"At Home" [.]

[fiefoe]

Literary references I can get behind:
__ From "Cranford", the lady who burned one candle a time but was careful to keep the pair in same height so guests wouldn't suspect her economy.
__ H. Belloc's doggerel about the sad fate of many early electricians
__ Alan de Botton on architecture

•  "Navigation Act" - how Britain kept Colonial America as a captive export market. (Glass was so hard to come by that emigrants were advised to bring glass panes on their sea voyage over).
• One early proponent of cremation to his reluctant wife: "Damn it woman, you shall burn!"
• Big wigs were literally so; people made wigs of one's own hair.
• Beau Brummel's dressing ritual was regularly witnessed by the Prince Regent and his cronies.
• High collars was necessary to keep the Prince Regent's waddle out of sight.

Some chapters are amazingly uplifting, (like the nice write-up about Capability Brown and his great drainage work), others fill one with doom:
__ Eiffel invented curtain-wall construction, making skyscrapers possible.
__ Eiffel Tower only took 183 workers 2 years and nobody died; the Statue of Liberty is only chocolate bunny thick.
__ The Serpentine's designer invented ha-has .  
__ the craze of having architectural caprice in one's backyard: grottoes, temples, prospect towers, artificial ruins, obelisks, castellated follies, manageries, orangeries, pantheons, amphiteaters, exedra, nymphaeum. ..
__ House changed from being the view to where one looks at the view. The "Great Blow" blew down trees and made people appreciate the natural landscape more.
 __ Mice do climb up from toilets; bats are a very endangered species.
__ People didn't know about mites being everywhere until the 60s.

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