At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

On December 16, 1773, a group of eighty or so colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, broke open 342 tea chests, and dumped the contents overboard. That sounds like a fairly moderate act of vandalism. In fact, it was a year’s supply of tea for Boston, with a value of £18,000, and so it was a grave and capital offense, and everyone involved knew so. Nobody at the time, incidentally, called it the Boston Tea Party; that name wasn’t first used until 1834.

Dinner finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, influenced by Queen Victoria. As the distance between breakfast and dinner widened, it became necessary to create a smaller meal around the middle of the day, for which the word luncheon was appropriated. Luncheon originally signified a lump or portion (as in “a luncheon of cheese”). In that sense it was first recorded in English in 1580. In 1755, Samuel Johnson was still defining it as a quantity of food—“as much food as one’s hand can hold.” Only slowly over the next century did luncheon come to signify, in refined circles at least, the middle meal of the day.

people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only a small evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk—a sadly appropriate word here—of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn’t do us any good at all.

The Naval Board also used lime juice rather than lemon juice because it was cheaper, which is why British sailors became known as limeys. Lime juice wasn’t nearly as effective as lemon juice. Incidentally, it was Americans, not Australians, who first applied the term limey to British sailors.

It has been estimated that as little as 1/25 of a teaspoon of mercury could poison a sixty-acre lake. It is fairly amazing that we don’t get poisoned more often.

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.

Four men—Charles Broadhead, James Geddes, Nathan Roberts, and Benjamin Wright—were appointed to get the work done. Three of them were judges; the fourth was a schoolteacher. None had ever even seen a canal, much less tried to build one. All they had in common was some experience of surveying. Yet somehow through reading, consultation, and inspired experimentation, they managed to design and supervise the greatest engineering project the New World had ever seen. They became the first people in history to learn how to build a canal by building a canal.

Highways in colonial America tended to be inordinately wide—165 feet across was not unusual—to provide safety from ambush and room to drive and graze herds of animals en route to market.

inserting different colored bricks to form a diamond pattern, known as a diaper. (The relationship between a pattern of bricks and a baby’s undergarment is that the baby garment was originally made from linen threads woven in a diamond pattern.)

Ceramics are baked clay. Depending on the type of clay and how intensely they are fired, they yield one of three different materials: earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain.

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, making the ground floor—normally the most welcoming part of a building—into a dark and forbidding vault.

As a building material, iron was of two types: cast iron and wrought iron. Cast iron (so called because it is cast in molds) was great at compression—supporting its own weight—but not so good under tension and tended to snap like a pencil when stressed horizontally. So it made excellent pillars, but not beams. Wrought iron, in contrast, was strong enough for horizontal duty but was more complicated, time-consuming, and expensive to manufacture since it had to be repeatedly folded and stirred while it was still molten. As well as making it comparatively strong, the folding and stirring made it ductile—that is, capable of being pulled, rather like taffy, and bent into shapes, which is why decorative objects like gates are made of wrought iron.

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. He was, to put it mildly, very good at it. He built bridges and viaducts across impossible defiles, railway concourses of stunning expansiveness, and other grand and challenging structures that continue to impress and inspire, including, 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, 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.

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.

In its finished state, the Eiffel Tower seems so singular and whole, so couldn’t-be-otherwise, that we have to remind ourselves that it is an immensely complex assemblage, a fretwork of eighteen thousand intricately fitted parts, which come together only because of an immense amount of the very cleverest thought. 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...

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. Although by 1889 steel was displacing iron everywhere, Eiffel rejected it because he had always worked in iron and didn’t feel comfortable with steel. So there is a certain irony in the thought that the greatest edifice ever built of iron was also the last.

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. With a value of $1.4 billion, it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the federal government if measured by annual revenue.

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.

in 1824 when Joseph Aspdin, a humble bricklayer in Leeds, in the north of England, invented portland cement, so called to suggest that it was as attractive and durable as portland stone.

