New terminology in the 1940s
New things and new times bring new words. Our times have produced some new terms, just as earlier times have done. Today we have our emails and our smart phones and Facebook and Instagram and texting and laptops and tablets and apps and OSs and coding and transistors and lots of binary stuff. The 1940s also gave us new words and expressions, some of which have already faded away, and others which became so commonplace that we have difficulty imagining life without them now.
Possibly one of the most major expressions that appeared for us in the 1940s was “farm electricity.” In the mid-1940s, “everybody” was getting electricity, “everybody” was wiring their house and outfitting their houses with electric lights. Of course electricity on the farm meant more than lights in the house and barns and chicken houses and along the paths outside, but electric lights were about the first topic of conversation. “We’re getting electric lights at our house.” Often the first electric lights in a home would be very basic, a single light fixture with an incandescent light bulb hanging from a cord from the ceiling, and with a pull-chain switch to turn it on and off. Plug-ins, or receptacles, as they might be called, were available, but many people put in only two or three in the house, not realizing that they would eventually need places to plug in appliances and radios and fans and other luxuries that would soon become near necessities.
We had “wall switches” from the beginning at our farmhouse in 1945. And, we had “plug-ins” as well. We even had two plug-ins in some rooms, like the kitchen. I guess people sometimes plugged in something back in the ’30s, but the expression “plug-in” came to be common in the 1940s, as we got electricity in our homes and started plugging-in electric lamps and radios and electric fans and electric toasters. The idea of a “plug-in” has evolved into today’s computer world, in that some computer programs can be expanded by plug-ins or add-ons, and easy to install devices came to be “Plug and Play technology.” Where would we be today without “plug-ins?” Even our wireless devices, our printers and our mouses and our smart phones might soon be powerless without those little plug-ins that we have in all the walls of our houses.
The coming of electricity also brought us the expression “high line.” I don’t hear that much anymore. The expression seems to have been replaced by the expression “power line.” Of course they were power lines all along, but in the exciting days when they were being strung across the countryside, we called them “high-lines.” They were “high lines” mostly because they were high, as high as the trees. We would follow the progress of the work crews, clearing the path for the high-line, and setting the poles, outfitting the poles with insulators and crossbars, and finally stringing the “high-lines” themselves. Before long, we could say the “high-line” is coming to our neighborhood, and, finally, “we’ve got the high-line to our place too now.” Not only were the high-lines high in the air, they also carried very high voltage electricity. The Rural Electrication Administration and the Carroll County Electric Coop, which were bringing electricity to us, led us to think of the flow of electricity on the wires as somewhat like the flow of water in a pipe. High pressure water, such as from a fire hose, could be really potent and powerful, even dangerous, and we were taught that the high voltage electricity on the high-lines was very potent and powerful, and dangerous. The high voltage power “on the line” had to be converted to a lower voltage for use in a house and farm applications, so we learned about “transformers.” Those metal cans on the high-line poles weren’t the robot toys that became popular in later years, the transformers converted the voltage on the high-line from thousands of volts down to 110 volts or 220 volts for use in homes and around the farm.
The 1940s also gave us “jet airplanes,” and “television.” We had had the “telegraph” for message signal- ling by the dots-and-dashes of Morse Code, and we had had the “telephone” which provided voice communication over the wire. World War II had given us radar and sonar. Now, the late 1940s gave us “television,” which was able to send pictures through the air using radio-like signals. We didn’t actually see a television set until the 1950s, but we began hearing about them in the 1940s. We got a TV in our home in 1953, and a “dial telephone” in 1954.
It was in the 1940s that we began getting “refrigerators,” usually Frigidaire brand, or Kelvinator or Philco. The Frigidaire brand was so common that many people in northwest Arkansas called refrigerators “frigidaires” no matter what the brand. Refrigerators quickly replaced the old “ice-boxes” and the web of country ice routes which used to deliver the ice for farm kitchens with ice boxes. In the 1940s we also began getting indoor bathrooms, and hot-and-cold running water in the house. In a single year we changed over from the outhouse with its old Montgomery Ward Catalog to an in-thehouse bathroom with some new-fangled stuff called “toilet paper.”
••• Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@ centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.