Sometime between 1914 and 1920 electricity came to Esperanza, along with the plumbing and the telephone.  Lucy Creevey later wrote:

“suddenly we had bathrooms and washstands with hot and cold laid on all over the place. It has, of course, been an immense convenience; and one wonders how we ever got along without it, but we did, and happily, too.  Never a gadget to get out of order.  Now when things go wrong, I am told the fixture is “obs’lete.”  

We had a telephone too, and soon after this Esperanza blossomed out with innumerable electric lights.  Just in time to save ‘Daddy Will’ (WWE) from nervous prostration: he had the household job of keeping about thirty kerosene lamps going, a grim job.”

Somebody thought ahead when they put most of the wiring in; running in the walls and ceilings, almost all of it is sheathed in metal.  This reduces the rodent problem and the fire-hazard.  The safety concerns are further addressed by the continued use of protected glass fuses instead of circuit breakers.  This gave us a headache with the insurance companies (until we found the right one) as dingbats apparently use pennies to replace blown fuses or use unprotected fuses which allow for too high an amperage.  Circuit breakers are theoretically harder to tamper with, but you can continue to flip the breaker and continue to send current down a problem wire.*  With the fuses, if it blows, you have to fix the problem.

This leaves fixtures.  My faithful handyman (Jamie) was fixing one the other day, it having correctly blown the fuse.  That prompted me to look at the styles of wall fixtures.  I somehow hadn’t realized that there are at least five different styles. The Dining Room has its unique style, two slightly different styles in the stairs/halls; a very distinctive tulip style in two of the bedrooms; and then miscellaneous one-offs. What you don’t pay attention to!

*I’ve done this.  I had a flat where a certain light-bulb lasted about two weeks on average, every time it went the breaker would trip off, the routine was to replace the bulb, turn the light on and then reset the breaker.  If you left the light off while resetting the breaker, it would trip the next time you turned it on and blow the light.  What the short was exactly and how that worked, I don’t know; but I do know it probably wasn’t smart.  God loves fools.