At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Monticello suffered similarly after Jefferson’s death, though in fact it was already in a pretty decrepit state. A shocked visitor in 1815 recorded that nearly all the chairs were worn through and had pieces of stuffing sticking out of them. When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day after the issuing of the Declaration of Independence—he had debts of more than $100,000, a colossal sum, and Monticello was looking threadbare.

  Unable to afford the considerable upkeep on the house, Jefferson’s daughter put it on the market for $70,000, but there were no takers. In the end it was sold for just $7,000 to a man named James Barclay, who tried to make it into a silk farm. The enterprise failed miserably. Barclay ran off to the Holy Land to do missionary work, and the house became derelict. Weeds grew through the floorboards. Doors fell off. Cows wandered through empty rooms. Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famous bust of Voltaire was found lying in a field. In 1836, just ten years after Jefferson died, Monticello was bought for $2,500—a paltry sum for such a house even then—by an improbable figure named Uriah Phillips Levy. Nearly everything about Levy made him an unusual owner of a Virginian estate, but then nearly everything about him was unusual anyway. To begin with, he was a Jewish naval officer—the only one in the U.S. Navy. He was also difficult and obstreperous—qualities that his superiors didn’t like to see in any naval officer but ones that neatly fed any anti-Semitic prejudices they were inclined to hold already. Five times in his career Levy was court-martialed, and five times exonerated. Of equal consideration to his new neighbors was that he was from New York. A Jewish Yankee didn’t have many friends in Virginia. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Monticello was seized by the Confederate government and Levy fled to Washington, the nearest safe refuge. He appealed to President Lincoln for help, and Lincoln, with a neat appreciation of aptness, appointed him to a seat on the federal court-martial board.

  The Levy family owned Monticello for ninety years—far longer than Jefferson himself did. Without them, the house would never have survived. In 1923, they sold Monticello for $500,000 to the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which embarked on a long program of renovation. Not until 1954 was the work complete. Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.

  Had Thomas Jefferson and George Washington merely been plantation owners who built interesting houses, that would have been accomplishment enough, but in fact of course between them they also instituted a political revolution, conducted a long war, created and tirelessly served a new nation, and spent years away from home. Despite these distractions, and without proper training or materials, they managed to build two of the most satisfying houses ever built. That really is quite an achievement.

  Monticello’s celebrated contraptions—its silent dumbwaiters, dual-action doors, and the like—are sometimes dismissed as gimmicks, but in fact they anticipated by 150 years or so the American love for labor-saving devices, and helped make Monticello not just the most stylish house ever built in America but also the first modern one. But it is Mount Vernon that has been the more influential of the two. It became the ideal from which countless other houses, as well as drive-through banks, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions, derive. Probably no other single building in America has been more widely copied—almost always, alas, with a certain robust kitschiness, but that is hardly Washington’s fault and decidedly unfair to his reputation. Not incidentally, Washington also introduced the first ha-ha into America and can reasonably claim to be the father of the American lawn; among all else he did, he devoted years of meticulous effort to trying to create the perfect bowling green, and in so doing became a leading authority in the New World on grass seed and grass.

  It is remarkable to think that much less than a century separated Jefferson and Washington living in a wilderness without infrastructure from a Gilded Age America that dominated the world. At probably no time in history has daily life changed more radically and comprehensively than in the seventy-four years between the death of Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and the beginning of the following century—very nearly the same years, as it coincidentally happens, that marked the boundaries of our own Mr. Marsham’s quietly uneventful life in England.

  There is a small postscript to all this. In the summer of 1814, the British burned down America’s Capitol (an act of vandalism so infuriating to Jefferson that he wanted to send American agents to London to set fire to landmarks there), and with it went the Congressional Library. Jefferson immediately, and generously, offered his own library to the nation “on whatever terms the Congress might think proper.” Jefferson thought he had about 10,000 books, but when a delegation from the federal government came to survey the collection, they found that the number was in fact 6,487. Worse, when they had a look at the books, they weren’t at all sure they wanted them. Many, they felt, were of no use to Congress, as they covered topics like architecture, wine making, cooking, philosophy, and art. About a quarter were in foreign languages, “which cannot be read,” the delegation noted grimly, while a good many more were of an “immoral and irreligious nature.” In the end, the congressmen allotted Jefferson $23,900 for the library—considerably less than half its value—and rather grudgingly took it away. Jefferson, as might have been expected, immediately embarked on building a new library, and had accumulated about a thousand new books by the time of his death the following decade.

