Th 1950's
was an explosion of colour for many things to do with the home.
And yes, the overhead light socket was once the only means of providing electricity to a room. Wall sockets existed of course, very early on, but the lack of appliances available (not to mention the price of those that were) meant that to keep down the cost of the installation of electricity in existing homes, often light fittings were the only power points fitted.
This presented three major saftey issues: firstly, an overhead lampholder suspended from a flex was never going to tollerate all the movement when the flex of a vacuum cleaner, iron, or hairdryer was attached to it, causing it to wear out quickly.
Secondly, the bayonet style plug was not capable of providing an earth connection, so a good deal of earthed appliances were used without the earth wire attached. Indeed back in the day, many a manufacturer gave instruction on how best to do this, in the case of Hoover cleaners they even went so far as to attach a 2-pin plug to a 3-core (earthed) cable, ready for the consumer to plug in!
Thirdly, one cannot underestimate the potential for the trips and falls and so on which must have taken place as people climbed on chairs and tables to plug in an appliance to the light socket.
There is also a theory that Hoover used to provide a dirtsearcher light to its cleaners to compensate for the fact that the user may well have had to remove the only artificial light source available in order to plug in the vacuum cleaner. This may or may not be true, but I think it is interesting. Of course, as soon as the manufacturers began making light fittings, so the production of all sorts of switches and adapters came onto the market too. One such beast was the 2-way light fitting adapter, allowing a bulb and an appliance to be attached to a light fitting at the same time.
Thankfully, as time progressed, more and more British Standards came into effect, and UK wiring became so much safer. We had high-quality accessories, and year after year changes to fuseboxes and so on meant that we are much safer now than ever before. However, sadly what has gone by the board now is the quality of our 13 amp plugs and electrical accessories. Even less than 15 years ago we still had the choice of many a high-quality UK bases electrical accessory manufacturer, but now several have gone out of business, whilst others have merged, and production of all -it would seem- has gone to the far east.
.
