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before the arrival of the railways. It made the big house truly big, regardless of its physical size. The apogee was reached in the years between the end of the Great Famine and the late 1870s—an era when the big house was the control centre of the estate and where the landowner exercised social, economic, and political power over his tenants. An estate was like a state within a state—a little kingdom. S. E. Hood suggested that “[t]he independent self-sufficient spirit of the landowning elite was demonstrated by its desire to play the leading role in society”.2 It is the intention of this work to show that one aspect of that “leading role” was to introduce generations of Irish people to the benefits of technology and that, in that sense, many landlords were agents for the broad modernisation of Ireland.
Subsequent to this golden era, for many landlords, the status—if not the independence—of most big houses declined as power slipped away from their owners. This descent into relative obscurity occurred within a short period of around fifty years, the cumulative result of electoral franchise changes, the Land Acts, the effects of technology beyond the demesne wall, and the First World War. Some measure of independence and dignity was maintained, however, by survivors of all of these combined factors despite wholesale reductions in the number of staff employed. Even though access to the ever-spreading public utilities was denied to most big houses due to remoteness and cost of connection, their own demesne technology provided many of their needs until the middle of the twentieth century.
The published literature by historians of the period between 1800 and the 1930s is virtually silent regarding the use of technology by landowners, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century. W. E. Vaughan, in his wide-ranging review of landlord-tenant relations, did address this topic but within the context of agricultural improvements as part of estate management during the second half of the nineteenth century.3 L. J. Proudfoot discussed the “construction and enhancement of various public utilities and amenities” by the dukes of Devonshire in urban areas during the same period.4 This dialect was more in the nature of landlord investments for profit, rather than direct application