At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials.

Log cabins were introduced by Scandinavian immigrants in the late eighteenth century, at which point they did rapidly catch on.

a design for a nine-hundred-foot-high guillotine, to commemorate France’s unrivaled contribution to decapitation.

By the early twentieth century, 10 percent of all British aristocratic marriages were to Americans—an

concrete houses became one of Edison’s more costly failures.

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

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

According to Clinton, one of the oldest of all urban legends, that rats come into homes by way of toilets, is in fact true.

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.

The grounds of stately homes weren’t so much parks as exercises in geometry.

For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit.

Before the nineteenth century lawns in any meaningful sense were the preserve almost exclusively of owners of stately homes and institutions with large grounds

Central Park in New York, which until the end of the nineteenth century was home to a roaming flock of two hundred sheep superintended by a shepherd who lived in the building that was until recently the Tavern on the Green.

many of the early mechanical lawn mowers were designed to be pulled by horses.

In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop.

In general, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, U.S. steps tend to be slightly higher, per unit of tread, than British ones, and European ones higher still,

for at least three centuries people lived on multiple floors yet had no convenient way of expressing it.

By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic, often in very significant quantities.

breathing at night was a degenerate practice.

An American named Eliza Ann Summers reported in 1867 how she and her sister took armloads of shoes to bed each night to throw at the rats that ran across the floor.

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned.

For the most part, women who had any medical complaint between neck and knees were required to point blushingly to the affected area on a dummy.

Nobody has ever bathed with as much devotion and precision as the Romans did.

The delivery rate to Rome worked out at an intensely lavish three hundred gallons per head per day, seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today.

Throughout the medieval period, an almost surefire way to earn lasting honor was to take a vow not to wash.

By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane.

as late as 1861 an English doctor could write a book called Baths and How to Take Them.

One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.

Water closet dates from 1755 and originally signified the place where royal enemas were administered.

in 1715 an edict reassured residents and visitors that henceforth the corridors would be cleared of feces weekly.

we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

It wasn’t until the invention of porcelain enamels, about 1910, that baths became durable and attractive.

In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath.

wool wasn’t sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked.

Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.

The world before the modern era was overwhelmingly a place of tiny coffins.

In poorer households—and that is what most homes were, of course—every person was, from the earliest possible moment, a unit of production.

Until well into the nineteenth century children received almost nothing in the way of legal protection.

Before the 1844 Factory Act reduced the workday for children, most worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week.

Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century,