The plan was to make a mold of a complete house into which concrete could be poured in a continuous flow, forming not just walls and floors but every interior structure—baths, toilets, sinks, cabinets, doorjambs, even picture frames. Apart from a few odds and ends like doors and light switches, everything would be made of concrete. The walls could even be tinted, Edison suggested, to make painting forever unnecessary.

The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted.

on March 10, 1876, a week to the day after Bell’s twenty-ninth birthday, the most famous moment in telecommunications history occurred in a small lab at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, when Bell spilled some acid on his lap and sputtered, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and an astonished Watson in a separate room heard the message clearly. At least that was the story Watson related fifty years later in a series of anniversary advertisements commemorating the telephone’s invention. Bell, who had died four years before the anniversary, had never actually mentioned spilled acid in any of his own recollections, and it would be odd, when you think about it, for a person startled by a searing pain in his lap to voice such a calm request, at normal volume, to someone who was not in fact present. Moreover, because of the prototype phone’s primitiveness, Watson could hear a message only when his ear was pressed to a vibrating reed, and it seems a touch unlikely that he would have had an ear cocked to a listening device on the off chance that Bell, seized by acidic pain, would call out to him. Whatever the precise circumstances, Bell’s notes confirmed that he did ask Watson to come to him and that Watson, in a separate room, heard the request clearly. History’s first telephone call had been made.

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”).

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. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, which quickly grew to employ four thousand men, producing a scale of stress and obligation way beyond anything he wished for, so he sold the business, converted to Islam, and became a follower of Edward Bellamy, a radical philosopher and quasi communist who for a short period in the 1880s enjoyed phenomenal esteem and popularity. Tiring of Bellamy, Watson moved to England in early middle age and took up acting, for which he showed an unexpected talent. He proved particularly adept at Shakespeare...

Dreyfuss didn’t design the dial itself. That had already been designed in-house, in 1917, by a Bell employee, William G. Blauvelt. It was Blauvelt who decided to put three letters with most, but not all, of the numbers. He assigned no letters to the first hole because in those early days the telephone dial needed to be rotated slightly beyond the first hole to generate a signal initiating a call. So the sequence ran 2 (ABC), 3 (DEF), 4 (GHI), and so on. Blauvelt left out Q from the outset, because it would always have to be followed by a U, limiting its utility, and eventually dropped Z as well because it didn’t feature enough in English to be useful. Every exchange was given a name, usually derived from the street or district in which it stood—Bensonhurst, Hollywood, Pennsylvania Avenue, for instance, though some exchanges used the names of trees or other objects—and the caller would ask the operator to be connected to “Pennsylvania 6–5000” (as in the Glenn Miller tune) or “Bensonhurst 5342.” When direct dialing was introduced in 1921, the names were reduced to two-letter prefixes and the convention became to capitalize those letters, as in HOllywood and BEnsonhurst. The system had a certain charm, but became increasingly impractical. A lot of names—RHinelander or SYcamore, say—were susceptible to confusion among those whose spelling was not of the first order. Letters also made it difficult to introduce direct dialing from abroad since foreign phones didn’t always come w...

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.

In optimum conditions (and in most houses conditions seldom are other than optimal) a female mouse can start breeding at six to eight weeks old and can give birth monthly thereafter. A typical litter consists of six to eight offspring, so numbers can very quickly mount up. Two mice, breeding prolifically, could theoretically produce a million descendants in a year.

Rats are smart and often work cooperatively. At the former Gansevoort poultry market in Greenwich Village, New York, pest control authorities could not understand how rats were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace. In a similar manner workers at a packing plant discovered how sides of meat, hanging from hooks, were knocked to the floor and devoured night after night. An exterminator named Irving Billig watched and found that a swarm of rats formed a pyramid underneath a side of meat, and one rat scrambled to the top of the heap and leaped onto the meat from there. It then climbed to the top of the side of meat and gnawed its way through it around the hook until the meat dropped to the floor, at which point hundreds of waiting rats fell upon it.

