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When we fall on stairs, we tend to blame ourselves and generally attribute the fall to carelessness or inattentiveness. In fact, design substantially influences the likelihood of whether you will fall, and how hurt you will feel when you have stopped bouncing. Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents.
Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings, of two successive steps measured horizontally), and the pitch is the overall steepness of the stairway. Humans have a fairly narrow tolerance for differing pitches. Anything more than 45 degrees is uncomfortably taxing to walk up, and anything less than 27 degrees is tediously slow. It is surprisingly hard to walk on steps that don’t have much pitch, so our zone of comfort is a small one. An
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The two times to take particular care on staircases are at the beginning and end. As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps. The most dangerous circumstance of all is having a single step in an unexpected place. Nearly as dangerous are stairs with four or fewer risers. They seem to inspire overconfidence.
Not surprisingly, going downstairs is much more dangerous than going up. Over 90 percent of injuries occur during descent. The chances of having a “severe” fall are 57 percent on straight flights of stairs, but only 37 percent on stairs with a dogleg. Landings, too, need to be of a certain size—the width of a step plus the width of a stride is considered about right—if they are not to break the rhythm of the stair user. A broken rhythm is a prelude to a fall.
Linseed oil is squeezed from the seeds of flax, the plant from which linen comes (which is why flaxseeds are also called linseeds).
A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression “sleep tight”),
Syphilis was coined in a poem by the Italian Hieronymus Fracastorius in 1530 (in his poem Syphilis is the name of a shepherd who gets the disease) but does not appear in English until 1718.
For the City of London, the death rolls—or Bills of Mortality as they were known in England—for 1758 list 17,576 deaths from more than eighty causes. Most deaths, as might be expected, were from smallpox, fever, consumption, or old age, but among the more miscellaneous causes listed (with original spellings) were: choaked with fat 1 Itch 2 froze to death 2 St Anthony’s fire 4 lethargy 4 sore throat 5 worms 6 killed themselves 30 French pox 46 lunatick 72 drowned 109 mortification 154 teeth 644
of cultures for so long that it is hard to know where to begin. The ancient Greeks were devoted bathers. They loved to get naked—gymnasium means “the naked place”—and work up a healthful sweat, and it was their habit to conclude their daily workouts with a communal bath.
To Romans the baths were more than just a place to get clean. They were a daily refuge, a pastime, a way of life. Roman baths had libraries, shops, exercise rooms, barbers, beauticians, tennis courts, snack bars, and brothels. People from all classes of society used them. “It was common, when meeting a man, to ask where he bathed,” writes Katherine Ashenburg in her sparkling history of cleanliness, The Dirt on Clean. Some Roman baths were built on a truly palatial scale. The great baths of Caracalla could take sixteen hundred bathers at a time; those of Diocletian held three thousand.
Devastating diseases arose, killed millions and then, often, mysteriously vanished. The most notorious was plague (which was really two diseases: bubonic plague, named for the swollen buboes that victims got in the neck, groin, or armpit, and the even more lethal and infectious pneumonic plague, which overwhelmed the respiratory system), but there were many others. The English sweating sickness, a disease about which we still know almost nothing, had epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528, killing thousands as it went, before disappearing, never to return (or at least not yet). It was
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Smallpox was of two principal types: ordinary and hemorrhagic. Both were bad, though hemorrhagic smallpox (which involved internal bleeding as well as skin pustules) was the more painful and lethal, killing 90 percent of its victims, nearly double the rate for ordinary smallpox. Until the eighteenth century, when vaccination came in, smallpox killed four hundred thousand people a year in Europe west of Russia. No other disease came close to the totals smallpox achieved.
Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory
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Water closet dates from 1755 and originally signified the place where royal enemas were administered. The French from 1770 called an indoor toilet un lieu à l’anglaise, or “an English place,” which would seem a potential explanation for where the English word loo comes from.
Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: “Going down into my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds … by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.”
Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries—scene of William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane—fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The house had nine beds—one for every seven occupants. A new word, of unknown provenance, sprang into being to describe such neighborhoods: slums. Charles Dickens
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In America in 1801, at the White House—or President’s House, as it was then called
Thomas Crapper (1837–1910), who was born into a poor family in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of eleven. There he became an apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and, in Britain, still familiar toilet with an elevated cistern activated by the pull of a chain. Called the Marlboro Silent Water Waste Preventer, it was clean, leak-proof, odor-free, and wonderfully reliable, and its manufacture made Crapper very rich and so famous that it is often assumed that he gave his name to the slang term crap and its many derivatives. In fact, crap in the lavatorial
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It was Henry Chadwick who decided, oddly and endearingly, that the symbol for a strikeout should be a K because it is the last letter of the word struck. (He had already used S’s for so many actions on the field that he felt he needed to enlist another letter for striking out.)
