PDF Summary:At Home, by Bill Bryson

Have you ever wondered why our homes are built the way they are? In At Home, Bill Bryson explores how the average home—the materials from which they’re built, their layouts, and the tools and technologies within them—reveals how people lived their daily lives throughout history. By tracing how homes have evolved to meet people’s changing needs, we can better understand not just what life was once like, but also why modern homes look and function the way they do.

In this guide, we’ll look at why humans started building homes, what materials they built them from, and when homes started to become a place of comfort. Then, we’ll examine how families stored and prepared food, dealt with health and safety challenges, and other aspects of home life. We’ll supplement Bryson’s discussions by exploring how homes evolved in cultures around the world, and discuss how new technology continues to transform our homes.

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How People Preserved Food

Bryson writes that in the mid-1600s and 1700s, people lacked reliable preservation methods, and food spoiled quickly. People had to eat what they could produce locally and consume it quickly—meat could only last a day before going bad and milk spoiled within hours.

(Shortform note: People weren’t completely at the mercy of food spoilage before the mid-1600s. In Salt, Kurlansky writes that people used salt to preserve food for thousands of years before modern preservation methods. They used two main techniques: curing and pickling. People cured meat and fish by packing them in salt to kill bacteria and remove moisture, making the food last much longer. They also pickled vegetables and fruits by letting the foods ferment in salty water inside sealed jars.)

Bryson writes that food was often contaminated both intentionally and unintentionally. Merchants sometimes used cheap or dangerous additives to stretch costly ingredients or enhance the appearance of foods. For example, some would add gypsum, sand, and dust to sugar or use lead compounds to make foods like bakery products and cheese more visually appealing. However, Bryson notes that most food contamination happened by accident as a result of poor hygiene—bakeries, for instance, were full of cobwebs, insects, and vermin that got into the food.

(Shortform note: While contaminated food may seem like an issue of the past, companies continue to deliberately tamper with food products to increase profits. These altered foods make up about 1% of the global food industry and cost the industry up to $40 billion per year. Common food adulterations include diluting honey, syrup, and olive oil with cheaper sweeteners and oils, and adding plant materials (like stems) and food dyes to spices.)

Bryson discusses several innovations in food preservation that transformed the way people ate:

Ice: In the 1800s, American businessman Frederic Tudor created the first ice trade, shipping frozen blocks out from New England lakes. As a result, ice-cooled railway cars could transport perishable foods across the country without spoiling.

(Shortform note: Refrigerated transport, particularly railway cars, fueled America’s westward expansion. Once refrigeration became widespread in the 1870s, meat production exploded—beef exports to Britain jumped from 109,500 pounds to 72 million pounds. US settlers moved west to claim land for cattle, also deliberately slaughtering millions of buffalo to starve and force Native American tribes off their lands.)

Mason jars: Patented in 1859, these jars revolutionized food storage with their airtight lid. This invention allowed people to safely preserve food for much longer than before.

(Shortform note: Before Mason jars, Napoleon Bonaparte played an important role in food preservation history. In 1795, he offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could develop better food preservation methods for his army. Nicolas François Appert won this prize by creating a method of heating, boiling, and sealing food in airtight glass jars, creating the basic technology behind the Mason jar.)

Iron cans: In the early 1800s, cans were made of heavy iron and extremely difficult to open—people had to use hammers and chisels, and soldiers in the field resorted to shooting or stabbing the cans to access the food. Canning didn’t become truly practical until lighter materials were developed that enabled mass production. Though inventors patented many cutting tools, they were either unsafe or hard to operate—the safe can opener that we know of only appeared in 1925.

(Shortform note: A major scandal nearly destroyed the canning industry in 1852. British Navy inspectors discovered that supplier Stephan Goldner had filled hundreds of cans with rotten meat and animal parts instead of proper beef. Goldner had won government contracts by cutting costs, using cheap labor and inadequate cooking processes at his Romanian factory, but the cost-cutting measures ultimately resulted in over 600,000 pounds of meat being discarded. Even a decade later, many Europeans and Americans remained skeptical of canned foods.)

