At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Nutrition is a remarkably inexact science. Consider magnesium, which is necessary for the successful management of proteins within the cells. Magnesium abounds in beans, cereals, and leafy vegetables, but modern food processing reduces the magnesium content by up to 90 percent—effectively annihilates it. So most of us are not taking in anything like the recommended daily amount—not that anyone really knows what that amount should be. Nor can anybody specify the consequences of magnesium deficiency. We could be taking years off our lives, or points off our IQ, or the edge off our memory, or almost any other bad thing you care to suggest. We just don’t know.

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. In a normal diet it is almost impossible not to overload on sodium, because there is so much salt in the processed foods we eat with such ravenous devotion. Often it is heaped into foods that don’t seem salty at all—breakfast cereals, prepared soups, and ice cream, for instance. Who would guess that an ounce of cornflakes contains more salt than an ounce of salted peanuts? Or that the contents of one can of soup—almost any can at all—will considerably exceed the total daily recommended salt allowance for an adult?

Archaeological evidence shows that once people settled down in agricultural communities they began to suffer salt deficiencies—something that they had not experienced before—and so had to make a special effort to find salt and get it into their diet. One of the mysteries of history is how they knew they needed to do so, because the absence of salt in the diet awakes no craving. It makes you feel bad and eventually it kills you—without the chloride in salt, cells simply shut down like an engine without fuel—but at no point would a human being think: “Gosh, I could sure do with some salt.” So how they knew to go searching for it is an interesting question, particularly as in some places getting it required some ingenuity. Ancient Britons, for instance, heated sticks on a beach, then doused them in the sea and scraped the salt off. Aztecs, by contrast, acquired salt by evaporating their own urine. 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. Every society in the world in which salt is freely available consumes, on average, forty times the amount needed to sustain life. We just can’t get enough of the stuff.

A very big part of the history of the modern world is the history of spices, and the story starts with an unprepossessing vine that once grew only on the Malabar coast of southwestern India. The vine is called Piper nigrum. If presented with it in its natural state, you would almost certainly struggle to guess its importance, but it is the source of all three “true” peppers—black, white, and green.

Pepper has been appreciated since time immemorial in its native territory, but it was the Romans who made it an international commodity. Romans loved pepper. They even peppered their desserts. Their attachment to it kept the price high and gave it a lasting value. Spice traders from the distant East couldn’t believe their luck. “They arrive with gold and depart with pepper,” one Tamil trader remarked in wonder.

in 1497 Vasco da Gama, sailing for Portugal, decided to go the other way to the Orient, around the bottom of Africa. This was a much trickier proposition than it sounds. Contrary prevailing winds and currents wouldn’t allow a southern-sailing vessel to simply follow the coastline, as logic would indicate. Instead it was necessary for Gama to sail far out into the Atlantic Ocean—almost to Brazil, in fact, though he didn’t know it—to catch easterly breezes that would shoot his fleet around the southern cape. This made it a truly epic voyage. Europeans had never sailed this far before. Gama’s ships were out of sight of land for as much as three months at a time. This was the voyage that effectively discovered scurvy. No earlier sea voyages had been long enough for the symptoms of scurvy to take hold.

The real significance of Magellan’s voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

The British had always loved sugar, so much so that when they first got easy access to it, about the time of Henry VIII, they put it on or in almost everything from eggs to meat to wine. They scooped it onto potatoes, sprinkled it over greens, and ate it straight off the spoon if they could afford to. 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.

Sweet tea became a national indulgence. By 1770, per capita consumption of sugar was running at 20 pounds a head, and most of that, it seems, was spooned into tea. (That sounds like quite a lot until you realize that Britons today eat 80 pounds of sugar per person annually, while Americans pack away a decidedly robust 126 pounds of sugar per head.)

To the unending exasperation of the Chinese authorities, Britain became particularly skilled at persuading Chinese citizens to become opium addicts—university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales—so much so that by 1838 Britain was selling almost five million pounds of opium to China every year.

Thomas Coryate, an author and traveler from the time of Shakespeare who was famous for walking huge distances—including once to India. In 1611, he produced his magnum opus, Coryate’s Crudities, in which he gave much praise to the dinner fork, which he had first encountered in Italy. The same book was also notable for introducing English readers to the Swiss folk hero William Tell and to a new device called the umbrella.

Protocol ruled every action. If you wished to take a sip of wine, you needed to find someone to drink with you. As one foreign visitor explained it in a letter home: “A messenger is often sent from one end of the table to the other to announce to Mr B——that Mr A——wishes to take wine with him; whereupon each, sometimes with considerable trouble, catches the other’s eye.… When you raise your glass, you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity.”

