At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world—whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over—eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house.

Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities:

virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.

much to the relief of Joseph Paxton, who had promised that it was stormproof but appreciated the confirmation.

The interesting thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that it happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant places were doing precisely the same things.

We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.

In fact, according to the furniture historian Edward Lucie-Smith, we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

Furniture historians are so starved of fact that they must even trawl through nursery rhymes.

In the whole of Britain, as far as can be told, just one door survives from the Anglo-Saxon period—a battered oak door in an outer vestibule at Westminster Abbey, which escaped attention until the summer of 2005, when it was realized that it was 950 years old and thus the oldest known door in the country.

A question worth considering is how you can tell how old a door is anyway. The answer lies in dendrochronology—the scientific counting of tree rings.

As one of his biographers has noted, “When Jefferson wrote that he planted olive trees and pomegranates, one must be reminded that he wielded no shovel, but simply directed his slaves.”

they didn’t so much light the way as provide distant points of brightness to aim for.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

Of all the minerals, the most vital in dietary terms is sodium, which we mostly consume in the form of sodium chloride—table salt.

We don’t need all that much—200 milligrams a day, about what you would get with six or eight vigorous shakes of a salt cellar—but we take in about sixty times that amount on average.

These are not intuitive acts, to put it mildly. Yet getting salt into the diet is one of the most profound urges in nature, and it is a universal one.

Nobody would die without spices, but plenty have died for them.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact. In return, the natives gave Columbus’s men syphilis.

Almost no single act in history has more profoundly changed the world than Columbus’s blundering search for eastern spices.

Although pepper and spices were what brought the East India Company into being, the company’s destiny was tea.

It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime.

Not everyone got the hang of tea immediately. The poet Robert Southey related the story of a lady in the country who received a pound of tea as a gift from a city friend when it was still a novelty. Uncertain how to engage with it, she boiled it up in a pot, spread the leaves on toast with butter and salt, and served it to her friends, who nibbled it gamely and declared it interesting but not quite to their taste.

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.

In 1901, J. P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty U.S. Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise the world had ever seen.

Because it was based on so many existing technologies, and because it proved so swiftly lucrative, a stream of people and companies challenged Bell’s patents or simply ignored them. Luckily for Bell, his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a brilliant and tireless lawyer. He launched or defended six hundred legal actions and won every one.

No less mysterious in our house is their predilection—I might almost say their determination—for dying in this room, the study.

Wherever there are humans there are mice. No other creatures live in more environments than the two of us do.

Mice and other rodents consume about a tenth of America’s annual grain crop—an

The usual defense against rat outbreaks is poison. Poisons are often designed around the curious fact that rats cannot regurgitate, so they will retain poisons that other animals—pet dogs and cats, for instance—would quickly throw up.

rats don’t actually infect us with plague. Rather, they harbor the fleas (that harbor the bacteria) that spread the disease.

In one famous survey he measured bacterial content in different rooms in various houses and found that typically the cleanest surface of all in the average house was the toilet seat. That is because it is wiped down with disinfectant more often than any other surface. By contrast the average desktop has five times more bacteria living on it than the average toilet seat.

The second most efficient way of spreading germs, Gerba found, is to flush a toilet with the lid up. That spews billions of microbes into the air. Many stay in the air, floating like tiny soap bubbles, waiting to be inhaled, for up to two hours; others settle on things like your toothbrush.

Brown bats, the most common species in America, consume up to six hundred mosquitoes per hour. Tiny pipistrelle bats—which weigh no more than a small coin—vacuum up three thousand insects apiece in the course of a night’s swoopings. Without bats there would be a lot more midges in Scotland, chiggers in North America, and fevers in the tropics. Forest trees would be chewed to pieces. Crops would need more pesticides. The natural world would become a very stressed place.

Rabies can be successfully treated, but only if the treatment is immediate. Once symptoms start, it’s too late.

Years of steady persecution followed, and bat populations in many places suffered shocking depredations. In one case, the largest bat colony in the world, at Eagle Creek, Arizona, experienced a population fall from thirty million to three thousand in a matter of years.

“more people die of food poisoning at church picnics annually than have died in all history from contact with bats.”

But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist.

Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.

Even on the most conservative calculations, however, stairs rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings, burns, and other similarly grim misfortunes.

When you consider how much falls cost society in lost working hours and the strains placed on health systems, it is curious that they are not studied more attentively. Huge amounts of money and bureaucratic time are invested in fire prevention, fire research, fire codes, and fire insurance, but almost none is spent on the understanding or prevention of falls.

About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.

Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway.

(You lean into the stairs when climbing, but hold your center of gravity back in descent, as if applying a brake.)

The two times to take particular care on staircases are at the beginning and end. As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.

Not surprisingly, going downstairs is much more dangerous than going up. Over 90 percent of injuries occur during descent.

One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects—an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did.