A New Age of Wonder: The Biggest Advancements of the Gilded Age

Jewels weren't the only things that glittered during the Gilded Age...

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An almost unbelievable promise rippled through late nineteenth-century Britain and America: life itself was about to speed up, light up, and link up.

Electric light flooded theatres and stately homes, steel stretched cities toward the clouds, and the telephone carried voices across oceans. Science was no longer a curiosity; it was a calling card of modern life.

The Gilded Age delivered glitter and grandeur, but also a cascade of inventions that changed how people moved, spoke, healed, worked, and played. Below, we follow that bright current from laboratory to living room, to learn the history behind some of the era’s most transformative innovations.

Lighting the Modern World

If you wanted a single evening to symbolise the new age, you could do worse than opening night at the Savoy Theatre in London, October 1881. The Savoy became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity, using Joseph Swan’s incandescent lamps.

Swan had demonstrated practical incandescent lamps in the North East by early 1879, while Thomas Edison perfected a long-lasting, high-resistance filament in the United States the same year. Both strands converged in Britain, where their companies eventually merged as Edison & Swan United.

For domestic life, Lord Armstrong’s house at Cragside in Northumberland became a showpiece. Powered by water from lakes he engineered himself, Cragside is widely credited as the first house lit by hydroelectricity. Arc lamps glowed there in 1878, and Swan’s bulbs followed in 1880, a moment the National Trust still interprets on site.