  Congress may not have been especially grateful for this windfall, but the purchase gave the infant United States the most sophisticated governmental library in the world and completely redefined such a library’s role. Government libraries previously had been mere reference rooms, designed for strictly utilitarian purposes, but this was to be a comprehensive, universal collection—an entirely different concept.

  Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last long. Thirty-six years after the Jefferson library was purchased, early on a Christmas Eve morning, one of the chimneys in the Capitol library caught fire. Because it was early and a holiday, no one was around to notice the fire or check its spread. By the time the blaze was discovered and brought under control, most of the collection was destroyed, including Jefferson’s precious copy of I quattro libri.

  The year of the fire, it almost goes without saying, was 1851.

  • CHAPTER XIV •

  THE STAIRS

  I

  We now come to the most dangerous part of the house—in fact, one of the most hazardous environments anywhere: the stairs. No one knows exactly how dangerous the stairs are, because records are curiously deficient. Most countries keep records of deaths and injuries sustained in falls, but not of what caused the falls in the first place. So in the United States, for instance, it is known that about twelve thousand people a year hit the ground and never get up again, but whether that is because they have fallen from a tree, a roof, or off the back porch is unknown. In Britain, fairly scrupulous stair-fall figures were kept until 2002, but then the Department for Trade and Industry decided that keeping track of these things was an extravagance it could no longer afford, which seems a fairly misguided economy, considering how much fall injuries cost society. The last set of figures indicated that a rather whopping 306,166 Britons were injured seriously enough in stair falls to require medical attention that year, so it is clearly more than a trifling matter.

  John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway. Even on the most conservative calculations, however, stairs rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings, burns, and other similarly grim misfortunes. When you consider how much falls cost society in lost workin
g hours and the strains placed on health systems, it is curious that they are not studied more attentively. Huge amounts of money and bureaucratic time are invested in fire prevention, fire research, fire codes, and fire insurance, but almost none is spent on the understanding or prevention of falls.

  “Perspective of a staircase” by Thomas Malton (photo credit 14.1)

  Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

  Eighty-four percent of people who die in stair falls at home are sixty-five or older. This is not so much because the elderly are more careless on stairs, but just because they don’t get up so well afterward. Children, happily, only very rarely die in falls on stairs, though households with young children in them have by far the highest rates of injuries, partly because of high levels of stair usage and partly because of the startling things children leave on steps. Unmarried people are more likely to fall than married people, and previously married people fall more than both of those. People in good shape fall more often than people in bad shape, largely because they do a lot more bounding and don’t descend as carefully and with as many rest stops as the tubby or infirm.

  The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.

  People fall in different ways in different countries. Someone in Japan, for instance, is far more likely to be hurt in a stair fall in an office, department store, or railway station than is anyone in the United States. This is not because the Japanese are more reckless stair users, but simply because Americans don’t much use stairs in public environments. They rely on the ease and safety of elevators and escalators. American stair injuries overwhelmingly happen in the home—almost the only place where many Americans submit themselves to regular stair use. For the same reason, women are far more likely to fall down stairs than men: they use stairs more, especially at home, where falls most commonly occur.

  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.

  According to Templer, stair safety is not one problem but two: “avoiding the circumstances that cause accidents and designing stairs that will minimize injuries if an accident occurs.” He notes how at one New York City railroad station (he doesn’t say which) the stair edges had been given a nonslip covering with a pattern that made it difficult to discern the stair edge. In six weeks, more than fourteen hundred people—a truly astonishing number—fell down these stairs, at which point the problem was fixed.

