterland (1930–1961). Entre el gas de hulla y el gas natural’, Scripta nova, X, 218 (29) (2006), http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-218–29.htm (last accessed 11 December 2014). See also: Mercedes Arroyo, La industria del gas en Barcelona (1841–1933). Innovación tecnológica, territorio urbano y conflicto de intereses (Barcelona: El Serbal, 1996).
27Juan Lasarte Karr, ‘L’electricitat i la llum a l’Exposició de Barcelona’, Ciència: Revista catalana de ciència i tecnologia, 36 (1930): 512–37.
28Jordi Ferran, ‘Technology for the public: Electricity in the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929’, Annales historiques de l’électricité, 4 (1) (2006): 31–48; Jordi Ferran, Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929–1936): De la Font Màgica de Montjuïc a la difusió dels electrodomèstics (PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2013). In the Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs, John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle described the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition in the following terms: ‘The scene was particularly stunning at night, when coloured lights illuminated the monumental fountain at the centre of the plaza and the cascades of water descending from Montjuïc. Art deco-styled pedestals lighted both sides of the avenue, and enormous light beams burst into the sky behind the Palacio Nacional’, John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 252.
29Electrical World (94), 7 December 1929. Electrical ‘magic’ fountains dated back to the nineteenth century, being installed for the first time at the 1884 International Electrical Exhibition of Philadelphia (David E. Nye, ‘Electrifying Expositions, 1880–1939’, in Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn (eds), Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1994), 140-56). The 1888 Barcelona Universal Exhibition also had a magic fountain (Suárez Saavedra, La Electricidad en la Exposición Universal de Barcelona).
30Charles J. Stahl, ‘The floodlighting of the International Exposition at Barcelona, Spain’, Illuminating Engineering Society Transactions, 24 (9) (1929): 876–89.
31In this case with the German company A.E.G. (E. Posa, ‘Los suministros de la AEG para la Exposición de Barcelona’, AEG al día, 13 (January 1930), 1).
32The notion of electrical sublime (firstly articulated in David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940) refers to a particular kind of ‘technological sublime’ (a notion developed in Nye, American Technological Sublime), which describes a semi-religious feeling of awe in the presence of impressive technological objects or performances. For a specific insightful analysis on the electrical sublime in exhibitions, see Nye, ‘Electrifying Expositions, 1880–1939’, 113–27.
33For a biographical approximation of Buigas, see L’enginy de Carles Buigas (1898–1979) (Barcelona: Agbar, Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1998). See also: Maria Paz Silva, 22 anys amb Buigas (Barcelona: Thor, 1981).
34Manuel Nogareda, ‘Editorial’, Diario Oficial de la Exposición Internacional, 22, 11 August 1929. See also: David Caralt, Agualuz (Madrid: Siruela, 2010).
35Diario Oficial de la Exposición Internacional de Barcelona, 6, 21 May 1929 (editorial of the day after the opening of the Exhibition). See also: David Caralt, ‘Les nits de l’Exposició Internacional de 1929’, in L’electrificació de Barcelona, 1881–1935, ed. Urteaga, 261–83.
36Nogareda, ‘Editorial’.
37Carles Buigas, ‘La iluminación decorativa en la futura exposición de Barcelona’, Ibérica, 759 (1929): 2; ‘La Exposición de Barcelona. La Opinión del “New York World”’, La Vanguardia, 13 September 1929, 16.
38Diario oficial de la Exposición de 1929, 29, 26 September 1929.
39La Ilustración Ibero-americana, (1 (4) (1930): 63–70) published some laudatory passages in international press articles. Articles featured in La Revue de Paris, Figaro, Daily Mail, Daily News, Glasgow Herald, Berliner Tageblatt, New York World, Mundo Argentino and El Mercurio de la Habana, among others.
40As has been pointed by John E. Findling: ‘In 1929, Daniel H. Burnham had gone [...] to visit the Barcelona and Seville Exhibitions, and he had been particularly impressed by the night-time illumination at Barcelona, which “far surpasses all previous expositions … [and] was what we have dreamed of for Chicago in 1933’; John E. Findling, Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 87.
41‘Barcelona’. Enciclopedia Espasa-Calpe. Apéndice I. Tomo 83 (1930), 1315. See also: Juan Lasarte Karr, ‘Las obras de ingeniería en la Exposición de Barcelona’, Técnica, 134 (1930): 17–23, and in consecutive issues.
42The Diputació de Barcelona decided to fund this Light Exhibition because they considered it to be a national effort and that Spain could thereby be considered one more among the most technologically advanced European nations, which had previously displayed its light industry in exhibitions visited and studied by the organizers of the Palace of Light (in Düsseldorf, Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Rostock, Berlin and Paris). See ‘Subvención concedida a la ‘Asociación Española de Luminotecnica’ para contribuir a sufragar los gastos de la Exposicion de la Luz’, File 4189 Exp. 26, Arxiu de la Diputació de Barcelona.
