The coal-industry lobbying group, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, has released a kids’ coloring book starring Power Rock (“POWER ROCK!”) and his sidekick, Squirt. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s not unprecedented.

Joel Eisen (@joeleisen), University of Richmond law professor, pointed out to me that it is really just “Reddy Kilowatt redux.” This humanoid is Reddy Kilowatt:

Reddy Kilowatt was born on March 11, 1926, the fine work of  Ashton B. Collins, general commercial manager of the Alabama Power Company.

“Collins, just home from an industry convention where a big problem under discussion was how to sell electricity as a servant of mankind, was gazing out the window into a thunderstorm, wondering what an electric servant might look like,” Toonopedia summarized the PR handout about Collins’ big moment. “All of a sudden, two lightning bolts merged and struck the ground as one. For a split-second, they reminded Collins of a human figure, and at that moment Reddy Kilowatt sprang from his brow full-grown, like Athena from that of Zeus.”

How could we sell electricity as a servant? Wait! Draw electric bolts with a vaguely human form! It’d be almost like, like-a, like a human servant but just made of electricity! Of course… It’s almost too easy.

(The story reminds me of the scene in Wayne’s World where Noah Vanderhoff’s wife describes her flash of insight about naming his arcades, Noah’s Arcades. “I just opened my mouth and out it came!” she says, beaming. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Vanderhoff,” replies Robe Lowe.)

In any case, Reddy went viral, among investor-owned utilities at least. He became the mascot (or mascoto) for more than 300 power companies. In the standard rendering, his torso and extremities are made of lightning bolts. His head is a lightbulb and his ears are sockets. In the 50s, he sang jingles, in keeping with the times. The YouTube video below features this excellent verse:

[voce di castrato]

I wash and dry your clothes
Play your radios
I can heat your coffee pot
I am always there
With lots of power to spare
Because I’m Reddy Kilowatt

[spoken, not sung, climbing into wall outlet]
Remember: Just Plug In
I’m Reddy!

Thomas Pynchon himself wishes he’d penned those lines.

But before we get into the cult of Reddy and the story of his battle with a knockoff, Willie Wiredhand, we should talk about why these mascots are important.

It’s funny to laugh at these weird, old animated figures, but they clearly meant something to the companies who used them. They were — first and foremost — effective marketing gimmicks. That should make us wonder: if electricity was so obviously great, as most technologists would contend, why did the utilities have to push it with lame mascots? Wasn’t it just, like, something people wanted?

Well, the investor-owned utilities in the cities and suburbs had a very specific task. They needed to promote electricity demand so they could justify building new plants. That was how they got paid, so they had to get people to abandon other ways of doing work and providing heating and cooling.

Get rid of the clothesline and put your clothes in the electric dryer! Why wash your own dishes by hand? Just get a dishwasher! Don’t open the windows and endure 77 degree temperatures, get an air conditioner! Once you’ve got that demand up-and-running through, you need to match the load for the winter. So, you start pitching electric space heaters, when insulation, proper house engineering, and a decent furnace might have done the trick.

The point here is that electricity wasn’t a panacea. It could help you do some things, but the choices were marginal. Maybe you could use electricity, but maybe something else worked just as well. For consumers, the choice wasn’t clear cut. There were other options for providing comfortable living aside from the very, very high energy home. (This is a story admirably told by Adam Ward Rome in his book The Bulldozer in the Countryside in the chapter, “From the Solar Home to the All-Electric House: The Postwar Debate Over Heating and Cooling.”)

If you were a utility, though, you did not have other options; you had to sell more power to grow. So, they pushed hard to increase electricity demand. Sounds nuts now, but the only demand response that the companies of the mid-century wanted was, “More please!” It’s important to remember that when you look at a chart plotting the rapid growth of electricity sales. The technology alone didn’t do that; companies and individuals did.

Many of the electricity marketing campaigns were conducted in conjunction with, or spiritually related to, the nuclear power push of the 50s and 60s. Economist Steven Cohn and long-time Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Alvin Weinberg have independently documented that nuclear optimism pervaded the electricity industry and while most people in the know thought the “too cheap to meter” stuff was nonsense, they did think that nuclear power would be much cheaper than the alternatives. (The low, low price of nuclear power turned out to be bogus for so many reasons that it’s another story.)

Imagine, though, that you were expecting to have a permanent monopoly with a product that was getting much cheaper to produce. It made sense to get big to compete with the other utilities.

The only problem is that from a thermodynamic point of view, it’s ridiculous to use electricity to heat homes. This is a point made by many engineers throughout the last half-century. By the time the electricity comes out of your plug, something like two-thirds of the heat value of the fuel that went into the generator has been lost. That might be an acceptable conversion ratio for making lumps of coal into electricity if you need high-quality power for your computer. But if what you wanted is the heat in the first place, it’s kind of silly.

