Around about Christmas 1879 a certain prominent person installed electric lighting in his home in Porchester Gardens using a battery of Grove Cells. This was not a very successful power source so a portable generator was then used.
I'd add a nice little history book Electricity Supply in the United Kingdom: A chronology (Electricity Council, 1987) that's available online. It doesn't seem to mention this specific case, but the first entry for 1880 claims the house of another big name to be lighted with - appropriately to that name - incandescent lamps, as "possibly the first in the world".
It's usually amusing to compare versions of technical history between countries. A very different set of names tends to come up in, e.g., American publications, regarding the first lighting, public supply, ac transmission, motor, etc, etc, even when not restricted to a country. Qualifiers such as "commercial", "permanent", "public", etc, are helpful for making claims more defensible. Someone showed me a list a few years ago of (from what I remember) 6 or so names that in various countries are considered the originators of 3-phase electricity. So even if this book were aimed at the world rather than the UK, we should be a bit cautious of "firsts". As it is, its focus is the UK but it does mention some particularly notable events elsewhere.
I'd add a nice little history book Electricity Supply in the United Kingdom: A chronology (Electricity Council, 1987) that's available online. It doesn't seem to mention this specific case, but the first entry for 1880 claims the house of another big name to be lighted with - appropriately to that name - incandescent lamps, as "possibly the first in the world".
It's usually amusing to compare versions of technical history between countries. A very different set of names tends to come up in, e.g., American publications, regarding the first lighting, public supply, ac transmission, motor, etc, etc, even when not restricted to a country. Qualifiers such as "commercial", "permanent", "public", etc, are helpful for making claims more defensible. Someone showed me a list a few years ago of (from what I remember) 6 or so names that in various countries are considered the originators of 3-phase electricity. So even if this book were aimed at the world rather than the UK, we should be a bit cautious of "firsts". As it is, its focus is the UK but it does mention some particularly notable events elsewhere.