Snow announced his findings in a pamphlet of 1849, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which demonstrated a clear link between cholera and water contaminated with human feces. It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.
Snow managed to persuade the parish council to remove the handle from a water pump on Broad Street, after which cholera deaths in the neighborhood vanished—or so it is commonly reported. In fact, the epidemic was already subsiding by the time the handle was removed, largely because so many people had fled, thinking the very air was poisonous.
After the Great Stink it became clear that London’s sewage system needed to be rebuilt, and Bazalgette was handed the job. The challenge was formidable. Bazalgette had to insert into an immensely busy city some twelve hundred miles of tunnels, which would last indefinitely, carry away every particle of waste generated by three million people, and be able to handle future growth of unknowable dimensions. He would have to acquire land, negotiate rights of way, procure and distribute materials, and direct hordes of laborers. The scale of every aspect of the job was exhausting merely to
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In 1876, Robert Koch, then an unknown country doctor in Germany, identified the microbe, Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. Seven years later, he identified Vibrio cholerae, another bacillus, as the cause of cholera. At long last there was proof that individual microorganisms caused specific diseases. It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.
Linen was made from flax and was popular because flax grows tall—up to a height of four feet—and quickly. Flax can be sown one month and harvested the next. The downside is that flax is tediously demanding in its preparation. Some twenty different actions are required to separate flax fibers from their woody stems and soften them enough for spinning. These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem.
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Hemp was roughly similar to flax, but coarser and not so comfortable to wear, so it tended to be used for things like rope and sails. It did, however, have the evidently very considerable compensating advantage that you could smoke it and get high, which Barber believes accounts for its prevalence and rapid spread in antiquity. Not to put too fine a point on it, people throughout the ancient world were very, very fond of hemp, and grew more of it than they needed for ropes or sails.
When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn’t get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn’t actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.
Wigs were so valuable—a full one could cost £50—that they were left as bequests in wills. The more substantial the wig, the higher up the social echelon one stood—one became literally a bigwig.
All wigs tended to be scratchy, uncomfortable, and hot, particularly in summer. To make them more bearable, many men shaved their heads, so we should be surprised to see many famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures as their wives saw them first thing in the morning. It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder. The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats. By the late eighteenth century, hair powders were commonly colored—blue and pink were especially popular—and scented, too.
Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English from there: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pajamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.
The problem was, cotton was very hard to spin and weave. The solution to that problem is called the Industrial Revolution.
Weaving involves interlacing two sets of strings at right angles to form a mesh. The machine on which cloth was woven was a loom. All that a loom does is hold one set of strings tight so that a second set can be fed through the first to make a weave. The tight set of strings is called the warp. The second, “active” set is called the weft—which is simply an old form of the verb weave.
The jenny, incidentally, was not named after his daughter, as is often stated; jenny was a northern word for engine.
(It is as well to remember that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a sudden explosive event, but more a gradual unfolding of improvements over many lifetimes and in lots of different fields.)
Whitney patented his gin (a shortened form of engine) and prepared to become stupendously wealthy.
Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.
Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going “to bed”—that planted too stimulating an image—but merely that they were “retiring.” It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became “nether integuments” or simply “inexpressibles” and underwear was “linen.” Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing
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The word brassière, from a French word meaning “upper arm,” was first used in 1904 by the Charles R. DeBevoise Company.
Friedrich Engels came to England at the age of just twenty-one in 1842 to help run his father’s textile factory in Manchester. The firm, Ermen & Engels, manufactured sewing thread. Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London. It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made
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in 1851—a strange, mystically rambling parable on whale hunting, called simply The Whale. This was a timely book since whales everywhere were being hunted to extinction, but the critics and buying public failed to warm to it, or even understand it. It was too dense and puzzling, too packed with introspection and hard facts. A month later the book came out in America with a different title: Moby-Dick. It did no better there. The book’s failure was a surprise because the author, thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville, had enjoyed great success with two earlier tales of adventure at sea, Typee and
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Eventually, of course, Darwin devised a theory—survival of the fittest, as we commonly know it; descent with modification, as he called it—that explained the wondrous complexity of living things in a way that didn’t require the intervention of a deity at all. In 1842, six years after the end of his voyage, he sketched out a 230-page summary outlining the theory’s principal elements. Then he did an extraordinary thing: he locked it away in a drawer and kept it there for the next sixteen years. The subject, he felt, was too hot for public discussion.
Philip Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called “prochronism” in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over. Even fossils, Gosse insisted, had been planted in the rocks by God during his busy week of Creation.
Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand-new. The term is not recorded in English before 1879, when it appears in the magazine Notes & Queries in the sentence: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his weekend at So-and-so.” Even then, clearly, it only signified Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then only for certain people.
