Ordinary Abundance Skip to story
Ordinary Abundance
Ordinary Abundance
Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be "the limit of human felicity." A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe.
scroll to move through the apartment
Stories of everyday objects
The sitting room
The sitting room
It’s eight o’clock. The apartment is quiet, aside from the music playing softly over the speaker. It’s a playlist your friend made for you years ago. You send them a text to check in, then pick up a book, flick on the lamp, and settle into the chair to read.
Any song, at home
If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.
Edward Bellamy, 1888 — From Looking Backward, his utopian novel set in the year 2000. Before recordings, listening to music meant having instruments or performers nearby, and favorite songs could go unheard for years at a time.
Light without fire
The people, almost with bated breath, stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural. The strange, weird light, exceeded in power only by the sun, yet mild as moonlight, rendered the Court House square as light as midday.
A witness at Wabash, Indiana, 1880 — The night Wabash, Indiana became one of the first cities lit entirely by electric light. Candles, oil lamps, and gas jets gave relatively feeble light, and were all smoky open fires inside the home.
A museum on the wall
A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls.
André Malraux, 1947 — Le Musée imaginaire, later translated as Museum Without Walls. Before reliable reproduction, most people saw major artworks only by visiting churches, collections, or museums.
Memories kept
The very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! ... I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist's work ever produced.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1843 — On first seeing a daguerreotype, in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford. Preserving a likeness used to require a painted portrait; many families had no accurate image of relatives who died.
Reading after the eyes fail
It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles ... one of the best and most necessary in the world. I myself saw the man who discovered it, and I talked with him.
Friar Giordano da Pisa, 1306 — A sermon at Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Age-related vision loss was common, and before spectacles it could end reading and other close work.
Distant messaging
Of all the marvellous achievements of modern science, the Electric Telegraph is transcendently the greatest and most serviceable to mankind. It is a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.
Briggs Maverick, 1858 — The Story of the Telegraph. For most of history, messages traveled only as fast as the person who carried them. Receiving a reply from far away could take weeks or months.
Books unchained
A great good, and almost a divine benefit to the world.
Jakob Wimpfeling, 1505 — The German humanist, on the new art of printing. A hand-copied book was valuable enough that libraries chained theirs to the reading desks.
The kitchen
It’s nine. A chapter ends, and you stretch and wander into the kitchen. You’re not exactly sure what you want, so you aimlessly rifle through your fruit bowl, open and close the door to the fridge, and settle on a cup of tea. You lean against the counter and let your mind wander as the water comes to a boil.
Clean water on tap
Water! Water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.
Philip Hone, 1842 — On the arrival of Croton water in New York City, in his diary. Manhattan’s wells shared soil with its privies and burial grounds; the cholera epidemic ten years earlier had killed 3,515 New Yorkers.
Fruit from afar
Like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish.
Charles Lamb, 1822 — On the rapture of the pineapple. In eighteenth-century Britain, a pineapple was costly enough that hostesses sometimes rented one for the evening rather than eat it.
Cold kept indoors
The first transport of ice from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges is an event of no mean importance ... the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through their adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the name of other benefactors of mankind.
The Calcutta Courier, 1837 — On the arrival of New England pond-ice in tropical India. Without cold storage, perishable food like dairy and meat spoiled within a day, and most foods could not be kept or eaten out of season.
Eden in jars
It is said that these things come from the earthly paradise; for the wind blows down the trees in paradise, just as the wind blows down the dry wood in the forests of our own land.
Jean de Joinville, c. 1309 — On merchants who netted ginger, cinnamon and rhubarb from the Nile. In medieval price lists, a pound of ginger sold for the price of a sheep; a pound of saffron, the price of a horse.
The back room
At ten, the night starts to wind down. You wash your face, then wash down a pill with a glass of water. As you brush your teeth, you make a mental note of the last few chores you need to cross off the list tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.
Smallpox made historical
You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest. ... Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed, and by you has been extirpated.
Thomas Jefferson, 1806 — In a letter celebrating Edward Jenner’s vaccine, sent to Jenner’s nephew. Smallpox killed about three of every ten people it infected, and in Jenner’s century it killed an estimated four hundred thousand Europeans a year.
Pain, interrupted
Before whom, in all time, surgery was agony; by whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; since whom, science has controlled pain.
Epitaph of W. T. G. Morton, 1871 — Morton first publicly demonstrated ether anaesthesia. Before anesthesia, operations were performed with the patient conscious, and the primary means of managing pain were speed, alcohol, and opium.