43Noteworthy members of the AEL included Germán de la Mora (president), Martín Arrúe (secretary), B. von Eggeling, A. Hielscher, F. Brandon, among others. Jorge Barcino, ‘La Exposición de la Luz en el Certamen Internacional de Barcelona’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (August, 1930), 36.
44‘El alma de la Exposición de la Luz. Don Martín Arrúe Astiazarán’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 38–9.
45Manuel Vidal Españó, ‘El Palau de la Llum de la nostra Exposició’, Ciència: Revista catalana de ciència i tecnologia, V, 36, (May–June 1930): 596–603.
46‘Los Dioramas de la Historia de la Luz’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 42–8.
47Jorge Barcino, ‘La Exposición de la Luz en el Certamen Internacional de Barcelona’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 36.
48For instance, a highly favourable article published in La Ilustración Ibero-americana referred to the Exposición de la Luz as: ‘Exhibitions like that produce real social movements since they are like historical crusades’ (Barcino, ‘La Exposición de la Luz en el Certamen Internacional de Barcelona’, 36).
49‘Ayer se inauguró la Exposición de la Luz’, La Vanguardia, 1 November 1929, 8.
50‘Se inaugura la Exposición de la Luz’, El Progreso, 1 November 1929, 3.
51‘El Palacio de la Luz’, Diario de Barcelona, 1 November 1929, 13. The news also announced a free technical service on lighting for the public.
52A.T.M., ‘El alma de la Exposición de la Luz. Don Martín Arrúe Astiazarán’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 38.
53La Vanguardia, 7 January 1930, 8; 14 January 1930, 11; and 18 January 1930, 8.
54‘El Comité Ejecutivo de Difusión Luminotécnica en Barcelona. Miembros que componen dicho Comité, organizador de la brillante labor cultural que se ha irradiado de la Exposición de la Luz de Barcelona’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 54.
55Arrúe lectured on the concept of luminotechnics; Jaime Bachs, engineer of Compañía de Aplicaciones Eléctricas, discussed the practical aspects of electric lighting; Francisco Vidal Burdils, lawyer of Fuerzas Eléctricas de Cataluña, presented several aspects of electric lighting; engineer Manuel Vidal i Españó talked about light and the ‘scientific organization’ of labour; engineer Manuel Gabarró Freixas presented electric lighting in the field of sport; José Mañas Bonví, engineer and professor of the Escola d’Enginyers Industrials of Barcelona, discussed the technology of lighting; Mariano Soria, professor of ophthalmology at the Universitat de Barcelona lectured on light and the sense of vision; José Baltá Elias, professor of physics at the same university, explained the nature of light as electromagnetic radiation; Miguel Masriera, PhD in Science at ETH Zurich, discussed the mechanisms of vision and painting; Josep Comas i Solà, director of the Fabra Observatory, presented and discussed the wave-particle nature of light. ‘Personalidades que han intervenido en el ciclo de conferencias organizado por el Comité Ejecutivo de Difusión Luminotécnica’, La Ilustración Ibero-americana, 1 (4) (1930): 55.
56‘La luminotecnia y la Exposición de la Luz’, 16 May 1930.
57He was also a pioneer in this area by translating the German text: F. Putnoky, Die Technik der Schaufensterbeleuchtung. F. Putnoky, La técnica del alumbrado de escaparates (Madrid: Blass, 1927). Arrúe translated it from the German edition of 1922 and introduced a new preface.
58Martín Arrúe, ‘La luz en el comercio’. Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 2 (1930): 7.
59‘La luz en la organización científica del Trabajo’, 9 July 1930.
60‘Aspectos interesantes de la iluminación’ by Francisco Vidal Burdills (15 July 1930); ‘Técnica de la Iluminación’ by José Mañas Bonví (13 June 1930); and ‘Aspectos prácticos de la iluminación’ by Jaime Bachs (2 July 1930).
61At least three of these pieces has been found: ‘Lo menos que debe saber todo el mundo respecto a la iluminación’ by Martín Arrúe (1 June 1930); ‘El alumbrado en la industria’ by Manuel Vidal i Españó (22 June 1930); and ‘El alumbrado en el hogar’ by Martín Arrúe (29 June 1930).
62Martín Arrúe, ‘Lo menos que debe saber todo el mundo respecto a la iluminación’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 3 (1930): 17. For the introduction of radio in Barcelona, see Chapter 10 of this volume.
