At Home

At Home takes you on a tour of the modern home, using each room as occasion to reminisce about the history of its tradition, thus enlightening you with how the amenities and comforts of everyday life you now take for granted have come to be.

You know the neanderthals had a tough time filling their stomachs. Hunting, gathering, learning what’s edible and what’s not through trial and error. These were tough times, no doubt. I have to admit though, that in my mind, somewhere around the 1600s, making sure you ate 2-3 times a day “must have become fairly easy.”

Ha! I could not have been more wrong.

Easy access to food is predicated on one thing: making it preservable. This process didn’t even start until the late 1700s. A confectioner from Paris, Nicolas Appert, was the first to try and can foods, sealing them in containers made of glass with a wax seal. However his seals weren’t really airtight, so the food could still be contaminated.

Bryan Donkin improved upon his concept, even launching the first commercial iron tin cannery, but wrought iron cans were heavy and almost impossible to open. Some even came with instructions to open them with hammer and chisel, and soldiers, well, they just shot the cans open with their rifles!

The first true relief at scale came with the invention of the can opener as we know it today: in 1925.

What none of this accounts for is that people rarely knew with certainty what they were eating, as food labeling has been required by law only since 1990 (!). Chalk was added to milk, dirt to tea and sand to sugar, to get more money out of less product. We now live in good times!

Today, mattresses are stuffed mainly with either springs or foam, and sometimes with a bladder filled with air or water. None of these were invented until the early 1900s – so what did people put into their beds before? Oh, all kinds of stuff: straw, feathers, horse hair, cotton, even sea moss and sawdust. Those were all pretty natural, but you know what nature attracts? Animals! Bedbugs, moths, mice, rats and other rodents were all too common companions while trying to get some shut-eye back then. When not all rustling beneath the sheets was of the good kind, you did well to keep a shoe close by, in case you needed to strike. Speaking of reproductive activities, they were considered a mere practical act back then. Having kids was good, but having fun while conceiving them? Nah-uh. Women were told to avoid board games and reading, as those could arouse them, and since masturbation was also considered filthy…