One popular American guidebook, The Laws of Etiquette; or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society, informed readers that they “may wipe their lips on the table cloth, but not blow their noses with it.” Another solemnly reminded readers that it was not polite in refined circles to smell a piece of meat while it was on one’s fork. It also explained, “The ordinary custom among well-bred persons is as follows: soup is taken with a spoon.”

For a generation or so it was usual for a theatrical company to perform the first half of a play to an auditorium full of dozing servants who had no attachment to the proceedings and to perform the second half to a crowd of ill-mannered inebriates who had no idea what was going on.

Nutmeg is the seed of the tree; mace is part of the flesh that surrounds the seed. Mace was actually the rarer of the two. About a thousand tons of nutmeg were harvested annually, but only about a hundred tons of mace.

If you had suggested to anyone in 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, that New York would one day be the greatest city in the world, you would possibly have been marked out as a fool.

New York’s prospects in 1783 were not promising. It had housed more Loyalists than any other city, so the war had had an unhappy effect on its standing within the new republic. In 1790, its population was just ten thousand. Philadelphia, Boston, and even Charleston were all busier ports.

Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years.

Throughout history Britons have used and needed a lot of wood. A typical farmhouse of the fifteenth century contained the wood of 330 oak trees. Ships used even more. Nelson’s flagship, Victory, consumed probably three thousand mature oaks—the

No one, other than perhaps the Luftwaffe, has done more to change the look of London than John Nash did over the next thirty years.

By the early Victorian era coal was being burned in England in positively prodigious quantities. A typical middle-class family could burn a ton a month, and nineteenth-century Britain suddenly had lots of middle-class families. By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world. In London the result was a near-impenetrable gloom through much of the year. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective has to strike a match—in daytime—to read something written on a London wall. So hard was it to find one’s way that people not infrequently walked into walls or tumbled into unseen voids. In one famous incident, seven people in a row fell into the Thames, one after the other.

Coal was hard on practically everything—on clothes, paintings, plants, furniture, books, buildings, and respiratory systems. During weeks of really bad fog, the number of recorded deaths in London could easily increase by a thousand. Even pets and animals at the Smithfield meat market died in disproportionately increased numbers.

There was just one problem with brick that became increasingly apparent as the century wore on and building space grew constrained. Bricks are immensely heavy, and you can’t make really tall buildings with them—not that people didn’t try. The tallest brick building ever built was the sixteen-story Monadnock Building, a general-purpose office building erected in Chicago in 1893 and designed shortly before his death by the architect John Root of the famous firm of Burnham and Root. The Monadnock Building still stands, and is an extraordinary edifice. Such is its weight that the walls at street level are six feet thick,

His full name was Alexandre Gustave Boenickhausen-Eiffel, and he was headed for a life of respectable obscurity in his uncle’s vinegar factory in Dijon when the factory failed and he took up engineering.

Everybody thinks of the Statue of Liberty as the work of the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, and it is of course his design. But without ingenious interior engineering to hold it up, the Statue of Liberty is merely a hollow structure of beaten copper barely one-tenth of an inch thick. That’s about the thickness of a chocolate Easter bunny—but an Easter bunny 151 feet high, which must stand up to wind, snow, driving rain, and salt spray; the expansion and contraction of metal in sun and cold; and a thousand other rude, daily physical assaults. None of these challenges had ever been faced by an engineer before, and Eiffel solved them in the neatest possible way: by creating a skeleton of trusses and springs on which the copper skin is worn like a suit of clothes. Although he wasn’t thinking of what this technique could do for more conventional buildings, it marked the invention of curtain-wall construction, the most important building technique of the twentieth century—the form of construction that made skyscrapers possible. (The builders of Chicago’s early skyscrapers also independently invented curtain-wall construction, but Eiffel got there first.) The ability of the metal skin to twist under pressure neatly anticipated the design of airplane wings long before anyone was seriously thinking about airplanes at all. So the Statue of Liberty is quite a piece of work, but because all that ingenuity is underneath Liberty’s gowns, almost no one appreciates it.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications—that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches—but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous. Many people loathed it, especially artists and intellectuals. A group of notables that included Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Paul Verlaine, and Guy de Maupassant submitted a long, rather overexcited letter protesting at “the deflowering of Paris” and arguing that “when foreigners come to see our exhibition they will cry out in astonishment, ‘What! This is the atrocity which the French have created to give us an idea of their boasted taste!’ ” The Eiffel Tower, they continued, was “the grotesque, mercenary invention of a machine builder.” Eiffel accepted the insults with cheerful equanimity and merely pointed out that one of the outraged signatories of the petition, the architect Charles Garnier, was in fact a member of the commission that had approved the tower in the first place.

