During the late 19th century gas was the fuel of choice for homes throughout the UK, but slowly electricity began to gain popularity and a mania for mechanisation surfaced. Products emerged to replace the role of a servant in every room of the house, and many were overtly marketed as tools which would ease a housewife's drudgery. Stove top kettles were already well established kitchen appliances, so it took only a small leap of imagination to inspire the evolution of the electric kettle.

The first electric kettle was manufactured by Crompton & Co. in 1891, using the electrical heat radiator concept devised earlier by Crompton (left). Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, C.B., F.R.S., was born in Thirsk on 31 May 1845 and was educated at Harrow. He was a pioneer in the development of the electrical manufacturing and electricity supply industries and founded the firm bearing his name. He was the first important British manufacturer of generators and was responsible for many improvements in generator design. Crompton & Co. Ltd, of London, was established by Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton (1845-1940), one of the first men to bring electric street lighting and a public electricity supply to London. Crompton was the first major British manufacturers of electricity generators and domestic cookers, and continued in business until the 1960s, when it was taken over by Hawker Siddley.

As today, early kettles were used in the kitchen, and were seen as a compact and invaluable adjunct to the cooker. Most kettles of the 1920s and 1930s were made from copper like their stove top predecessors, but some offered nickel or silver plated finishes. A few were made from vitreous enamel and aluminium (mainly in the 1930's). Chrome plated finishes were introduced in the late 1930's and became standard by the mid 1940's, not to be challenged until the invention of the plastic jug kettle during the 1970's.

At first the Victorians could not detach themselves from the concept of heating the water over a burning fire, or perhaps from their understandable fear of mixing water and electricity, so almost all of the earliest models featured a separate compartment for the element with a water compartment above it. These kettles were almost indistinguishable from stove top models, except for the presence of a seam dividing the two compartments and a socket opposite the spout. For some thirty years kettles were all manufactured in this way, and a few models clung to this design until they finally died out in the mid 1940's. By the 1990's housewives, tired of the unsightly appearance of limescale, were ready for the reintroduction of the hidden element, and it was heralded as a breakthrough. Well now you know... it wasn't.

Meanwhile designers wrestled with challenges arising from using a submerged element. For example, in patent application 138039 dated August 27th 1919 made by Allen Samuel Ford, a commercial traveller from Taunton, proposed a means of keeping an element submerged so that it would not burn out when the kettle was emptied. A different patent, number 143020, tackling the same problem was applied for on May 6th 1919 by Electrical Engineers Duncan Murray White and William Pettet Brooks.

In 1923 Arthur L. Large, from Birmingham, invented the immersed heating resistor. In 1924 the British Electric Transformer Company Ltd and Ernest Ellwood applied for a patent on a cut out device which would prevent damage to the kettle if it was accidentally operated when empty. Similar mechanisms were patented by Premier, Hotpoint (patent 310581, applied 1928) and Swan, amongst others.

Incidentally, the earliest reference I can find to a whistling kettle is in patent application 152461 by CYRIL AUBREY LYNCH and WILLIAM HUMPHREY WEBSTER of York in 1919 for improvements to the whistling mechanism in a non-electric kettle.