The Electric Light in our Homes

Beautiful navy-blue boards with illustration in gold gilt on the cover and spine, title in black script. Front cover illustration is of chandelier with a type of light bulb and its designer in each corner. The spine has a marked slant, is faded so the gold title is harder to read but is still visible, and has wear to the back strip cloth at the top and bottom. There is little edge wear to the front or rear boards but the corners are all worn especially on the front board. While the spine has a definite slant (see photos), it is firmly attached to the decorative flower end papers with some creasing at the fold. The text block is also slanted but the string binding is solid with no tears. Age tanning throughout and foxing on the pages where the Woodburytype photos have been attached (see photos). Bookseller stamp attached to the front endpaper but otherwise, interior pages are clean with no chips, tears, or other previous owner marks. First Edition, first printing as later printings only had two photos inserted. 205 pages plus six pages of advertisements Dimensions: H – 7-3/4" W – 5-1/4"

A Woodburytype is both a printing process and the print that it produces. Introduced by the English photographer Walter B. Woodbury it was used during the final third of the 19th century, most commonly for illustrating fine books with photographic portraits. The Woodburytype process produced very high-quality continuous tone images in monochrome, with surfaces that show a slight relief effect. It was ultimately displaced by halftone processes that produced prints of lower quality but were much cheaper. The early Woodburytype prints in this book would have been manually added after publication which have probably caused the wrinkling and foxing of each of the pages.

Robert Hammond (1850 – 1915) was a British electrical engineer who pioneered and established some of the earliest lighting systems in England. After the demonstration of a Charles F. Brush's arc lamp lighting system in Brighton in 1881 Hammond established the Hammond Electric Light and Power Supply Company, Limited to supply electricity so that shopkeepers located on Queens Road and Western Road could install electric lighting in their premises. Hammond started supplying power in January 1882 with sixteen arc-lamps in a series – with an unbroken supply thus Brighton, England may be able to claim the oldest continuous public electricity supply in the world. The publication of his 1884 book was strictly about lighting in the home – advantages and disadvantages. Hammond sold the company in 1885.