However, Bryson points out that these innovations in food preservation mainly benefited the middle and upper classes. While the wealthy enjoyed increasingly varied dishes, with recipe books showing how to prepare elaborate multicourse meals using both local and imported ingredients, many working people still survived on basic foods like bread, potatoes, and occasionally meat.

(Shortform note: This pattern of unequal access to quality and varied foods continues today. Research across 150 countries shows that wealthy nations enjoy 3.5 times more diverse diets than poorer countries. As in the past, poor households consume more staples like rice and cereals, spending around 25% of their food budgets on these items. In contrast, wealthy households spend only 3% on staples. Ultimately, food access remains closely tied to wealth, much as it was in earlier times when only the wealthy could afford preserved and imported delicacies.)

How People Ate Food

According to Bryson, people didn’t always have a designated room for eating meals. Before the late 1600s, people ate their meals at small, portable tables set up in any room of the house. Bryson explains that the creation of dining rooms wasn’t driven by people suddenly wanting a dedicated eating space. Rather, homeowners wanted to protect their expensive upholstered furniture from food and grease.

As formal dining rooms became common, dining customs also became more formal: Dinner service changed from serving all dishes on the table at once to serving meals in courses. People also started eating dinner later in the day to allow time for visiting people and attending theater shows, creating the need for a new midday meal: lunch. Dining tools evolved too—people began eating with forks, which were initially viewed with suspicion for being too delicate and dangerous with their sharp tines. Tables became crowded with specialized utensils like special knives for fish and spoons for olives.

Modern Dining and the Disappearance of the Dining Room

Today, the trend that Bryson discusses is now reversing, with the traditional dining room slowly disappearing from modern homes. Most American families now prefer open “great rooms” that combine the kitchen, dining area, and living space. This reflects how our eating habits have become more casual and integrated with other daily activities.

In apartments, dedicated dining spaces are vanishing entirely, often having only kitchen counters as eating spaces. This disappearance of dining spaces is partially driven by regulations, not just preferences: Building codes and zoning rules force developers to build smaller apartments with limited dining space. Experts say this shift is contributing to increasing loneliness in America, with nearly half of all meals now eaten alone.

Similarly, while meals became increasingly structured in the past, the traditional three-meal structure is also breaking down as a result of new work patterns like hybrid working. About one-third of British people only eat two meals a day, often replacing lunch with casual snacking instead.

Part 3: The History of Health and Safety at Home

Now that we’ve explored the history of food and dining, let’s turn to the evolution of health and safety in the home. Bryson writes that throughout history, people faced many health and safety challenges in their homes that we rarely think about today. In this section, we’ll discuss how people struggled with basic hygiene and lived with toxic building materials that we now know are dangerous, along with safety hazards that still remain in our homes.

The Development of Bathrooms

Bryson writes that beliefs about health changed dramatically throughout history. For example, while we consider regular baths and showers normal today, people’s views on washing have swung between extremes throughout history—from bathing regularly to avoiding bathing completely.

According to Bryson, ancient civilizations valued cleanliness and built public bathhouses where people gathered daily to bathe. The Romans even elevated bathing to a social activity, creating bathhouses with libraries, places to exercise, and other amenities that could accommodate thousands of people of all classes at once. These bathhouses were so popular that Romans often asked people where they bathed when they met someone.

(Shortform note: Bathing was a core part of Roman identity. Romans saw daily bathing as a mark of civilization that separated them from non-Roman “barbarians.” As Bryson discusses, the social importance of bathing crossed all class boundaries in Roman society: The Romans built bathhouses everywhere their empire reached, even in remote military outposts so soldiers could bathe, and they kept entry prices low so everyone could afford to use them. Wealthy Romans spent afternoons at the baths discussing philosophy or listening to poetry readings, and even enslaved people were expected to bathe when they could.)

Bryson writes that this all changed during the Middle Ages, when the practice of bathing disappeared. At the time, Christians saw dirtiness as a sign of religious devotion. Additionally, medical authorities mistakenly believed that bathing made people sick by exposing their skin to disease. Public bathhouses closed due to concerns that they would spread disease, particularly syphilis, and people actively avoided washing themselves. As a result, they suffered from constant skin infections, rashes, and itching.

