At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Of scurvy alone it has been suggested that as many as two million sailors

died between 1500 and 1850. Typically, scurvy killed about half the crew on any long voyage. Various desperate expedients were tried. Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either. Sometimes the toll was truly shocking. On a three-year voyage in the 1740s, a British naval expedition under the command of Commodore George Anson lost fourteen hundred men out of two thousand who sailed. Four were killed by enemy action; virtually all the rest died of scurvy. Over time, people noticed

In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods—bread and water chiefly—to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.

roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir—vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to

ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested foo...

It fell to the great Captain James Cook to get matters onto the right course. On his circumnavigation of the globe in 1768–71, Captain Cook packed a range of antiscorbutics to experiment on, including thirty gallons of carrot marmalade and a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for every crew member. Not one person died from scurvy on his voyage—a miracle that made him as much a national hero as his discovery of Australia or any of his other many achievements on that epic undertaking. The Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific institution, was so impressed that it awarded him the Copley Medal, its highest distinction. The British navy itself was not...

Christiaan Eijkman,

Clearly some thing or things were present in some foods, and missing in others, and served as a determinant of well-being. It was the beginning of an understanding of “deficiency disease,” as it was known, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize in medicine even though he had no idea what these active agents were.

Casimir Funk,

Funk also asserted that there was a direct correlation between a deficiency of specific amines and the onset of certain diseases—scurvy, pellagra, and rickets in particular. This was a huge insight and had the potential to save millions of shattered lives, but unfortunately it wasn’t heeded.

Put simply, we need vitamins a lot, but we don’t need a lot of them. Three ounces of vitamin A, lightly but evenly distributed, will keep you purring for a lifetime. Your B1 requirement is even less—just one ounce spread over seventy or eighty years.

The fundamental difference between vitamins and minerals is that vitamins come from the world of living things—from plants and bacteria and so on—and minerals do not.

Archaeological evidence shows that once people settled down in agricultural communities they began to suffer salt deficiencies—something that they had not experienced before—and so had to make a special effort to find salt and get it into their diet. One of the mysteries of history is how they knew they needed to do so, because the absence of salt in the diet awakes no craving. It makes you feel bad and eventually it kills you—without the chloride in salt, cells simply shut down like an engine without fuel—but at no point would a human being think: “Gosh, I could sure

do with some salt.” So how they knew to go searching for it is an interesting question, particularly as in some places getting it required some ingenuity. Ancient Britons, for instance, heated sticks on a beach, then doused them in the sea and scraped the salt off. Aztecs, by contrast, acquired salt by evaporating their own urine. These are not intuitive acts, to put it mildly. Yet getting salt into the diet is one of the most profound urges in nature, and it is a universal one. Every society in the world in which salt is freely available consumes, on average, forty times the amount needed to sustain life. We just can’t get enough of the stuff.

Cloves, the dried flowerbuds of a type of myrtle tree, grew on six similarly selective islands some two hundred miles to the north in the same chain, known to geography as the Moluccas but to history as the Spice Islands. Just to put this in perspective, the Indonesian archipelago consists of sixteen thousand islands scattered over 735,000 square miles of sea, so it is little wonder that the locations of fifteen of them remained a mystery to Europeans for so long.

He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without

chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.

sacrifice—refused to touch it. The Americas, it may be said, gained much from Europe in return. Before the Europeans stormed into their lives, people in Central America had only five domesticated creatures—the turkey, duck, dog, bee, and cochineal insect—and no dairy products. Without European meat and cheese, Mexican food as we know it could not exist. Wheat in Kansas, coffee in Brazil, beef in Argentina,

and a great deal more would not be possible.

the Caddo, saw its population fall from an estimated 200,000 to just 1,400—a drop of nearly 96 percent. An equivalent outbreak in modern New York would reduce the population to 56,000—“not enough to fill Yankee Stadium,” in the chilling phrase of Charles C. Mann. Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact. In return, the natives gave Columbus’s men syphilis.

Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750. Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime. It was easier to make at home than coffee, and it also went especially well with another great gustatory treat that was suddenly becoming affordable for the average wage earner: sugar.

Britons came to adore sweet, milky tea as no other nation had (or even perhaps could).

The rifle was an old-fashioned type loaded by tipping powder down the barrel.

The powder came in grease-coated paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. A rumor spread among the native sepoys, as the soldiers were known, that the grease used was

made from the fat of pigs and cows—a matter of profoundest horror for Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike, since the consumption of such fats, even unwittingly, would condemn them to eternal damnation. The East India Company’s British officers handled the matter with stunning insensitivity. They court-martialed several Indian soldiers who refused to handle the new cartridges, and threatened to punish any others who didn’t fall into line. Many sepoys became convinced that it was all part of a plot to replace their own faiths with Christianity. By unfortunate coincidence, Christian missionaries had recently become active in India, fanning suspicions further. The upshot was the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which the native soldiers turned on their British masters, whom they very muc...

When news of these cruelt...

