Hello all,

I've found an archive with old documents. Among other things, it appears that it contains bids submitted by electrical contractors in the 19th country, along with materials lists and invoices. There is a glimmer of hope for finding some kind a drawing, but hoping to find complete plans is probably too much.

This archive is owned by the state and I will have to submit requests to get each document retrieved.

Is anyone interested in seeing these documents, apart from me? I will go back next week anyway, but it will take a couple of weeks of tracking down documents this way. It's only open during office hours which is a bit of a hurdle.

Anyway, if anyone wants to see the documents, I'll have to scan them somehow which will be difficult.

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Some finds so far
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From the top of my head, here is the list of things included in a large private home in 1896. The change orders, which ended up costing more than the original bid, are included.

- Power to the lights
- Power to the two lifts (elevators)
- Power to the gate opener
- Possibly power to electroheat
- 3 (?) main panels, 10 sub panels
- 245 lightbulbs
- 2 high intensity arc lights
- Metal (steel?) conduit. Insulated!
- Boxes, like above
- Cables, double insulated, lead covered, steel armoured (if not in conduit).
- Outlets, a handful.
- Ordinary switches
- Switches with timers in the hallways. Depending on how you switched them, they gave two minutes of light or constant light.

The cover plates had to match the surrounding wall. Green marble walls with green marble switches, white marble walls with white marble or ivory cover plates. The handles were made of either oak or gold plated brass, depending of what matched the room.

In the room with walls of gold [sic!] the switch looked like a part of the wall.

I've found some details about how the panels and sub-panels were installed and how the cover plates were manufactured. (And by whom)

P.S. I have a surprise up my sleeve, but to show it I have to fill out a form where it says on the top that that permission is rarely granted.

245 LIGHTBULBS??????

How huge is this house?

It was built for a couple and is some 2000 square meters or a little over 20 000 square feet spread across some 30 rooms. The fact that the the ceilings are five meters up contributes greatly to the impression of size.

Edit to add that according to my calculations, the electrical system alone cost the equivalent of the annual wage for ten workers.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 01-13-2006).]

Sounds like a mansion!

Seriously. I'd love to see that house (and the installation, if it's still intact).

WOW! That's some amazing building and _very_ sophisticated technology for that time!
As far as I can tell by now the house where I live (1913-1914 apartment designed for quick money with seemingly upscale apartments) had a single light switch in each room, looking exactly like this one:



Not even the looong hallways (8.5m) had three-way switching, only one switch next to one end, near the front door. In each room there was usually one socket, some had more (seems to have depended on the first tenants, unlike the switch positions it varies from apartment to apartment).
The most sophisticated detail of the wiring seems to have been the stairway lighting with push buttons on each floor and a switch and big mercury relay in the basement. The switch had a day, evening and night setting and was controlled by the janitor. Day means off, evening means permanently on and night is 2 minutes or the like. The old relay and switch are long gone, but the wiring is still largely intact, keeping me scratching my head... each time 2 push buttons are pressed the same time the result is a dead short, but according to all my schematics that just isn't possible...

I'd love to read such old stuff!

The oldest thing I've ever seen is a 1937 invoice for some wiring.

C-H,
Yeah, mate, I'd be into that!.
Sven,
I agree, that would have been a gargantuan house with that many lights back then.
Nowadays, a house with that many lights in it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow, especially when you consider that a lot of top-end-of- the-market homes have a heap of them little 20 or 50W halogen lamps where as before there would have been a couple of large fittings per room.
Haven't we learned how to waste electricity since then?.

Very keen to read about it.

Must be a huge place with so many lamps.

The inclusion of a timing circuit for the lighting looks very advanced for those days.

Look forward to the details.

Thanks Ray

The history of domestic electrical use in the USA (I'm assuming it's about the same in Europe) is that until after 1910, only the very wealthy had electricity in the home. Labor-saving appliances had no market, since the presence of servants was a given. Usually the only appliances that would have been used were the iron (since it produced superior results to a stove-heated flatiron), and the fan, since there was no other practical means of powering one (yes, there were water-motors and alcohol-fired Stirling engines and the like, but who wouldn't opt for electricity if it were an option?).

Yes, of course it was a gargantuan house. Domestic electricity before 1910 was all about conspicuous consumption, so 245 bulbs in an 1896 house would not seem out of the question. Private lifts would also fall into this category.

C-H, if you can get these documents, I'd be an enthusiastic reader!

[This message has been edited by yaktx (edited 01-15-2006).]

Sven,

Who knows, maybe you will...

Gas lighting was the norm for Vienna until after WW I when electricity became big. Our house was wired for electricity right from the beginning in 1913, back then it was something unusual to have electricity in _all_ apartments of a house. Power was 220V DC back then, each apartment of 1000 sq. feet having two 4amp circuits for lights and sockets.

My grandmother from Germany was born in 1925 and still remembers having gas light at her first childhood home.

I'd say that wasn't even a mansion, that was a castle!

You're sure you didn't get the bids for the Royal Castle of Stockholm, are you?

No, that is roughly twenty times larger with some 600 rooms.

Many houses built here around the turn of the century had gas lighting. It's not unusual to find old Victorian houses which still have one or two gas lamps in place and connected to the supply.

Many of these places show evidence that the first electrical installations probably took place in the 1920s or 1930s.

Wow! I could never have imagined.

Me too! Pretty much all old gas stuff has disappeared with the changeover from town gas to natural gas here. Due to the 2.5 times higher caloric value of natural gas all old stuff would have needed to be converted and people were simply told conversion wasn't possible for any stuff older than maybe 10 years, so that dates the oldest useable gas appliances in Vienna to around 1960. Still, several of the old gas taps have survuved the gas company's Gestapo-methods and lurk around in kitchens and sometimes bathrooms, still connected to the supply.

The gas company of Upper Austria had the big marketing gag of lighting their parking lot with gas candelabres... aside of LPG operated camping lights these are the only real-life gas lights I've ever seen.