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An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.
With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.
Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”
National Museum of American History Archives Center
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”
I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Mike Munsell
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:
I'm a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.
Munsell:
I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?
Thompson:
My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn't give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ‘70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ‘70s, alcohol as well.
There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.
We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.
Munsell
And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?
Thompson
Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.
[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.
But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it's a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we're going to put his wages up. And that's a fair thing.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
Munsell:
The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?
Thompson:
Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.
But he's part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we're all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.
So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He's part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.
Munsell
Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?
Thompson
In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]
It was used in the 1939 World's Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it's really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people's electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.
Mike Munsell
I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We're coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?
Dr. Moana Thompson
I'm not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he's also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he's going to have value.
Munsell
I guess your research sort of doesn't get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?
Thompson
Well, I'm not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it's possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.
Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?
Thompson
Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.
Munsell
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?
Thompson
I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we've mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ‘20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.
And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.
So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.
And who knows, maybe that'll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.
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Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”
Everyone knows the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, the one that allegedly knocked over a lantern in 1871 and burned down 2,100 acres of downtown Chicago. While the wildfires raging in Los Angeles County have already far exceeded that legendary bovine’s total attributed damage — at the time of this writing, on Thursday morning, five fires have burned more than 27,000 acres — the losses had centralized, at least initially, in the secluded neighborhoods and idyllic suburbs in the hills above the city.
On Wednesday, that started to change. Evacuation maps have since extended into the gridded streets of downtown Santa Monica and Pasadena, and a new fire has started north of Beverly Hills, moving quickly toward an internationally recognizable street: Hollywood Boulevard. The two biggest fires, Palisades and Eaton, remain 0% contained, and high winds have stymied firefighting efforts, all leading to an exceedingly grim question: Exactly how much of Los Angeles could burn. Could all of it?
“I hate to be doom and gloom, but if those winds kept up … it’s not unfathomable to think that the fires would continue to push into L.A. — into the city,” Riva Duncan, a former wildland firefighter and fire management specialist who now serves as the executive secretary of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group, told me.
When a fire is burning in the chaparral of the hills, it’s one thing. But once a big fire catches in a neighborhood, it’s a different story. Houses, with their wood frames, gas lines, and cheap modern furniture, might as well be Duraflame. Embers from one burning house then leap to the next and alight in a clogged gutter or on shrubs planted too close to vinyl siding. “That’s what happened with the Great Chicago Fire. When the winds push fires like that, it’s pushing the embers from one house to the others,” Duncan said. “It’s a really horrible situation, but it’s not unfathomable to think about that [happening in L.A.] — but people need to be thinking about that, and I know the firefighters are thinking about that.”
Once flames engulf a block, it will “overpower” the capabilities of firefighters, Arnaud Trouvé, the chair of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, told me in an email. If firefighters can’t gain a foothold, the fire will continue to spread “until a change in driving conditions,” such as the winds weakening to the point that a fire isn’t igniting new fuel or its fuel source running out entirely, when it reaches something like an expansive parking lot or the ocean.
This waiting game sometimes leads to the impression that firefighters are standing around, not doing anything. But “what I know they’re doing is they’re looking ahead to places where maybe there’s a park, or some kind of green space, or a shopping center with big parking lots — they’re looking for those places where they could make a stand,” Duncan told me. If an entire city block is already on fire, “they’re not going to waste precious water there.”
Urban firefighting is a different beast than wildland firefighting, but Duncan noted that Forest Service, CALFIRE, and L.A. County firefighters are used to complex mixed environments. “This is their backyard, and they know how to fight fire there.”
“I can guarantee you, many of them haven’t slept 48 hours,” she went on. “They’re grabbing food where they can; they’re taking 15-minute naps. They’re in this really horrible smoke — there are toxins that come off burning vehicles and burning homes, and wildland firefighters don’t wear breathing apparatus to protect the airways. I know they all have horrible headaches right now and are puking. I remember those days.”
If there’s a sliver of good news, it’s that the biggest fire, Palisades, can’t burn any further to the west, the direction the wind is blowing — there lies the ocean — meaning its spread south into Santa Monica toward Venice and Culver City or Beverly Hills is slower than it would be if the winds shifted. The westward-moving Santa Ana winds, however, could conceivably fan the Eaton fire deeper into eastern Los Angeles if conditions don’t let up soon. “In many open fires, the most important factor is the wind,” Trouvé explained, “and the fire will continue spreading until the wind speed becomes moderate-to-low.”
Though the wind died down a bit on Wednesday night, conditions are expected to deteriorate again Thursday evening, and the red flag warning won’t expire until Friday. And “there are additional winds coming next week,” Kristen Allison, a fire management specialist with the Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center, told me Wednesday. “It’s going to be a long duration — and we’re not seeing any rain anytime soon.”
