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. Gas is now considered almost indispensable in the city, aNew Yorker reported in 1851. So much so, that scarcely a respectabledwelling house is now built without gas fixtures.For the first time in history, interior illumination was cheap, so that itcould be used in abundance, and people began to stay up later and readfar more than previously.Books, magazines, and newspapers allincreased sales markedly at this time, as did sheet music.Nighttime activity was further encouraged by the spread of centralheating.Falling prices for piping and ducting made it affordable, and hotair systems began to appear in houses in the 1830s.By the 1860s steamradiators were rapidly replacing the primitive hot air furnaces, and theAmerican love affair with central heating was on in earnest.Foreign visi-164 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THtors were often appalled. The method of heating in many of the besthouses is a terrible grievance to persons not accustomed to it, wroteThomas Golley Grattan, who had been British consul in Boston,  and afatal misfortune to those who are.An enormous furnace sends up,day and night, streams of hot air through apertures and pipes.Itmeets you the moment the street door is opened to let you in, and itrushes after you when you emerge again, half-stewed and parboiled, intothe welcome air.The cast-iron cookstove as well proved a great improvement over thehearth, making the lives of women much easier, and became widespread.Despite all these improvements, running a household was still a greatdeal of work, and large ones required large numbers of servants to func-tion efficiently.There had been a  servant problem early in the centuryas the number of households seeking to employ them increased far fasterthan the supply.But as young women began to move off the family farmand into the cities, and foreign immigration increased, especially in the1840s, the price of servants wages began to fall sharply.Even modesthouseholds could afford to have someone to help the wife.By mid-century a typical upper-middle-class household employed acook, a waiter (who did much of the heavy work, such as shoveling coal,as well as waiting on the table at mealtimes), and a maid to clean thehouse.The more affluent would also have an upstairs maid, a laundress,a houseman (who did the heavy work), a coachman, and a governess forthe children.A skilled domestic, such as a good cook, could earn asmuch as $6 or $7 a week as well as room and board, very good wages forwomen at that time.In many households, favorite servants were an integral part of thefamily, greatly loved and valued.Under these circumstances, domesticservice, particularly for an unmarried woman, could be a pleasant life,especially compared with the alternative: a job in one of the new facto-ries and a room, or part of a room, in the teeming, noisome slums thatwere spreading quickly in all northern cities at this time.And despite theChaining the Lightning of Heaven165vast growth of industry in the later nineteenth century, in 1900 thelargest single category of employment tracked by the U.S.Census wouldstill be domestic service.As the cities grew in size by leaps and bounds in the first decades ofthe nineteenth century, the problem of supplying the inhabitants withwater and disposing of sewage increased apace.In the early years of thecentury the affluent had rain barrels or cisterns, fed from their rooftops,but the rest had to haul water from the nearest well.This water was oftengrossly contaminated from the sewage from privies and the chamberpots that were emptied into the streets.Although not understood at thetime, this was the source of the frequent epidemics of such diseases asyellow fever and cholera that ravaged American cities at this time.Philadelphia was the first city to build a modern water supply thatcould be piped into houses and allow waste to be disposed of throughsewers.In 1832 the first houses in America to be built with bathroomswere supplied by this system.New York, surrounded by salt water, had afar more difficult technological problem to deal with.Nonetheless, afterbuilding a forty-five-mile-long aqueduct to bring water in from the Cro-ton River in Westchester County, New York opened the  Croton Sys-tem on July 4, 1842.Philip Hone was agog.Months later he wrote in his diary that  noth-ing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water.Foun-tains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impedeour progress through the streets.Water! Water! Is the universal notewhich is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy andexultation into the masses.George Templeton Strong was positively giddy when his fatherinstalled Croton water in his house on Greenwich Street in 1843.Takinga bath no longer involved heating water on the stove and pouring it intoa hip bath dragged into the kitchen for the purpose. I ve led a ratheramphibious life for the last week, he wrote happily in his diary,  pad-dling in the bathing tub every night and constantly making new discov-166 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THeries in the art and mystery of ablution.Taking a shower bath upsidedown is the last novelty.Boston, ever vigilant against the possibility that people might beenjoying themselves on the Sabbath, banned bathing on Sundays.BE FORE TH E EARLY N I N ETE E NTH CE NTU RY; even among the notori-ously peripatetic population of the United States, people seldom ven-tured more than fifty miles from where they had been born, or, if theydid, never saw their birthplace again.Now, in less than a lifetime, it hadbecome possible to travel a hundred miles in a day, receive instant wordfrom someone a thousand miles away, and read of events that were tak-ing place, right then, halfway around the world.It was possible to havehot water run out of a tap, be warm on the coldest night, read a book atnight without eyestrain.These miracles of daily life that piled one upon the other in the firstdecades of the nineteenth century railroads, telegraph, newspapers,heating, lighting, running water induced a mood of optimism and abelief in progress that had not been known before.The sense that any-thing was possible pervaded what would come to be called the Victorianage, throughout the Western world.But in the United States, still onlyhalf formed and growing economically more quickly than any othermajor country in the world, that mood was palpable.We have never completely lost it, even in the worst of times that wereto come.C h a t e r T e nWHALE S, W O O D, I C E, AN D G O L DLTHOUG H GAS LIG HT RAPI DLY I LLUMINATED the cities begin-Aning in the 1820s, it wasn t available in the countryside, wheremost Americans still lived [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]