If the household does have electric heating for water and in the same time it using an electric cooking machine, it dosen't need 2 phases or 3 phases?
In Romania for one phase you can use no more then 6-7 Ampers on one phase and we have 230 Volts... at 120 Volts you need more Amps.
Gas lighting was used in Buchares too. Coal gas, or gaz aerian (aerial gas) how it was named here. I think it went out of service around 1950.
In 1943 natural gas camed in Bucharest. They had the intention to bring it before that, but the lack of funds and intrerest. Well, during W.W. 2 you had to use less oil, so at the big Grozăveşti * power plant (at 40 M.W.'s it was the most powerfoul in Romania) they bringed gas for boilers. Household natural gas, the 1st person in 1944, but natural gas becomed more common in households only after 1960 and some people had to wait for natural gas pipes for years 1980-2000. Well, there is the posibility of small household gastanks (butelii de aragaz).
Heh, I do have an old French book (1931) about electricity meters.
I thought that the thing with light on not all poles was a thing of Romania, because here electricity is expensive.
1998 holliday, Prahova country side (Prahova is a quyte developed county), disco (I was between 15 and 16 years of age back then), the lighths where turne of at 1-2 P.M., so we had to use an electric torch. And sometimes we missed the batteries (had to go to the city). When we got 4 D (R20) batteries, there was a very shiny Moon.
A song to rember me of that holliday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnbL0js_spo
Maybe that 1936-1937 Romanian magazine exagerated with the accesibility of refrigerators in U.S.A. in those years. But I do think that more people could afford them comparing to Germany, France, U.K.
Here is something intresting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nDSYpMXdKA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVfZCKCzEWg
* Grozav means great (not in the way of big, but more as hot shot, good thing), and Grozăveşti means "you are great". Probably there was a great guy in that are.
A guy named Victor Iliescu-Grozăveşti wrote some books about boilers.
In Romania, some household used sobe (don't know how that is called in English) for heating and boilers for hot water.