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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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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”