At Home: A Short History of Private Life

  • Bill Bryson
Doubleday: 2010. 544 pp. £20 9780767919388 | ISBN: 978-0-7679-1938-8

Any scientist-turned-writer who tries to popularize their work soon realizes how hard it is to captivate a reader. Surveying an entire field makes the account too dull; just throwing in personal stories makes it too random. The beauty and excitement that drew scientists to their research disappears. They need help.

Which is why Bill Bryson was created. His latest work, At Home, is a slow walk through an ordinary family home, bringing in the history of hygiene, energy use, lighting technology and much else on the way. Bryson lures readers into a discussion of science not by presenting the facts directly, but by offering a compelling vision of the home as a nexus at which history and technology meets. The reader develops a thirst to understand that vision, and in the process absorbs the science that underpins it.

Before salt came in shakers, the Aztecs had to acquire it from urine. Credit: COMSTOCK/PHOTOLIBRARY

Consider Bryson's discussion of household condiments. He starts with a conceptual curio: the remarkably low levels of nutrients required by our bodies. A single ounce of vitamin B1, for example, is all that we need to sustain an 80-year lifespan. Rather than list various vitamins or minerals and their requirements, Bryson describes human quirks that ordinary readers will recognize.

In discussing salt, for example, he points out that a lack of it makes you feel bad and eventually kills you, but “at no point would a human being think: 'Gosh, I could sure do with some salt'.” Our interest whetted, Bryson inserts a deft explanation of its role: “without the chloride in salt, cells simply shut down, like an engine without fuel”.

Along with his inspired associative thinking and 'science by stealth' approach, Bryson frames his stories with a light hand and considerable wit. Finding the required salt, he explains, called for some ingenuity by early humans: “Ancient Britons, for instance, heated sticks on a beach, then doused them in the sea and scraped the salt off. Aztecs, by contrast, acquired salt by evaporating their own urine. These are not intuitive acts, to put it mildly.”

The humour and metaphors are needed because raw science rarely resonates with human feelings. The formation of atoms and the generation of elements, for example, are awe-inspiring — if one is thinking about time, creation and our place in the Universe. Otherwise, it is just the slotting together of particles by following certain rules: intriguing to scientists, but geeky to most people.

By the book's end, wider messages are apparent. One example is our immense luck in being alive now. Before flushing toilets, running water and supermarkets, people spent huge amounts of time lugging waste, water and food around. Millions of lives were squandered for generations, as many people performed these basic tasks for their more fortunate superiors.

Those superiors felt that their social position was not down to luck, but to birth and breeding. They berated their servants accordingly. Yet in colonial America, a labour shortage meant that servants were quick to escape this situation. Because they could easily leave their jobs to set up homes of their own, the servant class dwindled and a huge market arose for labour-saving machines. Even today we associate such devices — from the refrigerator to the rubbish compactor — with American values.

Ultimately, Bryson sees precariousness. Our comfortable homes exist today because we consume long-stored fuels, and lots of them. Of all the energy produced since the Industrial Revolution began, “half has been consumed in the last twenty years” he notes.

Bryson finishes At Home by climbing to his attic and looking out on the world. Climate change is beyond the scope of this book, but he touches on the huge shifts that took place when electricity took over from coal and wood for domestic energy. His home is safe, inland in tranquil Norfolk. But how long will that security endure, if the sea level rises and our resources run out?