63For instance, they published up to 7,620 square centimetres about lighting in the daily or technical press from July 1931 to June 1932. AEL, Memoria correspondiente al ejercicio de 1° de julio de 1931 a 1° de julio de 1932 (Madrid: Gráficas Reunidas, 1932).
64AEL, La luz en casa racionalmente empleada proporciona alegría, bienestar, belleza y economía (Madrid: Gráficas Reunidas, S.A., 1933). A description of AEL publications can be found in Jordi Ferran, ‘La asociación española de luminotecnia (1929–1935): La utilización racional de la electricidad para la iluminación’. Actes d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica, 5 (2012): 51–70.
65Luminotecnia y Decoración only published six issues.
66Ferran, Els públics de l’electricitat a Catalunya (1929–1936).
67La Vanguardia, 16 May 1930, 7.
68‘El concurs d’aparadors il·luminats’, Revista Imatges, 1 (7), 23 July 1930, 2.
69The goal in this case was to reproduce the North American model. It had transformed shopping into entertainment through artificial illumination (Jakle, City Lights, p. 253).
70The Comitè Català de Luminotècnia, established some time after the Exhibition and inheriting the Comité de Difusión Luminotécnica, obtained resources from the Asociación Española de Luminotecnia (5.000 pesetas) but there was indifference from Electric Companies and the City Council. The event was never held. ‘Una noticia muy interesante. ¿Será Barcelona la ciudad de la Luz?’. Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 5–6 (1930–1931): 26; AEL, Memoria correspondiente al ejercicio de 1° de julio de 1930 a 1° de julio de 1931 (Madrid: Talleres Voluntad, 1931), p. 4.
71L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 2602, 10 May 1929, 296.
72L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 2658, 6 June 1930, 377; 2660, 20 June 1930, 420; 2662, 4 July 1930, 443.
73La Vanguardia, 9 June 1929, 14.
74La Vanguardia, 29 July 1934, 7. Regarding the electric lighting opening in the squares of Santa Madrona and Blasco de Garay.
75La Vanguardia, 13 June 1931, 12. The Sociedad Sportiva Pompeya was established in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood.
76La Vanguardia, 31 March 1934, 19.
77Manuel Cases Lamolla, ‘Il·luminació’, Art: Revista de les Arts, 9 (1934): 3. Manuel Cases Lamolla (1900–1974), architect and member of the Fomento de las Artes Decorativas was one of the first professionals outside the core of promoters of decorative lighting. He considered himself as a tamer of the Edison’s shiny light bulb (Luminotecnia y Decoración, 1 (January 1935), 1).
78L’Esquella de la Torratxa, 2622, 27 September 1929, 616.
79In 1935, founders of the Comitè and other professionals began to publish the journal Luminotecnia y Decoración devoted to showing lighting installations by means of spectacular pictures. A paper entitled ‘El progreso de la iluminación decorativa en España’ considered that not only Barcelona and Madrid had a considerable number of spectacular lighting displays in commerce (Luminotecnia y Decoración, 3, (March 1935)).
80Mariano Rubió Bellvé, ‘La psicología de la ciudad’. La Vanguardia, 14 May 1935, 5.
81Horacio Capel (ed.), Las Tres Chimeneas. Implantación industrial, cambio tecnológico y transformación de un espacio urbano barcelonés. Vol. 3 (Barcelona: FECSA, 1994), p. 165. Unfortunately, there is no data available on electricity consumption per inhabitant at local level. Catalonia had a total consumption of 372 kWh per inhabitant in 1935 (Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘Panorama eléctrico español hasta 1944’, in Gonzalo Anes (ed.), Un siglo de luz. Historia empresarial de Iberdrola (Madrid: Iberdrola, 2006), 88). Lighting consumption was considered to be 15.5 per cent (Alayo, L’electricitat a Catalunya, p. 901). In the period between 1290 and 1935, domestic electrification rose from insignificant values to more than 70 per cent penetration in industrialized cities worldwide. Nevertheless, consumption values per inhabitant for lighting purposes presented a high level of variability among European cities in 1933: Basel 525 kWh, Zurich 471 kWh, Stockholm 236 kWh, Amsterdam 243 kWh, Paris 123 kWh, Berlin 100 kWh and Vienna 84 kWh (Luciano Segreto, ‘Ciento veinte años de electricidad. Dos mundos diferentes y parecidos’, in Anes (ed.), Un siglo de luz, pp. 29–30). Figures for Barcelona were far from those of top cities. The Spanish average was 153 kWh per inhabitant in 1933 (Maluquer de Motes, ‘Panorama eléctrico español hasta 1944’, p. 88). Simultaneously, Catalonia led the electrification process in Spain during this period.