British ears, retribution was swift and unforgiving. Rebellious Indians were tracked down and executed in ways calculated to instill terror and regret. One or two were even fired from cannons, or so it is often recorded. Untold numbers were shot or summarily hanged. The whole episode left Britain profoundly shaken. More than five hundred books appeared on the uprising in its immediate aftermath. India, it was commonly agreed, was too big a country and too big a problem ...

Mercury especially so. 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. According to one computation, no fewer than twenty thousand chemicals in common use are poisonous to humans if “touched, ingested or inhaled.” Most are twentieth-century creations.

Sodium chloride is strange stuff because it is made up of two extremely aggressive elements: sodium and chlorine. Sodium and chlorine are the Hell’s Angels of the mineral kingdom. Drop a lump of pure sodium into a bucket of water and it will explode with enough force to kill. Chlorine is even more deadly. It was the active ingredient in the poison gases of the First World War and, as swimmers know, even in very dilute form it makes the eyes sting. Yet put these two aggressive elements together, and what you get is innocuous sodium chloride—common table

The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, se...

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.

The one thing America had in quantity was wood. When Europeans arrived, the New World was a continent containing an estimated 950 million acres of woodland—enough to seem effectively infinite. But in fact the woods were not quite as boundless as they first appeared, particularly as the newcomers moved inland. Beyond the mountains of the eastern seaboard, Indians had already cleared large expanses and burned much of the forest undergrowth to make hunting easier. In Ohio, early settlers were astonished to find that the woods were more like English parks than primeval forests, and roomy enough to allow the driving of carriages through the trees. Indians created these parks for the benefit of bison, which they effectively harvested.

Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world. In London the result was a near-impenetrable gloom through much of the year. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective has to strike a match—in daytime—to read something written on a London wall. So hard was it to find one’s way that people not infrequently walked into walls or tumbled into unseen voids. In one famous incident, seven people in a row fell into the Thames, one after the other. In 1854, when Joseph Paxton suggested building an eleven-mile-long “Grand Girdle Railway” to link all the principal railway termini in London, he proposed to build it under glass so that passengers would be insulated from London’s unwholesome air. It was more desirable evidently to be inside with the thick smoke of trains than outside with the thick smoke of everything else.

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.

America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age.

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. 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.

Henry Clay Folger, president of Standard Oil (and distantly related to the Folger’s coffee family), began collecting First Folios of William Shakespeare’s plays, usually from hard-up aristocrats, and eventually acquired about a third of all surviving copies, which today form the basis of the great Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Many others, like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, built up great art collections, while some simply bought indiscriminately, none more so than the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who bought treasures so freely that he needed two warehouses in Brooklyn to store them all. 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 Vanderbilts were the richest family in America, with an 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. Cornelius Vanderbilt—“Commodore” as he liked to be known, though he had no actual right to the title—didn’t offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual enchantment, but he had a positively uncanny gift for making money. At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

The Vanderbilts grew so powerful and spoiled that they could get away, literally, with murder. Reggie Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, was a notoriously reckless driver (as well as insolent, idle, stupid, and without redeeming feature of any type) who ran through or over pedestrians on five occasions in New York. Two of those he flung aside were killed; a third was crippled for life. He was never charged with any offense.

The U.S. secretary of agriculture, J. Sterling Morton, marveled that Vanderbilt employed more men and had a larger budget for his single forest than Morton had for an entire federal department. The estate had two hundred miles of roads. It included a town—a small city, really—complete with schools, a hospital, churches, railroad station, banks, and shops to serve the estate’s two thousand employees and their families. Workers lived a prosperous but semifeudal existence, bound

by many rules. They were not allowed to keep dogs, for instance. To support the estate, George’s forests were logged for timber, and his many farms produced fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, poultry, and livestock. He also engaged in some manufacturing and processing.

Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented

Thomas Edison. The pen worked by rapidly punching holes in a sheet of paper to form an outline of letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected onto pages below, which allowed multiple copies of a document to be made quickly. 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.

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.)

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”).

Dreyfuss came up with a startlingly squat, slightly boxy, sleekly modern design in which the handset rested laterally in a cradle slightly above and behind a large dial. This of course became the standard model throughout most of the world for much of the twentieth century. It was one of those things—rather like the Eiffel Tower—that did its job so well and seemed so inevitable that it takes some effort to remember that someone had to imagine it, but in fact nearly everything about it—the amount of resistance built into the dial, the low center of gravity that made it next to impossible to knock over, the brilliant notion of having the hearing and speaking functions contained in a single handset—was the result of conscious and inspired thinking by a man who would normally never have been allowed anywhere near industrial design. Why AT&T engineers chose the youthful Dreyfuss for the project is forgotten, but they could not have made a better choice.

House mice—Mus musculus, as they are known on formal occasions—are wondrously adaptable with regard to environment. Mice have even been found living in a refrigerated meat locker kept permanently chilled at –10 degrees Celsius. They will eat almost anything. They are next to impossible to keep out of a house: a normal adult can squeeze through an opening just three-eighths of an inch wide, a gap so very tight that you would almost certainly bet good money that no grown mouse could possibly squeeze through it. They could. They can. They very often do.