There were more than four thousand people making electric-light bulbs in eight factories surveyed by the federal government at the end of 1907. The men among them included a small number of skilled metal tradesmen and electricians and many laborers, who stoked furnaces, handled freight, and moved cases of lamp components about the factories. Among the workers who actually made the lamps, 94.4 percent, or 2, 756, were women. The factories were all located in major urban agglomerations where their wares might be used and where many young women resided and sought employment. Almost 60 percent of the production workers, in fact, were between sixteen and twenty years of age; 35 percent were daughters of American parents, 40 percent had been born in the United States to immigrant parents, and only 25 percent were immigrants themselves. Plant managers expressed a clear preference for employees who had been born and educated in the United States. Consequently, the typical electric-lamp worker might be described as a seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter of German immigrants residing in a middling-sized town adjacent to New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, or Detroit.

In contrast to the common laborer who expended his strength in ways that seemed almost impervious to change, the lamp worker found herself at the very frontier of industrial innovation. The electrical industry was scarcely a generation old and was the product of modern research laboratories. Its leading companies had been consolidated by investment bankers in the early 1890s and had joined forces in a patent pool in 1896.