(Shortform note: Some historians argue that the idea that medieval Europeans were dirty and rarely bathed is untrue. They point out that while a select number of Christian clergy embraced poor hygiene as a form of self-denial, most medieval people tried to stay clean. Books recommended that people wash their hands, face, and teeth daily. Many households likely owned wooden bathtubs, and people regularly washed their clothes, undergarments, and linens. While bathhouses did close due to fears of spreading syphilis, most medieval physicians thought parasites came from within the body due to an imbalance in the “humors”—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile—so they actually recommended frequent washing and changing of clothes.)

Bryson writes that people didn’t start bathing regularly again until the 1700s, and even then, they saw it mainly as a medical treatment. Doctors told patients to swim in the sea or soak in mineral baths to cure illnesses. During the Victorian era, people began bathing more frequently, often embracing the discomfort of water by bathing with ice or using forceful showers.

(Shortform note: In the 1800s, doctors believed mental illness came from problems in the brain and used water as rather cruel treatments for patients. Psychiatric hospitals invested heavily in hydrotherapy facilities, where they restrained patients and subjected them to ice-cold showers directed at their heads or wrapped them tightly in wet sheets for hours. Doctors claimed these harsh water treatments could cure “hot brains” and eliminate toxins that cause insanity.)

Bryson says that the private bathroom as we know it is a rather recent addition to the home. For much of history, people didn’t have bathrooms and relied instead on chamber pots kept in bedrooms or dining rooms.

(Shortform note: Before the advent of private bathrooms and toilets, people tried to make chamber pots less off-putting by making them more aesthetically pleasing. As a result, chamber pots often featured beautiful designs like blue daisies and gilded edges, and the wealthiest Victorians commissioned chamber pots made of silver and precious stones. Some chamberpots even featured the faces of politicians. For example, an American chamber pot had the portrait of a British naval officer painted inside. Supposedly, the officer had written unflattering accounts of American society in his travel books, and angry Americans responded by putting his face where they thought it belonged.)

It wasn’t until around the mid-1900s that homes had bathrooms. Getting bathrooms into homes was challenging because of:

• Weak water pressure that couldn’t reach the upper floors
• Expensive materials and fixtures
• Limited space
• Bathtubs chipping or cracking from hot water

Bryson explains that by 1940, manufacturers could finally mass-produce affordable bathroom fixtures. This, combined with improved plumbing and water systems, allowed most American homes to install private bathrooms. However, European homes took longer to adopt private bathrooms due to space constraints.

The Challenges of Adopting Modern Smart Bathrooms

While basic bathroom technology has become standard in many homes, many of the same challenges that slowed early bathroom adoption—cost, space, and infrastructure—continue to affect bathroom innovation today. The next stage of bathroom evolution—the smart bathroom—faces both old and new obstacles.

While innovations like smart mirrors that regulate your sleep cycle, toilets that clean themselves, and showers you can control with your voice are available, several barriers stand in the way of making these technologies common in homes. First, installation costs are high since smart devices need special plumbing and electrical work. Second, fitting sensors and electronic components into small bathroom spaces poses design challenges. Lastly, privacy concerns make many homeowners hesitant to put internet-connected devices in their bathrooms. Before smart bathrooms become common, companies must prove their products are secure and will protect user privacy.

Safety Hazards in the Home

Even as people improved their health practices, they still had to navigate various safety hazards in their homes—some, we still deal with to this day. Bryson explores two major sources of danger in the home throughout history: staircases and wall coverings.

Stairs

Bryson suggests that stairs first appeared in Bronze Age mines around 3,000 years ago because workers needed to have their hands free to carry heavy loads—which they couldn’t do while climbing ladders. Although no one’s sure when staircases migrated into homes, staircases have been a major household safety hazard throughout history. Today, only car accidents cause more accidental deaths than stair accidents.

(Shortform note: Researchers found that even professionally designed stairs are risky, with at least 61% of stairways featured in an architectural journal having at least one visible design hazard. Dangerous stairs are so common that there’s a Facebook group dedicated to them. With nearly one million members, Death Stairs catalogs terrifying and hazardous staircases that members come across.)