  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 inescapable problem with stairs is that they have to convey people safely in both directions, whereas the mechanics of locomotion require different postures in each direction. (You lean into the stairs when climbing, but hold your center of gravity back in descent, as if applying a brake.) So stairs that are safe and comfortable in the ascent may not be so good for going down, and vice versa. How far the nosing projects outward from the tread, for one thing, can materially affect the likelihood of a mishap. In a perfect world, stairs would change shape slightly depending on whether a user was going up or down them. In practice, every staircase is a compromise.

  Let’s look at a fall in slow motion. Descending a staircase is in a sense a controlled fall. You are propelling your body outward and downward in a manner that would clearly be dangerous if you weren’t fully on top of things. The problem for the brain is distinguishing the moment when a descent stops being controlled and starts being a kind of unhappy mayhem. The human brain responds very quickly to danger and disarray, but it still takes a fraction of a moment—190 milliseconds to be precise—for the reflexes to kick in and for the mind to assimilate that something is going wrong (that you have just stepped on a skate, say) and to clear the decks for a tricky landing. During this exceedingly brief interval the body will descend, on average, seven more inches—too far, generally, for a graceful landing. If this event happens on the bottom step you come down with an unpleasant jolt—more of an affront to your dignity than anything else. But if it happens higher up, your feet simply won’t be able to make a stylish recovery, and you had better hope that you can catch the handrail—or indeed that there is a handrail. One study in 1958 found that in three-quarters of all stair falls no handrail was available at the point of the fall’s origin.

  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.

  For a long time it was recognized that people going up and down steps appreciate being able to do so with a certain rhythm, and that this instinct could most readily be satisfied by having broad treads on short climbs and narrower treads on steeper climbs. Classical writers on architecture had surprisingly little to say on the design of stairs, however. Vitruvius merely suggested that stairs should be well lighted. His concern was not to reduce the risk of falls but to keep people moving in opposite directions from colliding (another reminder of just how dark it could be in the pre-electric world). It wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that a Frenchman named François Blondel devised a formula that mathematically fixed the relationship between riser and tread. Specifically, he suggested that for every unit of increased height the depth of tread should be decreased by two units. The formula was widely adopted and even now, more than three hundred years later, remains enshrined in many building codes even though it doesn’t actually work very well—or indeed at all—on stairs that are either unusually high or unusually low.

  In modern times, the person who took the design of stairs most seriously was, surprisingly, Frederick Law Olmsted. Although almost nothing in his work required it of him, Olmsted measured risers and treads fastidiously—sometimes obsessively—for nine years in an attempt to arrive at a formula that ensured staircase comfort and safety in both directions. His findings were converted into a pair of equations by a mathematician named Ernest Irving Freese. They are:

  and

  The first, I am told, is for when the going is fixed, and the second for when it is not.

  In our own time, Templer suggests that risers shou
ld be between 6.3 inches and 7.2 inches, and that goings should never be less than 9.0 inches, but ought to be more like 11.0, but if you look around you will see that there is huge variability. 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, but it doesn’t quantify the statement.

  In terms of the history of stairs, not a great deal can be said. No one knows where stairs originated or when, even roughly. The earliest, however, may not have been designed to convey people upward to an upper story, as you might expect, but rather downward, into mines. In 2004, the most ancient wooden staircase yet found, dating from about three thousand years ago, was discovered a hundred meters underground in a Bronze Age salt mine at Hallstatt in Austria. It was possibly the first environment in which an ability to ascend and descend by foot alone (as opposed to a ladder, where hands are needed, too) was a positive and necessary advantage since it would leave both arms free to carry heavy loads.

  In passing, one linguistic curiosity is worth noting. As nouns, upstairs and downstairs are surprisingly recent additions to the language. Upstairs isn’t recorded in English until 1842 (in a novel called Handy Andy by one Samuel Lover), and downstairs is first seen the following year in a letter written by Jane Carlyle. In both cases, the context makes clear that the words were already in existence—Jane Carlyle was no coiner of terms—but no earlier written records have yet been found. The upshot is that for at least three centuries people lived on multiple floors yet had no convenient way of expressing it.