The Making of Home Read online

  The first important technological developments in oil lighting emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Patented in 1780, the Argand lamp included improvements that allowed the flame to burn more brightly, and more cleanly. This new flame was, for the first time, now enclosed in a glass cylinder, called a chimney, which not only protected the flame from draughts, but further increased its brightness by creating an up-draught. A winding mechanism for the wick made it easier to use, while a reservoir to hold the oil was gravity-fed, giving a more constant supply, and therefore a more constant light. (G. F. Kersting’s The Elegant Reader (c.1814; see plate section, no. 27) shows an Argand lamp, in which this reservoir, above the shade to the left, can be clearly seen.) The success of this new lamp encouraged other manufacturers to work on improving efficiency, ease of use and, of course, brightness throughout the nineteenth century: wicks were repositioned, oil reservoirs repositioned, pumps added. From the 1830s, different types of oil were also becoming available. Colza, or rapeseed, was popular in France (although heavily taxed in Britain, so less common there), while the USA favoured camphene, distilled from turpentine and mixed with alcohol – cheap but on occasion dangerous. From the 1860s, paraffin, first distilled in 1846, began to be manufactured in commercial quantities. Both less expensive and less smelly than animal and vegetable oils, it was also less viscous, which allowed manufacturers to dispense with expensive pumps. (It also had a low flashpoint, which meant it exploded spectacularly, and spectacularly often, but its merits were felt to outweigh this liability.)

  As these constant small improvements suggest, while the light oil lamps gave was better, the lamps themselves were in many ways as troublesome as tallow candles. The reservoirs needed to be refilled and the wicks trimmed before every use. The glass chimneys, despite an extreme fragility, nevertheless had to be washed daily, or they grew so black with soot that no light penetrated. If not broken in handling, they were as much at risk each time the lamp was lit, cracking in the heat unless they were warmed very slowly and carefully. In Salem in 1835, one cautious housewife borrowed a pair of candlesticks (note, also, that she didn’t own any herself) every time she entertained, in case her lamps failed. They worked perfectly for weeks, she grumbled, and then, without warning, ‘They went out, they smoked, the oil ran over.’ The reservoirs also routinely leaked, and many women made lamp rugs, small mats made out of scraps or, after its invention, oilcloth, to place under each lamp to protect their furniture.

  In retrospect, lighting technology appears to have followed a simple trajectory: first oil, then candles, then gas, then electricity. The reality was more complex. No household used only candles, or only gas, or only oil. A single family may well have used an Argand lamp for those who sat sewing or doing similar types of close work at the family’s central table, while others read or drew or played the piano by the light of the fire; an older person might have needed a candle to read by, and, where affordable, candles were always used to light the family to their bedrooms at the end of the evening; poorer households used rushlights for many of these tasks. Different rooms, too, were better suited to different types of lighting: gas was good for a front hall, as it wasn’t easily extinguished by draughts; it was also ideal for children’s rooms, where the brackets could be placed high on the wall, safe from little fingers; elegant candles were for drawing rooms and company; sewing tables needed bright oil lamps. Yet even with all the new technology of the nineteenth century, older forms long remained in daily use. When in The House at Pooh Corner Tigger wakes Winnie the Pooh in the middle of the night, Pooh ‘got out of bed, and lit his candle’ as a matter of course. Household gas had been available for nearly a century by the time A. A. Milne wrote this in 1928, and electricity for thirty-odd years, but a candle was either his own default assumption, or was the bedroom illumination he thought would be familiar to the middle-class children who were his readers.

  Given the range of options, technologies and costs, no one type of lighting predominated. Gas was welcomed for its ease of use, but it remained expensive, and many districts were beyond the reach of the gas mains. Even when it was accessible, gas had many drawbacks. It smelt, it corroded metals and destroyed fabrics; it was dirty and left a sticky residue over everything. By 1885, gas was used in just 20 per cent of British households. It spread more widely only with the popularization of the incandescent gas mantle, invented by the Austrian Carl Auer von Welsbach in 1884. Gas mantles were small tubes filled with metallic salts that, when heated by a gas flame, gave a light which was ten times brighter than an Argand, while using a third of the energy. Gas mantles also had pilot lights, which meant that no longer were matches needed to light them. Safer, cleaner, brighter: once the mantles began to be made commercially, their benefits led to a marked increase in the adoption of gas lighting. By World War II, almost half of Britain’s working-class housing had access to gas, even as electricity was spreading at a similar rate.

  Like gas, electric lighting was initially expected to be an outdoor technology. In 1878, the avenue de l’Opéra in Paris was illuminated for nearly a kilometre by arc lights.* In London there was a temporary installation on the Thames embankment; the population of Sheffield watched football played under arc lights; and Godalming, in Surrey, had a plan to install electric street lighting as early as 1881. But while arc lighting was very bright, and very focused, its lack of diffusion left large areas in darkness. Hilaire Belloc was characteristically succinct:

  This system (technically called the Arc),

  Makes some passages too light, others too dark.