82Electric showrooms were mainly placed (14) in the Eixample, the new city, but close to the limits of the old city, surrounding Plaça de Catalunya. For refrigerators, it is worth mentioning the Sala de Auto-Electricidad (Diputació, 234) exposing General Electric fridges; Suministros Eléctricos, S.A., (Fontanella, 14) for Westinghouse; Anglo-Española de Electricidad (Granvía, 525 and Pelai, 12) for Kelvinator, among many others. See also: Barcelona en el año de la Exposición International de 1929 (Barcelona: Bailly-Ballière y Riera Reunidos, 1929).
83Launched in 1930, the journal Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica (Domestic and Industrial Electricity) was devoted to popularizing new electric devices and their use in home chores. Its pages were full of ads for electricity companies, which often bought copies to circulate them among the journal’s subscribers. Within a few months of being launched, the journal achieved a monthly circulation of 30,000 copies.
84In the centre of the ceiling and on both sides of the mirror in the bathroom; a bedroom with lighting points in the ceiling, over the dresser and the bedside tables. José J. Morales, ‘El alumbrado racional. Una sala de demostraciones’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 3 (1930): 12.
85José Jurado Morales, ‘Una sala de demostraciones de alumbrado’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 5–6 (1930–1931): 10.
86He considered it crucial to teach children the benefits of electric lighting, keeping in mind that ‘new generations will appreciate great manifestations of electricity’ (Morales, ‘Una sala de demostraciones de alumbrado’, p. 10).
87Advertisements of Compañía Barcelonesa de Electricidad presented decorative lighting as the key factor of home comfort (Luminotecnia y Decoración, 3 (March 1935), 1). Philips ‘Design with light’ campaign also stressed the link between lighting and modernity (Nuevas formas. Revista de Arquitectura y Decoración, 3 (1934): 110).
88‘La electricidad os eleva Señora al trono de la mayor comodidad’. Advertisement run by the Cooperativa de Fluido Eléctrico, published in Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 9 (1931): 4.
89Regarding this controversy, see: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Women. The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (London: Free Association Books, 1989); Cynthia Cockburn and Ruza Fürst-Dilíc (eds), Bringing Technology Home. Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994); Amy Sue Bix, ‘Equipped for life. Gendered technical training and consumerism in home economics, 1920–1980’, Technology and Culture, 43 (4) (2002): 728–54; Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, ‘The Technological Revolution that Never Was. Gender, Class, and the Diffusion of Household Appliances in Interwar England’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 244–74; Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun (eds), His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Technology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); or Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (eds), Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009).
90Unlike other European countries, it is not possible to find any women’s association devoted to popularizing electricity. In the case of Britain, see L. Symons, ‘The Electrical Association for Women, 1924–1986’, IEE Proceedings A: Science, Measurement and Technology, 140 (3) (1993): 215–20.
91However, it is worth noting that in Germany, for instance, full-scale electrification of households only took place in the 1950s, after World War II (Dieter Schott, ‘The City and Electricity’, in Mikael Hård, and Thomas J. Misa (eds), The Urban Machine. Recent Literature on European Cities in the 20th Century, (Tensions of Europe, electronic publication, 2003, www.iit.edu/~misa/toe20/urban-machine, last accessed 15 July 2012), 109–19.
92Ernest Greenwook, ‘Lo que la señora de la casa debe conocer’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 16 (1931): 8. Republished in issue 37 (1933): 4.
93AEL, La luz en casa racionalmente empleada, 1–2, 16.
94J. A. Corcovan, ‘Electrifique su casa. Conviértala en un hogar’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 3 (1930): 22.
95This procedure was shown by advertisements published in La Vanguardia (6 June 1936, 7 and 9 June 1936, 2).
96In the city centre there were advertisements of the next companies: Dr Andreu, Gilette, Amatller, Juncosa, Moulin Rouge, Xampany Freixenet, Jorba, Almacenes el Águila, Agua Oxigenada Forest, Odeón and Pirelli; ‘Com es fa un anunci lluminós’, Revista Imatges, 5 (9 July 1930). 21.
97Josep M. Planes, Nits de Barcelona (Barcelona: Llibreria Catalonia, 1931), p. 55.
98‘Com es fa un anunci lluminós’. Revista Imatges.
99Raymond Carr, España 1808–2008 (Madrid: Arial, 2009).
100L. S. Splendor, ‘Alegorías de la Luz. Cuento de Invierno’.
101Gooday, Domesticating Electricity.
102F. A. Delgado, ‘Barcelona, Fanal de Luz’, Electricidad Industrial y Doméstica, 2 (September 1930): 18.
103L. S. Splendor, ‘Alegorías de la Luz. Cuento de Invierno’, p. 5
104Ibid., p. 6.
