Anyone who has been watching the Channel 4 documentary series 1900 House will have become aware just how much better off are the living conditions of 1999. The series which has taken the Bowler family back to live in Victorian times, shows them coping with a coal-fired kitchen range that takes 16 hours to bake a potato - provided it hasn’t gone out during the night - and heats the 25 gallon water tank through out the day. This was a middle class family - only the rich had electricity- who at least had running water and were connected to the sewage system. Their was lighting provided either by gas or candles. The house was perpetually dirty so it carpets had to be swept by a manual carpet sweeper, scrubbed or brushed. There was no refrigerator, so food had to be kept cold by being stood in water. During this century the standards of living accommodation has improved enormously. The advent of safe electricity and reliable sewage and sanitation was the first major breakthrough. Until just before the First World War keeping food cold was done in cold stores with huge amounts of natural ice. Mechanical and electrical refrigerators started to be made available from the 1920s but were not seen in most homes until after the war. Electricity helped freed the housewife by making large numbers of labour-saving devices - like the iron, the vacuum cleaner - readily available. Since then the kitchen has become a place where people can enjoy working rather than place of chores. Electricity has helped save time by doing jobs quicker and usually more efficiently. Doing the household washing was a laborious process. The arrival of launderettes and then the domestic washing machine and dryer helped further. Now domestic appliances range from food mixers, microwaves, electric kettles to DIY drills and lawnmowers. In the fifties and sixties future analysts predicted that one day all houses would be kept spotless by robot servants. That was a red herring that is unlikely to ever materialise. The closest thing to a functioning robot available commercially today is Robomow, a self-operating lawn mower. Plans to develop a smart vacuum cleaner are in experimental stages, hampered by the machine’s inability to distinguish between a wall and a pair of children’s Wellington boots. The houses of the future will be smart, capable of making decisions on their own but humans will still have to do most of the things they do today. But microprocessors set into appliances will help budget and even order food and supplies. Microsoft's Bill Gates has spent £30 million building a state of the art 45-room mansion – a temple to technology - on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle. Within 30 years most of the innovations in Bill’s dream home will be available to everybody else - at a fraction of the cost.