  Indoors, it was too glaringly bright to be used at all. It was only with the invention of the incandescent filament that light bulbs began to be tamed, domesticated, and therefore to win favour for electricity: by 1881, a great house in Scotland had been fully electrified. Initially light bulbs were prohibitively expensive, greatly hindering the adoption of the new technology. Not until the patents expired in 1893 did prices drop. From then, the comfortably-off could afford to think about installing the new technology. But in Britain electrification remained patchy – some rural areas were not fully electrified until as late as the 1960s.

  As so often, technological innovations had repercussions that were both unexpected, and extended far beyond the immediate impact of the inventions themselves. The various forms of improved lighting technologies may well have played a role in encouraging the trend for furniture to be moved away from the walls and placed permanently throughout a room, for example. There is no danger of stumbling against furniture in the dark when a room can be illuminated with the rasp of a match. There is no evidence for this one way or another, but it is notable that continental Europe was slow to adopt both the changing furniture layout and gas lighting, as was America.* Decades after the British had become used to furniture arranged throughout their rooms, one of the USA’s most influential household manuals rejected what it reported as a new fashion for arranging rooms, which made it look as if the furniture was ‘dancing a jig’. (There is a faint implication of rowdy drunkenness, or at least improperly decorous behaviour in this phrase, one that perhaps would not have been there with brighter lighting?)

  As is often the case, the design for each new technology was drawn from the design of older ones. With electricity, the method of turning lights on and off was adapted from gas, and so at first each lamp, or sometimes each branch of a chandelier, had its own switch. It was some time before it was realized that switches could be separated from the light source, and moved to the walls of each room. (It was even longer before the wall-switches were routinely placed by the entrance. That it is sensible not to have to cross a room in the dark is obvious only in retrospect.) The conceptual leap, from light fixture to wall, was enormous. Just as windowpanes had once been furniture rather than part of a building, so too had lighting been before gas and electricity. Today we no more think of selling a house without glazing than we think of removing the wiring and taking it with us when we move. Lighting became,
for the first time, not an independent unit, but part of the fabric of the house.

  There is always a gap between the lifestyles to which people aspire, and the means, financial or technological, by which they might achieve those aspirations. Many of the changes spurred by technological improvements affected the daily routines of millions who never lived in houses directly touched by the innovations themselves. Soon after World War II, the Office of the Military Government in US Occupied Germany mounted an exhibition called Amerika zu Haus (America at Home); its centrepiece was a life-sized model six-room house, complete with an up-to-date complement of American appliances. Guides extolled the ‘household miracles’ of toasters, washing machines, electric ovens and vacuum cleaners to the sell-out crowd of 43,000 visitors who walked through it over the next fortnight. None of these eager viewers, especially the 15,000 from East Berlin, had any expectation that they would ever own a house like this, or ever acquire its consumer durables. The house itself was twice the size laid down for housing by postwar West German legislation, and the consumer goods were similarly oversized for the European market. They were also both unaffordable and unavailable, not least because they were wired for US voltages. Nevertheless, those thousands of visitors were keen to see these technologies, and these commodities, even if they would probably never own them, for while the individual elements that made up this American dream-house were almost entirely unachievable, the ideas of home they represented were not.

  7

  The Home Network

  If market demand drives supply, it can also drive invention. In the seventeenth century, servants in the Netherlands were a highly taxed luxury: under 20 per cent of households could afford to employ a servant, and for all but the very richest or most nobly-born, housework was something that was undertaken by family members. By contrast, in the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth century, even the middle classes of northwestern Europe could draw upon a large and relatively inexpensive service economy. In the USA at this time, low-density populations kept the cost of labour high. Countries that relied heavily on paid labour, such as Britain, where one in four women were in domestic service at the end of the nineteenth century, tended to have householders who, understandably, saw little need for technology. If someone could be employed for a (relative) pittance to carry hot water for baths, why spend a (proportionate) fortune to install a hot water system? The rich clients of Arts and Crafts architects such as Lutyens or Voysey had fully staffed households, so they were unconcerned by the lack of attention these architects paid to the service areas of their houses, their modern, forward-looking façades masking old-fashioned and inconvenient back premises. Dutch housewives had been their own labour force in the seventeenth century, and a revolution in how houses were run was the result; so too in the USA did American women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drive another household revolution.

  As we have seen, for much of human history, cooking had taken place in the main living space. In the days of central hearths, a chain suspended the cooking pot from a pole over the fire, closer or further away, depending on its contents and the amount and type of fuel being burnt. When fireplaces were moved to the walls, an adjustable chimney-crane, of wood or iron, improved matters. The pot was lowered and raised as before, but the crane also now swung out into the room, which meant the cook no longer had to lean over the fire to stir the food. But the food, and the method of cooking, barely altered. Solids and a liquid were put in a pot to be boiled or stewed. It was rare that there was space for more than one pot over a single fire, and so more elaborate meals were made by placing different ingredients in nets in the single pot, hooking each one out of the liquid as it was ready. This remained the standard cooking method until stoves appeared in the industrial age, making it easier to cook using several pots and pans at one time.