The end of the outhouse
It just felt like I was the wealthiest person in the world. It felt great not to have to go outside to go to the restroom.
Patty Doak, 2003 — Recalling her family's first indoor bathroom, rural Iowa. Well into the twentieth century, most rural American homes had no indoor bathroom, and every gallon of water for cooking, washing, and bathing was carried in by hand.
Freedom on two wheels
I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.
Susan B. Anthony, 1896 — Interviewed by Nellie Bly for the New York World. The safety bicycle opened up new possibilities for independent travel, especially for women under restrictive social rules.
The washtub retired
Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day. Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 1797 — From her poem 'Washing-Day.' A household wash meant hauling and heating water by the barrel, then scrubbing, rinsing, and wringing every piece by hand; it filled an entire day each week.
The queen of inventions
What philanthropy failed to accomplish, what religion, poetry, eloquence, and reason had sought in vain, has been produced by — the Sewing Machine.
Godey's Lady's Book, 1860 — From 'The Queen of Inventions,' in the era's leading women's magazine. Before the machine, most people owned only two or three outfits, and a single new shirt meant some fourteen hours of hand stitching.
Warmth in every room
It is so cold that the freezing of the ink on the point of my pen renders it difficult to write. We have had the thermometer at 12°.
Thomas Jefferson, 1796 — In a letter to his son-in-law, the ink freezing as he wrote. Bedrooms in winter often fell close to the temperature outside, and it was not unusual to wake up to a frozen washbasin.
The old wish to fly
I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
Wilbur Wright, 1908 — Remarks at a banquet of the Aéro-Club de France, Paris. Before flight, crossing an ocean took a week or more at sea, and emigrating across one often meant never seeing your family again.
At eleven, you switch off the lights, silence your phone, and lie down to sleep. As your head hits the pillow, you idly wonder what people slept on before mattresses.
All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.
It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.
Sources
- Recorded music Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 20001887 (Boston: Ticknor Co., 1888), chapter 11.
-
Electric light A contemporary account of the lighting of Wabash, Indiana, March 31, 1880, reprinted in the county histories of 1884 and 1914.
-
Art reproductions Andr Malraux, Le Muse imaginaire, in La Psychologie de lart (Geneva: Skira, 1947); translated by Stuart Gilbert in The Psychology of Art (New York: Pantheon, 1949); the quotation follows the Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price translation, Museum Without Walls (1967).
-
Photography Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, December 7, 1843.
-
Corrected vision Giordano da Pisa, Lenten sermon at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, February 23, 1306; on the sermon, see Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (2007).
-
Instant communication Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph (New York: Rudd Carleton, 1858).
-
Printed books Jakob Wimpfeling, Epitoma rerum Germanicarum (1505), translated in Theodore Low De Vinne, The Invention of Printing (1876).
-
Clean running water Philip Hone, diary entry, October 12, 1842, in The Diary of Philip Hone, 18281851 (1889), vol. 2.
-
Imported fruit Charles Lamb, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, London Magazine, September 1822; collected in Essays of Elia (1823).
-
Household refrigeration The Calcutta Courier, on the arrival of New England ice in Calcutta; quoted in Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation (2013).
-
Global spices Jean de Joinville, The Life of Saint Louis (completed c. 1309), translated by Frank Marzials in Memoirs of the Crusades (1908).
-
Vaccination Thomas Jefferson, letter to George C. Jenner, Edward Jenners nephew, Monticello, May 14, 1806.
-
Anesthesia Inscription on the Morton monument, Mount Auburn Cemetery, erected 1871, attributed to Jacob Bigelow; printed in Historical Memoranda Relative to the Discovery of Etherization (Boston, 1871).
-
Indoor plumbing Patty Doak, interviewed in The People in the Pictures: Stories from the Wettach Farm Photos (Iowa PBS, 2003).
-
Personal mobility Nellie Bly, Champion of Her Sex: Miss Susan B. Anthony, New York World, February 2, 1896.
-
Automated laundry Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Washing-Day, The Monthly Magazine, December 1797.
-
Mechanized sewing The Queen of Inventions The Sewing Machine, Editors Table, Godeys Ladys Book, July 1860, p. 77.
-
Central heating Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, November 28, 1796.
-
Human flight Wilbur Wright, remarks at a banquet of the Aro-Club de France, Paris, November 5, 1908, in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, vol. 2 (1953).