Consider just the first 180 feet of the structure, up to the first platform—already the height of a ten- or twelve-story building. Up to that height the legs lean steeply inward at an angle of 54 degrees. They would clearly fall over if they weren’t braced by the platform. The platform just as clearly couldn’t be up there without the four legs underneath to support it. The parts work flawlessly when brought together, but until they are brought together they cannot work at all. Eiffel’s first challenge, therefore, was to devise some way to brace four immensely tall and heavy legs, each straining to topple inward; then, at the right moment, be able to ease them into position so that all four came together at exactly the right points to support a large and very heavy platform. An incorrect alignment of as little as one-tenth of one degree would have put any leg out by a foot and a half—far more than could be corrected without taking everything down and starting all over again. Eiffel effected the delicate operation by anchoring each leg in a giant container of sand, like a foot in a large boot, which held them securely during construction. Then, when work on them was complete, the legs could be eased into position by letting sand out of the boxes in a carefully controlled manner.

More time was spent designing the Eiffel Tower than building it. Erection took under two years and came in well under budget. Just 130 workers were needed on-site, and none died in its construction—a magnificent achievement for a project this large in that age. Until the erection of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930, it would be the tallest structure in the world.

The Eiffel Tower was the most striking and imaginative large structure in the world in the nineteenth century, and perhaps the greatest structural achievement, too, but it wasn’t the most expensive building of its century or even of its year. At the very moment that the Eiffel Tower was rising in Paris, two thousand miles away, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, an even more expensive structure was going up—a private residence on rather a grand scale. It would take more than twice as long to complete as the Eiffel Tower, employ four times as many workers, cost three times as much to build, and was intended to be lived in for just a few months a year by one man and his mother. Called Biltmore, it was (and remains) the largest private house ever built in North America. Nothing can say more about the shifting economics of the late nineteenth century than that the residents of the New World were now building houses greater than the greatest monuments of the Old.

America’s industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more basked in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings over $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn’t become a regular part of American life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.

A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party—possibly the most preposterous ever staged—several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry’s, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback. Many parties cost tens of thousands of dollars. On March 26, 1883, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt broke all precedent by throwing a party that cost $250,000, though as the New York Times judiciously conceded, it did mark the end of Lent. Easily dazzled in those days, the Times ran ten thousand words of unrestrained gush reporting every detail of the event.

The Vanderbilts were the richest family in America, with an empire founded on railroads and shipping by Cornelius Vanderbilt, “a coarse, tobacco-chewing, profane oaf of a man,” in the estimation of one of his contemporaries. Cornelius Vanderbilt—“Commodore” as he liked to be known, though he had no actual right to the title—didn’t offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual enchantment, but he had a positively uncanny gift for making money. At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

In 1888, he decided finally to build a place of his own. He bought 130,000 acres of wooded retreat in North Carolina and engaged Richard Morris Hunt to build him something suitably comfy. George decided he wanted a Loire château—but grander, of course, and with better plumbing—and so he built more with Biltmore (though he seems never to have noticed the pun). Closely modeled on the famous Château de Blois, it is a rambling, gloriously excessive mountain of Indiana limestone, comprising 250 rooms, a frontage 780 feet long, and a footprint of 5 acres. It was, and remains, the largest house ever built in America. For its construction, George employed a thousand workers at an average wage of 90 cents a day.

A few concrete houses were built and some actually still stand in New Jersey and Ohio, but the general concept clearly never caught on, and concrete houses became one of Edison’s more costly failures. That is really saying something, for Edison was good at making things the world didn’t yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them. He completely failed, for instance, to see the potential of the phonograph as a medium for entertainment, but thought of it only as a device for taking dictation and archiving voices—he actually called it “the speaking machine.” For years he refused to accept that the future of motion pictures lay in projecting images on screens because he hated the thought that they could become visible to someone who had slipped into the viewing chamber without buying a ticket. For a long time he held out for the idea of keeping moving images securely inside hand-cranked peepshow boxes. In 1908 he confidently declared that airplanes had no future.

After his costly failures with cement, Edison moved on to other ideas that mostly proved to be impractical or demonstrably harebrained. He developed an interest in warfare and predicted that soon he would be able to induce mass comas in enemy troops through “electrically charged atomizers.” He also concocted a plan to build giant electromagnets that would catch enemy bullets in flight and send them back the way they had come. He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, no one anywhere, Bell included, saw its full potential. Many didn’t see any potential for it at all. Executives from Western Union famously dismissed the phone as “an electrical toy.” So Bell proceeded independently and did rather well out of it, to say the least. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted. All Bell did really was put together existing technologies. The components necessary to make telephones had existed for thirty years, and the principles were understood.

Watson deserves more attention than history has given him. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1854, seven years after Bell was born in Scotland, Watson left school at fourteen and worked in various undistinguished jobs before hooking up with Bell. The two men were bound by the deepest feelings of respect and even affection, yet they never progressed to first-name terms, despite half a century’s friendship. It is impossible to say exactly how vital Watson’s role was in the invention of the phone, but he was certainly far more than a mere assistant. During the seven years he worked for Bell, he secured sixty patents in his own name, including one for the distinctive ringing bell that was for decades an invariable part of every phone call made. Remarkably, before this, the only way to know if someone was trying to get through to you was to pick up the phone from time to time and see if anyone was there.

By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became a U.S. citizen, and devoted himself to worthwhile pursuits.

Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled lunatic in 1881, Bell was called in to see if he could help locate the bullet. He invented a metal detector, which worked beautifully in the laboratory but gave confused results at Garfield’s bedside. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the presidential bedsprings. In between these pursuits Bell helped found the journal Science and the National Geographic Society, for whose magazine he wrote under the memorable nom de plume of H. A. Largelamb (an anagram of “A. Graham Bell”).

For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Mizner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Mizner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.

Edison’s family was also in Canada till shortly before he was born. It is interesting to consider how different North American history might have been if Edison and Bell had both stayed north of the border and done their inventing there.

These days the study is the final refuge of old furniture and pictures that one member of the marriage partnership admires and the other would happily see on a bonfire.

Wherever there are humans there are mice. No other creatures live in more environments than the two of us do. House mice—Mus musculus, as they are known on formal occasions—are wondrously adaptable with regard to environment. Mice have even been found living in a refrigerated meat locker kept permanently chilled at –10 degrees Celsius. They will eat almost anything. They are next to impossible to keep out of a house: a normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it. They could. They can. They very often do.

Two mice, breeding prolifically, could theoretically produce a million descendants in a year. That doesn’t happen in our homes, thank goodness, but very occasionally mouse numbers do get completely out of control. Australia seems to be particularly propitious in this respect. In one famous outbreak in 1917, the town of Lascelles, in western Victoria, was overrun with mice after an unusually warm winter. For a short but memorably lively period, mice existed in Lascelles in such densities that every horizontal surface became a frantic mass of darting bodies. Every inanimate object writhed under a furry coating. There was nowhere to sit. Beds were unusable. “The people are sleeping on tables to avoid the mice,” one newspaper reported. “The women are kept in a constant state of terror, and the men are kept busy preventing the mice from crawling down their coat collars.” Over fifteen hundred tons of mice—perhaps a hundred million individuals—were killed before the outbreak was defeated.

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

Each mouse voids about fifty pellets a day, and that results in a lot of contamination, too. Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

Almost everything that could be said of mice applies equally, but with multiples, to their cousins the rats. Rats are more common in and around our houses than we care to think. Even the best homes sometimes have them. They come in two principal varieties in the temperate world: the emphatically named Rattus rattus, which is alternatively (and tellingly) known as the roof rat, and Rattus norvegicus, or the Norway rat. The roof rat likes to be up high—in trees and attics principally—so the scurryings you hear across your bedroom ceiling late at night may not be, I’m sorry to say, mice. Fortunately, roof rats are rather more retiring than Norway rats, which live in burrows and are the ones you see scuttling through sewers in movies or prowling around garbage cans in back alleys.

“The high protein content that characterizes the more affluent neighborhoods is particularly enticing,” James M. Clinton, a U.S. health official, wrote some years ago in a public health report that remains one of the most compelling, if unnerving, surveys ever taken of the behavior of domestic rats. It isn’t merely that modern houses are full of food, but also that many of them dispose of it in ways that make it practically irresistible. As Clinton put it: “Today’s garbage disposals in homes pour out a bountiful, uniform, and well-balanced food supply for rats.” According to Clinton, one of the oldest of all urban legends, that rats come into homes by way of toilets, is in fact true. In one outbreak, rats in Atlanta invaded several homes in wealthy neighborhoods, and bit more than a few people. “On several occasions,” Clinton reported, “rats were found alive in covered toilet bowls.” If ever there was a reason to put the lid down, this could be it.

Once in a domestic environment, most rats show little fear “and will even deliberately approach and make contact with motionless persons.” They are particularly emboldened in the presence of infants and the elderly. “I have verified the case of a helpless woman attacked by rats while she slept,” Clinton reported. He went on: “The victim, an elderly hemiplegic, hemorrhaged extensively from multiple rat-bite wounds and died despite emergency hospital treatment. Her 17-year-old granddaughter asleep in the same room at the time of the attack was unharmed.”

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. Anticoagulants are commonly used, too, but there is evidence to suggest that rats are developing resistance to them.