At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

The rest was just centuries and centuries of people quietly going about their daily business—eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused—and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

Mesopotamians invented and used the wheel, but neighboring Egypt waited 2,000 years before adopting it. In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn’t think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children’s toys. The Incas didn’t have wheels at all, or money or iron or writing. The march of progress, in short, has been anything but predictable and rhythmic.

Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicenter of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice.

For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced.

Many people considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew belowground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible. Only the Irish couldn’t afford to be so particular.

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set off in five leaky ships, in a brave but seriously underfunded operation, to find a western route. What he discovered was that between the Americas and Asia was a greater emptiness than anyone had ever imagined Earth had room for: the Pacific Ocean. No one has ever suffered more in the quest to get rich than Ferdinand Magellan and his crew as they sailed in growing disbelief across the Pacific in 1521.

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.

Steel was the material the Industrial Revolution had been waiting for. Everything from railway lines to oceangoing ships to bridges could be built faster, stronger, and cheaper. Skyscrapers became possible, and so cityscapes were transformed. Railway engines became robust enough to pull mighty loads at speed across continents.

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.

Railways allowed people to move out to distant suburbs and commute in to work. Suburbs gave homeowners greater space. More spacious properties allowed—indeed, all but required—the new breed of suburbanites to take an interest in gardening.

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

In practice, of course, things were not that precise. Architectural style doesn’t change just because a monarch dies. Nor does it stay still during the course of a long dynasty. Because the Georgian period went on so long, various architectural refinements and elaborations arose and either fell away or prospered independently, so that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish meaningfully between Neoclassical, Regency, Italianate Revival, Greek Revival, and other terms intended to denote a particular style, aesthetic, or block of time. In America, Georgian became an unappealing label after independence (it wasn’t actually much liked before), so there Colonial was coined for buildings predating independence, and Federal for those built after.

There had never been a house like it. This was, almost literally, the last house in the world. Before it lay an unexplored continent. Behind it was all the known world. Perhaps nothing says more about Jefferson and his house than that it faces away from that old world and into the unknown emptiness of the new.

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.

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.

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

Many devout people simply couldn’t accept that the Earth was as ancient and randomly enlivened as all the new ideas indicated. One leading naturalist, 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. Gradually, however, educated people came to accept that the world was not just older than biblically supposed but also much more complicated, imperfect, and confused. Naturally, all this undermined the confident basis on which clergymen like Mr. Marsham operated. In terms of their preeminence, it was the beginning of the end.