At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away.

was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is wh...

In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in theater fires in Britain, according to a report published in 1899 by ...

often more so since means of escape were constrained or impossible on various ...

The real need was for a practical electric light.

In 1846, rather out of the blue, a man named Frederick Hale Holmes patented an electric arc lamp. Holmes’s light was made by generating a strong electric current and forcing it to jump between two carbon rods—a trick that the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy had demonstrated but

arc lighting was never a huge success because it was complicated and expensive. It required an electromagnetic motor and a steam engine together weighing two tons, and needed constant attention to run smoothly.

Arc lights were way too bright for domestic use.

Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1881–82, Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle.

on the afternoon of September 4, 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up for his scheme.

Cannily, he put his incandescent bulbs in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: the New York Stock Exchange, the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn’t, in short, have a lot of vision.

As electricity became more freely available, many people found it unnerving to be relying for comfort on an invisible force that could swiftly and silently kill.

all were necessarily inexperienced, so the profession quickly became one for daredevils. Newspapers gave full and vivid accounts whenever an electrician electrocuted himself, as happened pretty routinely.

1896, Edison’s former partner Franklin Pope electrocuted himself while working on the wiring in his own house, proving to many people’s satisfaction that electricity was too dangerous even for experts.

Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named Shirley Foster Murphy, in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies—eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness, and possibly even “the premature exhaustion of life.” One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.

It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one.

was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically.

It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed.

Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire.

more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.

The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs.

A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds.

All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land.

Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry.

The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the North of England.

All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked.

The most prized wood of all was mahogany from the Caribbean. Mahogany was lustrous, warp-resistant, and sublimely accommodating. It could be carved and fretted into the delicate shapes that perfectly suited the exuberance of rococo, yet was strong enough to be a piece of furniture.

The central uprights of the chairs—the splats—could be worked in a way that was wondrous to a people who had never seen anything less clunky than a Windsor chair.

Mahogany would have been nothing like as esteemed a wood as it was had it not been for one other magical new material, from the other side of the Earth, that gave it the most splendid finish: shellac.

They began to operate a factory system on a large scale, cranking out pieces that were cut from templates, then assembled and finished by teams of specialists. The age of mass manufacture had been born.

and of no one is that more true than a shadowy furniture maker from the north of England named Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous.

He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named; before him, the names faithfully recalled monarchies: Tudor, Elizabethan, Louis XIV, Queen Anne.

nothing at all is known of his early life. His first appearance in the written record is in 1748, when he arrives in London,

and an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose.

The reason we all know Chippendale’s name today is that in 1754 he did something quite audacious. He issued a book of designs called The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, containing 160 plates.

The drawings were unexpectedly beguiling. Instead of being flat, two-dimensional templates, as was standard, they were perspective drawings, full of shadow and sheen.

but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani.

Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery.

The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.

we were to go back in time to a house in Chippendale’s day, one difference that would immediately strike us would be that chairs and other items of furniture were generally pushed up against the walls, giving every room the aspect of a waiting room.

(One reason for pushing them aside was to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping over furniture in the dark.)

Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather.

Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so.

the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it.

What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.

Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

fell to the great Captain James Cook to get matters onto the right course.

of the globe in 1768–71, Captain Cook packed a range of antiscorbutics to experiment on, including thirty gallons of carrot marmalade and a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for every crew member. Not one person died from scurvy on his voyage—a miracle t...

The realization that an inadequate diet caused not only scurvy but a range of common diseases was remarkably slow to become established.

Not until 1897 did a Dutch physician named Christiaan Eijkman, working in Java, notice that people who ate whole-grain rice didn’t get beriberi, a debilitating nerve disease, while people who ate polished rice very often did.