Apart from the unlucky recipients of electric shock documented in Chapter 3 and patients of electrotherapists, the primary encounter with electricity in the late nineteenth century was visual: the electric light. Yet, in more than one sense, early electric lighting caused major headaches for many of those who first encountered it and for reasons quite unlike those commonly attributed to coal gas illumination (Chapter 4). The aesthetic problems of electric lighting touched on by previous historians were not merely transitory inconveniences, they were serious enough to become a real challenge to those seeking to domesticate electricity. A related problem was that, for more than a decade after the public debut of Swan and Edison domestic lamps in 1880–1, electric light was so expensive that it could only be construed as a luxury affordable by the upper-middle classes and aristocracy; only the most optimistic projectors argued that it was a viable economic competitor to gas or candle lighting. In order to be represented as a luxurious commodity for the upper classes to consume, and for the rest of the population to aspire to, the electric light had to be represented within the aesthetic framework of luxury consumption as a (potentially) pleasant, even indulgent, experience.