Despite the lack of technical intelligence in such a system, the electric industry succeeded in getting millions of homes built without energy efficiency in mind. These houses locked millions of Americans into homes that need lots of energy to keep comfortable. Regionally appropriate building techniques, advocated in books like Design with Climate, were ignored.  They were replaced by cheap homes that substituted cheap energy for design. The homes are part of the infrastructure that makes the United States such a high-energy place.

In short, for both consumers and environmentalists, this housing stock is bad news. They are a major part of the infrastructure that makes the United States vulnerable to high energy prices. And old Reddy Kilowatt and his merry friends are partially responsible.

Ok, enough serious talk, let’s get back to the funny. Reddy effectively wired his way into the consciousness of a particular generation. He made TV appearances. He showed up in “kite safety” comic books with the Brady Bunch and Road Runner and Brer Rabbit. Granite Falls High School adopted the Kilowatt as their mascot. There were even knock-offs of old Reddy, like Willie Wiredhand, who represented the co-op utilities of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Willie’s creation story is actually quite like Reddy’s, but with the addition of beer.

“We were toying with ideas for a rural electrification symbol,” an old-time editor of the NRECA’s trade mag recalled. “I had tossed out the idea that the symbol ought somehow to portray rural electric service as the farmer’s hired hand, which in those days was almost the entire PR story we had to get across. Drew picked up both the idea and a sketch-pad one night at our home after a couple of beers.”

And there you had it, Willie was born. His legs were the prongs of the electric plug, his body the wire. He wore gloves and was tough.

The only problem was that Willie, by the reckoning of the investor-owned utilities as represented by Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., was a blatant knock-off of Kilowatt himself. It certainly didn’t help matters that Willie represented an organization, NRECA, that the private utilities had assaulted as being a socialistic enterprise.

In fact, Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., sued over the infringement and lost after a judge delivered what will go down as one of the funniest opinions ever to scoot out of the Appellate Court.

It should be a classic of jurisprudence. Here, the Appellate judge quotes from a District judge decision in which he recited the list of animated industrial characters that had been produced prior to Collins’ flash of insight.

‘Long prior to the adoption of Reddy Kilowatt by Collins, animated characters had been in common and widespread use as trade marks, and in advertising, promotion and public relations work for all kinds of products and services. Exhibits D-W; D-X; D-DD and D-EE are collections of such materials. Exhibit D-X is a collection of 258 registrations of animated characters granted by the U.S. Patent Office, illustrating the wide use of such characters as trade marks for a great variety of products and services. The fanciful, animated, humanized character made up from mechanical or electrical parts for use in advertising and promotional work did not originate with Collins. See Exhibit D-EE showing the following: Saturday Evening Post June 10, 1911, Hot Point, Miss Glad Iron and Miss Sad Iron, showing an animated electric iron; Saturday Evening Post (1920) French Battery & Carbon Co., showing Mr. Ray-O-Lite in connection with batteries. This character has a badge made up of jagged lines to simulate lightning or electricity. Other animated characters are there shown.

‘Prior to the date of Collins’ first license agreement on January 2, 1934, other animated characters were used as shown in Exhibit D-EE, including Planters Mr. Peanut, Ingram’s animated shaving cream jar and tube, Three Minute animated oat kernels and animated characters by Arkansas Power & Light Company, named ‘The Kilo-Watts’. Other advertisements showing animated characters used concurrently in advertising with Reddy Kilowatt include an animated telephone of the Bell System (1950); animated character, Mr. Plug-In (1942); an animated fluorescent light tube, and an animated electrical figure, Katie Kord. Items 68-73 of Exhibit D-D, all published in the nineteenth century show, respectively, an animated oil bottle, animated green peas and radishes, an animated insecticide bottle and hats and flatirons. Item 74 shows an animated ear of corn published in 1909 and Item 75 shows a gas light and an electric light in animated form named, respectively, ‘Miss Cubic Foot’ and ‘Miss Kilo Watt’, published in 1916. Exhibit D-RR is a group of magazines published by American Waterworks Association showing the use of an animated drop of water. It is humanized and is delivering messages and performing functions of the public water supply service in much the same way that plaintiff’s character has been used to personalize electric service. The character is known as ‘Willing Water’. The use of such characters for such purpose was in the public domain and plaintiff has no exclusive right to the use of animated characters in the electrical field.’”

In his later years, Reddy got made into a live-action character and that wasn’t good for anyone. He, or she, really, ended up on a small-market television station shilling for coal with a depressing, possibly drunken clown called Mr. Toot. It was a sad end for an important personification, but if you want to relive the glory years, just visit reddykilowatt.org for dozens of posts on America’s favorite lightning beam animated character with a lightbulb for a head.