When rats are mentioned in a historical context, the one topic that invariably follows is plague. This may be not quite fair. For one thing, rats don’t actually infect us with plague. Rather, they harbor the fleas (that harbor the bacteria) that spread the disease.

It is commonly written that there is one rat for every human being in a typical city, but studies have shown that to be an exaggeration. The actual figure is more like one rat for every three dozen people. Unfortunately, that still adds up to a lot of rats—a quarter of a million in New York City, for instance.

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

Lice have developed an increasing resistance to pesticides, but the greatest reason for their increase, it seems, is low-temperature wash cycles in washing machines. As Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Centre has put it: “If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.”

Altogether you hold about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells in your body. If you took them out and put them in a pile, they would weigh about four pounds.

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 dirtiest area of all was the kitchen sink, closely followed by the kitchen counter, and the filthiest object was the kitchen washcloth. Most kitchen cloths are drenched in bacteria, and using them to wipe counters (or plates or breadboards or greasy chins or any other surface) merely transfers microbes from one place to another, affording them new chances to breed and proliferate. 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. That is, of course, yet another good reason for putting the lid down.

Hardly anybody likes bats, which is truly unfortunate because bats do much more good than harm. They eat enormous quantities of insects, to the benefit of crops and people alike. 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.

It is easy to suppose that park making consists essentially of just planting trees, laying paths, setting out benches, and digging the odd pond. In fact, Central Park was an enormous engineering project. Over twenty thousand barrels of dynamite were needed to reconfigure the terrain to Olmsted and Vaux’s specifications, and over half a million cubic yards of fresh topsoil had to be brought in to make the earth rich enough for planting. At the peak of construction in 1859, Central Park had a workforce of thirty-six hundred men. The park opened bit by bit, so it never had a grand opening.

Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

The Monticello visitors see today is a house Jefferson never saw but only dreamed of. It was never finished in his lifetime, or even in really good shape. For fifty-four years Jefferson inhabited a building site. “Putting up and pulling down is one of my favorite amusements,” he remarked cheerfully, and it was just as well, for he never stopped tinkering and messing. Because the work was so protracted, some parts of Monticello were actively deteriorating while others were still abuilding.

Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that itself ran to more than 650 pages. He kept a record of every cent earned and spent. He recorded how many peas it took to fill a pint pot. He kept full, individual inventories for his slaves, giving an unusually complete record of how they were treated and what they owned.

Until comparatively recently books had been really quite rare. When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year. Jefferson, over the course of his life, bought books at the rate of about twelve a month, accumulating a thousand every decade on average.

Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction, and useful instruction than I quattro libri.

Although personally ascetic—Jefferson dressed less showily than his own household servants—he spent colossal sums on food and drink. During his first term as president he spent $7,500—equivalent to about $120,000 in today’s money—on wine alone. During one eight-year period, he purchased no fewer than twenty thousand bottles of wine. Even at the age of eighty-two and hopelessly saddled with debts, he was “still ordering Muscat de Rivesaltes in 150-bottle lots,” as one biographer notes with undisguised wonder.

Unable to afford the considerable upkeep on the house, Jefferson’s daughter put it on the market for $70,000, but there were no takers. In the end it was sold for just $7,000 to a man named James Barclay, who tried to make it into a silk farm. The enterprise failed miserably. Barclay ran off to the Holy Land to do missionary work, and the house became derelict.

Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items.

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.

Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

Eighty-four percent of people who die in stair falls at home are sixty-five or older. This is not so much because the elderly are more careless on stairs, but just because they don’t get up so well afterward. Children, happily, only very rarely die in falls on stairs, though households with young children in them have by far the highest rates of injuries, partly because of high levels of stair usage and partly because of the startling things children leave on steps. Unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people, and previously married people fall more than both of those. People in good shape fall more often than people in bad shape, largely because they do a lot more bounding and don’t descend as carefully and with as many rest stops as the tubby or infirm.