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Book: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
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  1. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The
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  2. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. Once day - and don't expect it to be a distant day - many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield.The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.
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  3. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Moreover, wool wasn't sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    The telephone," he wrote, "may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker's voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we go in the world we recognize domesticity the moment we see it.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery products a golden glow and brought radiance to mustard. Lead acetate was added to drinks as a sweetener, and red lead somehow made Gloucester cheese lovelier to behold, if not safer to eat. There was hardly a foodstuff, it seems, that couldn't be improved or made more economical to the retailer through a little deceptive manipulation.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen
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  8. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy-the removal of a kidney stone-in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. {That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.}
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  9. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time- till the 1600s- before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers.
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  10. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers {craftsmen} and laborers "must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night"-giving an eighty-four-hour workweek.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    a modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose."
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  12. Bill Bryson _ At Home: A Short History of

    For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history-perhaps most-it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater. Dressing
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