  Most who lived in relatively well-populated districts did not bake at home, but relied on public bakehouses or bakeries for their bread. Those who lived in areas with clay industries might have small freestanding earthenware ovens, some dating from as early as the seventeenth century (and some still in use in the 1930s, in countries as distant as Wales and the USA). Otherwise, for those who lived too far from bakehouses, bread was baked by setting a breadstone and a pot to heat in the fire before the dough was placed on the breadstone and covered with the pot, to cook on the hearth in the residual warmth. Bread ovens, brick cubicles in which peat or wood was burnt, were the preserve of the very largest and richest households. Some were freestanding or, later, were built into the sides of fireplaces. These also cooked by indirect heat: after the fuel was consumed, the ashes were swept out and the dough placed inside to bake on the hot bricks. The relatively low temperature of these ovens was reflected in the length of time it took the contents to bake: two and a half hours for bread, two hours for a cake or a pie. (For non-cooks, a modern oven bakes these in 30–45 minutes.)

  As with baking, roasting began as an upper-class luxury. Few could afford the large cuts of meat, few could afford the fuel, and few could afford the labour, or the time as a joint was skewered and then turned in front of an open fire. In the seventeenth century, dogs, or servants, usually children, were stationed beside the spit to turn the meat steadily for the five hours it took to cook through by this method. With the arrival of coal fires, the skewer was repositioned over the grate bars, or given its own stand in front of the fire, with a dripping-pan underneath to catch the fat so it could be poured back over the joint to baste it as it cooked. By the eighteenth century, the disappearance of hooded chimneys and the arrival of the mantelpiece led to the creation of the bottle-jack, which clipped on to the mantel, with the roast suspended beneath; it had a clockwork wind-up mechanism, which removed the need for constant attention, thereby putting roasting within reach of more families.

  Apart from these innovations, however, cooking methods for the masses barely differed from those of the Middle Ages. Real change came only as coal became the primary domestic fuel; in England this frequently coincided with the development in room-usage that saw cooking migrate from the main room into its own dedicated space, the kitchen. It was in the eighteenth century that the first enclosed cooking range was created, but it was well into the 1800s before even middle-class households began to accept the idea. The range enclosed the heat source, the fire, most commonly by an iron surround. With that came the possibility of resting pans directly on the heat source, rather than over or in front of it. (In the regions of Europe that heated their houses with closed stoves, this was less of a novelty, of course.) Trivets were now fixed to the grate, and frying and sautéing broadened the earlier repertoire of boiled and stewed dishes. Gradually these ranges became more elaborate, with interior spaces for baking in ovens that were regulated by flues and dampers. For the first time too the temperature food was cooked at could be controlled. These closed stoves, as they were known, were for a long time the province of the wealthy, and only a few of the middle classes. In New England in 1848, Catharine Beecher, famous as the author of books of household management, ‘the American Mrs Beeton’, dismissed them as confined to ‘the settled areas’. She was almost certainly correct: while many books both in the USA and Britain refer to the new saucepans and pots that were available for use on these ranges, most recipes continued to give directions for cooking over an open fire. And indeed, most of the population did continue to cook that way, those in communities of any size using commercial cookshops and bakehouses for everything that could not be cooked in a pan or a pot over a small fireplace.*

  Although Beecher had considered it unlikely that her readers would own a modern closed range, it was she who took the first steps towards the idea that a kitchen could, or even should, be designed around its user’s tasks. The architects of houses for the great had not concerned themselves with how kitchens were organized – very often, on plans, the room is simply an empty square. Kitchens of the wealthy were used by servants, so it did not matter, while the rooms of the less wealt
hy had been so multi-purpose that little single-function planning was possible. By the nineteenth century, however, middle-class housewives had, or wanted to have, a separate room dedicated to food preparation, and Beecher, writing as a housewife, wanted that room adapted to suit her needs and convenience, not to have to adapt herself to suit the room. She grouped equipment not by appearance, but by the requirements of a cook or housekeeper. Her ideal kitchen had shelves near the workspaces, so that routine tasks could be performed without fetching and carrying: ‘half the time and strength is employed in walking back and forth to collect and return the articles used’. Her innovative layout included putting a dish-drainer beside the sink, with space underneath for towels and cleaning equipment; a ‘moulding board’, or worktop, was set above bins that contained the most frequently used ingredients, and more shelves were located overhead (see plate section, no. 29). She was similarly pragmatic about other elements, giving instructions on where to site the stove for maximum heat efficiency, which way doors should be hung to keep smells away from the living areas, and so on. Beecher was, in effect, delineating the outline of the fitted kitchen of the twentieth century.

  Such an organizational approach is taken for granted today, but it was slow to catch on. In the late 1880s, the kitchen in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s new house had a series of shelves along one wall, with a bread drawer, space for her milk-churns, and bins for flour, graham flour and corn meal, much as Mrs Beecher had proposed. But its owner’s amazement – ‘you could stand … and mix up anything, without stirring a step’, she marvels – suggests that this was the first time she had seen anything like it.