by Bill Bryson
However, when Edison’s first practical installation did come, it was far more prominent and therefore more lastingly significant. Edison wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semiderelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1881–82, Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle. Back at Edison’s workshops, several of his men lost teeth to mercury poisoning from overexposure to Sprengel’s mercury pump. But all the problems were finally resolved, and on the afternoon of September 4, 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up for his scheme.
Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The lightbulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp stands and switches. Within months, Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world; within a year or so, his plants were powering thirteen thousand lightbulbs. Cannily, he put his incandescent bulbs in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: the New York Stock Exchange, the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn’t, in short, have a lot of vision. Indeed, he didn’t even file for a patent. Edison took out patents everywhere, including in Britain in November 1879, and so secured his preeminence.
By modern standards those first lights were pretty feeble, but to people of the time an electric light was a blazing miracle—“a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp,” as a reporter for the New York Herald breathlessly reported. It is hard to imagine now how bright and clean and eerily steady this new phenomenon was. When the lights of Fulton Street were switched on in September 1882, the awed Herald reporter described for his readers the scene as the customary “dim flicker of gas” suddenly yielded to a brilliant “steady glare … fixed and unwavering.” It was exciting, but clearly it was also going to take some getting used to.
And of course electricity had applications way beyond simply providing lighting. As early as 1893, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago displayed a “model electric kitchen.” It was exciting, too, though not yet very practical. For one thing, since electricity distribution was not yet general, it was necessary for most owners to build their own “electric plant” on the property to provide the necessary power. Even if they were lucky enough to be wired up to the outside world, utilities couldn’t supply sufficient power to make appliances work well. It took an hour just to preheat an oven; even then the oven could produce no more than a very modest 600 watts of heating, and you couldn’t use the stovetop at the same time as the oven. There were certain design deficiencies, too. The knobs to regulate the heat were just above floor level. To modern eyes, these new electric stoves looked odd because they were built of wood, generally oak, lined with zinc or some other protective material. White porcelain models didn’t come in until the 1920s—and they were considered very odd when they did. Many people thought they looked as if they should be in a hospital or a factory, not in a private home.
As electricity became more freely available, many people found it unnerving to be relying for comfort on an invisible force that could swiftly and silently kill. Most electricians were hastily trained and all were necessarily inexperienced, so the profession quickly became one for daredevils. Newspapers gave full and vivid accounts whenever an electrician electrocuted himself, as happened pretty routinely. In England, the poet Hilaire Belloc offered a snatch of doggerel that caught the public mood:
Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip—
The Terminals—flash—a sound like “Zip!”
A smell of burning fills the startled Air—
The Electrician is no longer there!
In 1896, Edison’s former partner Franklin Pope electrocuted himself while working on the wiring in his own house, proving to many people’s satisfaction that electricity was too dangerous even for experts. Fires due to electrical faults were not uncommon. Lightbulbs sometimes exploded, always startlingly, sometimes disastrously. The new Dreamland Park at Coney Island burned down in 1911 after a lightbulb burst. Errant sparks from faulty connections caused more than a few gas mains to explode, which meant that one didn’t even have to be connected to the electricity supply to be perilously at risk.
Something of the prevailing ambivalence was demonstrated by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who went to a costume ball dressed as an electric light to celebrate the installation of electricity in her Fifth Avenue home in New York, but later had the whole system taken out when it was suspected of being the source of a small fire. Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named Shirley Foster Murphy, in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies—eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness, and possibly even “the premature exhaustion of life.” One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.
For the first few years, no one thought of plugs and sockets, so any electrical appliances had to be wired directly into the system. When sockets did finally come in, around the turn of the century, they were available only as part of overhead light fittings, which meant having to stand on a chair or stepladder to plug in any early appliance. Wall sockets soon followed, but weren’t always terribly reliable. Early ones reportedly tended to crackle and smoke, and sometimes shot out sparks. At one stately home in Scotland, until well into Edwardian times it was the practice to throw cushions at one particularly lively wall outlet, according to the historian Juliet Gardiner.
Consumer growth was also held back by the depression of the 1890s. But electric lighting was ultimately irresistible. It was clean, steady, easy to maintain, and available instantaneously and in infinite amounts at the flick of a switch. Gas lighting had taken half a century to establish itself, but electric lighting caught on much more quickly. By 1900, in cities anyway, electric lighting was increasingly the norm—and electrical appliances ineluctably followed: the electric fan in 1891, the vacuum cleaner in 1901, the washing machine and electric iron in 1909, the toaster in 1910, the refrigerator and dishwasher in 1918. By that time, some fifty types of household appliances were reasonably common, and electrical gadgets were so fashionable that manufacturers were producing every possible kind they could think of, from curling tongs to an electric potato peeler. The annual use of electricity in the United States went from 79 kilowatt hours per capita in 1902, to 960 in 1929, to well over 13,000 today.
It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one. Thanks to Thomas Edison, electric lighting became the wonder of the age. Interestingly, as we shall see a little further on, electric lighting turned out to be one of the remarkably few Edison inventions that actually did what he hoped it would do.
Joseph Swan was so thoroughly eclipsed that few have heard of him outside England, and he isn’t terribly much celebrated there. Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography gives him a modest three pages, less than it gives to the courtesan Kitty Fisher or any number of talentless aristocrats. But then that’s much more than Frederick Hale Holmes, who doesn’t get mentioned at all. History is often like that.
* The French, according to A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, had a curious expression, which I pass on w
ithout comment: “By candle-light a goat is lady-like.”
* Both gasoline and kerosene were variously spelled in the beginning. Gesner actually termed his product “Kerocene” in his patent application of 1854. Scientists hate inconsistency, and petroleum geologists have from time to time tried to make the spelling of the terminal syllables match, but obviously without success. They have been equally unsuccessful with the terminal pronunciations of hydrocarbons, as evidenced by turpentine. The British resolved part of the problem by calling kerosene paraffin.
* South Foreland Lighthouse, now in the hands of the National Trust and very much worth a visit, became famous again in 1899 when Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first international radio signal from there to Wimereux in France.
• CHAPTER VII •
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By midcentury it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.
Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.
Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn’t actually start there; it doesn’t start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn’t have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.
Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.* This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.
Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.
It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.
Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.
The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire*—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.
All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth
enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.
Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This didn’t always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the North of England. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.
This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new joie de richesse. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—“dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.