At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Coade is often credited as its inventor, but it seems more likely that Pincot had the method and she the money.

In any case, Pincot left the firm after just two years and was heard from no more. Eleanor Coade ran the business very successfully for fifty-two years until her death at the age of eighty-eight in 1821—an especially remarkable achievement for a woman in the eighteenth century.

Bricks are immensely heavy, and you can’t make really tall buildings with them—not that people didn’t try.

The Monadnock Building still stands, and is an extraordinary edifice.

Such is its weight that the walls at street level are six feet thick, making the ground floor—normally the most welcoming part of a building—into a dark and forbidding vault.

Chicago is built on mud flats: anything heavy deposited on Chicago soil wants to sink—and, in the early days, buildings pretty generally did sink.

Sidewalks were built with a severe slant, running upward from the curb to the building. The hope was that as the building settled, the sidewalk would come down with it into a position of perfect horizontality. In practice, it seldom did.

“raft” on which the building could stand, rather as a surfer stands on a surfboard. The raft under the Monadnock Building extends eleven feet beyond the building in every direction, but even with the raft, the building sank almost two feet after construction—something you really don’t want a sixteen-story building to do.

is a testimony to the skills of John Root that the building still stands.

A government office block called the Federal Building, constructed at a staggering cost of $5 million in 1880, took on such a swift and dangerou...

Something much stronger was needed, and that material was steel—which is just another kind of iron but with a different input of carbon.

Steel was a superior material in every way, but it couldn’t be made in bulk because of the high volume of heat required.

In 1856, the problem was unexpectedly—and indeed improbably—solved by an English businessman who knew nothing at all of metallurgy but loved to tinker and experiment. His name was Henry Bessemer

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.

in 1884, one of the trickiest of all, the internal supporting skeleton for the Statue of Liberty. Everybody thinks of the Statue of Liberty as the work of the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi,

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,

Eiffel was not a vain man, but in his next big project he made sure no one would fail to appreciate his role in its construction by creating something that was nothing but skeleton. The event that brought it into being was the Paris Exposition of 1889.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing.

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.

America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age. There would never be another time to equal it.

The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century’s end.

Europeans viewed America’s industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation, and finally alarm.

Books with titles like The American Invaders and The “American Commercial Invasion” of Europe sold briskly.

What particularly galled the Europeans was that nearly all the technological advances in steel production were made in Europe, but it was America that made the steel.

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.

Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation.

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.

Easily dazzled in those days, the Times ran ten thousand words of unrestrained gush reporting every detail of the event.

Many of the nouveaux riches traveled to Europe and began buying up fine art, furniture, and whatever else could be crated up and shipped home.

Hearst and his wife were not evidently the most sophisticated of buyers: when he told her that the Welsh castle he had just bought was Norman, she reportedly replied, “Norman who?”

The new rich began to collect not just European art and artifacts, but actual Europeans.

In possibly the only example ever of the super-rich being ironic, they called their Newport homes “cottages.” In fact, these were houses so big that even the servants needed servants.

The ostentation of these properties generated such widespread disapproval that a Senate committee for a time seriously considered introducing a law limiting how much any person could spend on a house.

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.

At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

one of the many Vanderbilt mansions, a breakfast nook was adorned with a Rembrandt painting. A children’s playhouse at the Breakers was larger and better appointed than most people’s actual houses;

The one member of the family who seemed immune from the urge to be extravagant or revolting was George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of the clan so painfully shy that people sometimes assumed him to be simple-minded. In fact, he was exceedingly intelligent and spoke eight languages.

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.

Edison, ever misguided, was confident that the invention would be “bigger than telegraphy.” Of course it wasn’t, but someone else was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching pen and redeveloped it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.

The first telephone installation began functioning in Boston in 1877. It allowed three-way communications between two banks (one of them the interestingly named Shoe and Leather Bank)

The real breakthrough was the invention of the switchboard the following year.

By the early 1880s, America had sixty thousand telephones in operation. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million.

The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.

By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America,

Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy.

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.

Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven.

He died, contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.

For many people, the new age of enormous wealth in America meant being able to indulge slightly peculiar whims. George Eastman of Kodak film and camera fame never married.