Editor’s note: Firefighting crews made “big gains” overnight against the Sunset fire, which threatened famous landmarks like the TLC Chinese Theater and the Dolby Theatre, which will host the Academy Awards in March. Most of the mandatory evacuation notices remaining in Hollywood on Thursday morning were out of precaution, the Los Angeles Times reported. Meanwhile, the Palisades and Eaton fires have burned a combined 27,834 acres, destroyed 2,000 structures, killed at least five people, and remain unchecked as the winds pick up again. This piece was last updated on January 9 at 10:30 a.m. ET.
On greenhouse gases, LA’s fires, and the growing costs of natural disasters
Current conditions: Winter storm Cora is expected to disrupt more than 5,000 U.S. flights • Britain’s grid operator is asking power plants for more electricity as temperatures plummet • Parts of Australia could reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days because the monsoon, which usually appears sometime in December, has yet to show up.
The fire emergency in Los Angeles continues this morning, with at least five blazes raging in different parts of the nation’s second most-populated city. The largest, known as the Palisades fire, has charred more than 17,000 acres near Malibu and is now the most destructive fire in the county’s history. The Eaton fire near Altadena and Pasadena has grown to 10,600 acres. Both are 0% contained. Another fire ignited in Hollywood but is reportedly being contained. At least five people have died, more than 2,000 structures have been destroyed or damaged, 130,000 people are under evacuation warnings, and more than 300,000 customers are without power. Wind speeds have come down from the 100 mph gusts reported yesterday, but “high winds and low relative humidity will continue critical fire weather conditions in southern California through Friday,” the National Weather Service said.
Apu Gomes/Getty Images
As the scale of this disaster comes into focus, the finger-pointing has begun. President-elect Donald Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, suggesting his wildlife protections have restricted the city’s water access. Many people slammed the city’s mayor for cutting the fire budget. Some suspect power lines are the source of the blazes, implicating major utility companies. And of course, underlying it all, is human-caused climate change, which researchers warn is increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires. “The big culprit we’re suspecting is a warming climate that’s making it easier to burn fuels when conditions are just right,” said University of Colorado fire scientist Jennifer Balch.
America’s greenhouse gas emissions were down in 2024 compared to 2023, but not by much, according to the Rhodium Group’s annual report, released this morning. The preliminary estimates suggest emissions fell by just 0.2% last year. In other words, they were basically flat. That’s good news in the sense that emissions didn’t rise, even as the economy grew by an estimated 2.7%. But it’s also a little worrying given that in 2023, emissions dropped by 3.3%.
Rhodium Group, EPA
The transportation, power, and buildings sectors all saw upticks in emissions last year. But there are some bright spots in the report. Emissions fell across the industrial sector (down 1.8%) and oil and gas sector (down 3.7%). Solar and wind power generation surpassed coal for the first time, and coal production fell by 12% to its lowest level in decades, resulting in fewer industrial methane emissions. Still, “the modest 2024 decline underscores the urgency of accelerating decarbonization in all sectors,” Rhodium’s report concluded. “To meet its Paris Agreement target of a 50-52% reduction in emissions by 2030, the U.S. must sustain an ambitious 7.6% annual drop in emissions from 2025 to 2030, a level the U.S. has not seen outside of a recession in recent memory.”
Insured losses from natural disasters topped $140 billion last year, up significantly from $106 billion in 2023, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer. That makes 2024 the third most expensive year in terms of insured losses since 1980. Weather disasters, and especially major U.S. hurricanes, accounted for a large chunk ($47 billion) of these costs: Hurricanes Helene and Milton were the most devastating natural disasters of 2024. “Climate change is taking the gloves off,” the insurer said. “Hardly any other year has made the consequences of global warming so clear.”
Munich Re
A new study found that a quarter of all the world’s freshwater animals are facing a high risk of extinction due to pollution, farming, and dams. The research, published in the journal Nature, explained that freshwater sources – like rivers, lakes, marshes, and swamps – support over 10% of all known species, including fish, shrimps, and frogs. All these creatures support “essential ecosystem services,” including climate change mitigation and flood control. The report studied some 23,000 animals and found about 24% of the species were at high risk of extinction. The researchers said there “is urgency to act quickly to address threats to prevent further species declines and losses.”
A recent oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge got zero bids, the Interior Department announced yesterday. This was the second sale – mandated by Congress under the 2017 Tax Act – to generate little interest. “The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to open more drilling in the refuge, calling it “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia.”
“Like it or not, addressing climate change requires the help of the wealthy – not just a small number of megadonors to environmental organizations, but the rich as a class. The more they understand that their money will not insulate them from the effects of a warming planet, the more likely they are to be allies in the climate fight, and vital ones at that.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap