At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

But see the luscious Ligonier Prefers her post boy to her Peer

Whether in the country or in town, servants were warm, well fed, decently attired, and adequately sheltered at a time when those things meant a good deal.

Servants often made pretty good money from tips, too. It was usual when departing from a dinner party to have to pass a line of five or six footmen, each expecting his shilling, making a dinner out a very expensive business for everyone but the servants.

The inevitable fact was that servants, being only human, rarely possessed the acuity, skills, endurance, and patience necessary to satisfy the ceaseless whims of employers.

In the autumn of 1939,

For three months it was essentially illegal to show any light at night, however faint.

Drivers had to drive around in almost perfect invisibility—even dashboard lights were not allowed—so they had to guess not only where the road was but at what speed they were moving.

cars took to straddling the middle white lines, which was fine until they encountered another vehicle doing likewise from the opposite direction.

“During the first four months of the war,” Juliet Gardiner relates in Wartime, “a total of 4,133 people were killed on Britain’s roads”—a 100 percent increase over the year before.

Nearly three-quarters of the victims were pedestrians. Without dropping a single bomb, the Luftwaffe was already killing six hundred people a month, as the British Medical Journal drily observed.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity.

Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century.

In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later.

Until the late eighteenth century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some three thousand years. But in 1783 a Swiss physicist named Ami Argand invented a lamp that increased lighting levels dramatically by the simple expedient of getting more oxygen to the flame.

Argand’s lamps also came with a knob that allowed the user to adjust the flame’s level of brightness—a novelty that left many users almost speechless with gratitude.

The best light of all came from whale oil, and the best type of whale oil was spermaceti from the head of the sperm whale.

By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50—half an average worker’s weekly wage—yet still the remorseless hunt continued.

useless, sticky residue left over from the processing of coal into gas—he devised a way to distill it into a combustible liquid that he called (for uncertain reasons) kerosene.

By the late 1850s, total American output was just six hundred barrels a day.

Bissell called on a professor at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, and there he noticed a bottle of rock oil on the professor’s shelf.

The professor told him that rock oil—what we would now call petroleum—seeped to the surface in western Pennsylvania.

Bissell conducted some experiments with rock oil and saw that it would make an outstanding illuminant if only it could be extracted on an industrial scale.

Bissell’s novel idea was to drill for oil, as you would for water.

Reluctantly, they dispatched a letter to Drake instructing him to shut down operations. Before the letter got there, however, on August 27, 1859, at a depth of just under seventy feet, Drake and his men hit oil.

Although no one remotely appreciated it at the time, they had just changed the world completely and forever.

In its natural state, oil was really just horrible gunk. Bissell set to work distilling it into something purer. In so doing he discovered that, once purified, it not only made an excellent lubricant but also produced as a side product very considerable quantities of gasoline and kerosene.* The gasoline had no use at all—it was way too volatile—and so was poured away, but

At last the world had a cheap illuminant to rival whale oil. Once others saw how easy it was to extract oil and turn it into kerosene, a land rush was on.

John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president.”

Unfortunately, Bissell, Drake, and the other investors in his company (now renamed the Seneca Oil Company) didn’t prosper to quite the degree that they had hoped. Other wells produced far greater volumes—one

price of oil plunged catastrophically, from $10 a barrel in January 1861 to just 10 cents a barrel by the end of the year.

In 1878, a plot of land in Pithole City sold for $4.37. Thirteen years earlier it had fetched $2 million.

John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business.

By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes.

No human being in modern times has been richer.

Drake squandered the money he made and died soon after, penniless and crippled by neuralgia. Bissell did much better. He invested his earnings in a bank and other businesses, and accrued a small fortune—enough to build Dartmouth a handsome gymnasium, which still stands.

Gas had many drawbacks.

gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows.

left a greasy laye...

and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in...

But as the pressure was stepped up later in the day, the light could flare dangerously, scorching ceilings or even starting fires, wherever someone had forgotten to turn down the tap. So gas was dangerous as well as dirty.

was bright—at least compared with anything else the pre-electric world knew.

provided wonderful overall illumination. It made reading, card playing, and even conversing more agreeable. Diners could see the condition of their food; they could find their way around delicate fish bones and know how much salt came out the hole.

It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

The poor couldn’t afford it, and the rich tended to disdain it—partly because of the cost and disruption of installing it, partly because of the damage it did to paintings and precious fabrics, and partly because when you have servants to do everything for you already there isn’t the same urgency to invest in further conveniences.

Keeping warm remained a challenge for most people right through the nineteenth century.

A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn’t get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

but real comfort came only when people sealed off their fireplaces and brought a stove fully into the room. This kind of stove, known as a Dutch stove, smelled of hot iron and dried out the atmosphere, but at least it kept the occupants warm.

To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew), but danger could never be entirely avoided.

Argand lamps were top-heavy and therefore easily knocked over. And kerosene fires were almost impossible to put out. By the 1870s such fires were killing as many as six thousand people a year in America alone.

The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light.