According to Bryson, architects and engineers have tried to make stairs safer by developing mathematical formulas and careful measurements. However, creating perfectly safe stairs remains challenging because people climb up and down stairs differently. He explains that a staircase that feels comfortable to go up might be awkward or dangerous to go down, making every staircase design an imperfect compromise between these needs.

(Shortform note: Though a perfectly safe stair design still eludes us, you can make your stairs safer with a few changes: First, research shows that most falls happen because of slipping rather than tripping, so add grip materials like rubber treads, anti-slip tape, or tightly fitted carpet to your steps, especially if they’re made of smooth wood or tile. Second, improve the lighting by installing bright LED bulbs and switches at both the top and bottom of stairs, since most accidents happen at these points. Lastly, hard-to-see step edges also cause falls, especially for older adults, so add reflective tape or different paint colors to step edges to make it easier to see where each step ends.)

Wall Coverings

Wall coverings were another source of danger in the home. Bryson writes that for hundreds of years, people used toxic ingredients in wallpapers and paints that caused illness and accidents.

Bryson explains that wallpaper became affordable in the 1830s, transforming home decoration but also introducing new dangers. By the late 1800s, about 80% of English wallpapers contained a toxic substance called arsenic, especially in green colors. When walls became damp—a common problem in English homes—these papers released toxic fumes that made residents sick.

(Shortform note: Even after European scientists proved arsenic-based wallpapers were dangerous, British manufacturers ignored these warnings. William Morris, one of the most famous wallpaper designers of the time, denied the risks—perhaps because his father owned the country’s largest arsenic company. However, after newspapers spread awareness and consumers demanded safety alternatives, manufacturers stopped using arsenic by the late 1880s.)

Paint was also dangerous, says Bryson. For centuries, painters included toxic ingredients like lead, arsenic, and mercury compounds in paint, which led to a range of health issues including palsy, hallucinations, and even blindness. Another paint ingredient, linseed oil, caused many house fires because it could spontaneously combust. Despite people knowing about the dangers of lead, lead paint was only banned in the United States in 1978 and in Britain in 1992.

Hidden Dangers in Modern Homes

Although arsenic and lead are no longer used in paints and wallpapers today, harmful chemicals can still be found in modern living spaces. A class of chemicals called PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) can be found in everything from wall paint to carpeting to household dust. These “forever chemicals” remain indefinitely in the environment and our bodies, and they can lead to serious health issues including cancer, hormonal disruption, and developmental delays.

Modern wall paint is one of many household items containing PFAS, with a study finding these chemicals in 60% of popular paint brands. The PFAS don’t just stay in the paint either; they can enter the air you breathe, similar to how Victorian paints and wallpapers released toxic fumes.

Just as it took decades to ban arsenic wallpapers and lead paint despite known dangers, PFAS regulations have been slow to emerge. While the Environmental Protection Agency has only recently begun limiting certain PFAS in drinking water, companies continue to use these chemicals in countless home products.

Part 4: Daily Life at Home

Now that we’ve explored how homes reveal people’s dining and health habits, as well as the safety hazards they presented throughout history, let’s look at what daily life was like for the people living in these spaces. We’ll focus on two elements of household operations: how people lit their homes after dark, and how household servants—who were essential to running many homes—lived and worked.

Lighting Homes After Dark

Bryson describes how lighting in homes has changed throughout history. He says that while many assume our ancestors simply went to bed at sunset in the pre-electricity era, people stayed active well into the night. There were numerous forms of lighting throughout history:

Rushlights: This was the simplest form of early lighting. People made rushlights by coating 18-inch strips of rush plants with animal fat, typically mutton. These provided about 15-20 minutes of illumination each.

(Shortform note: According to historical accounts, people gathered these rushes—especially the common soft rush (juncus conglomeratus) that grew near streams and under hedges—during summer months. Children, women, and elderly members of the household would collect the rushes and keep them in water to prevent them from drying. They then peeled and bleached the rushes in sunlight before using them as candles. Once lit, people would secure these rushlights in special holders to provide light in their homes.)

Candles: Bryson explains that candles existed in two main varieties. Tallow candles, made from animal fat, were cheaper but they flickered constantly, needed frequent trimming, gave uneven light, and smelled bad. Beeswax candles offered better illumination and needed less maintenance but at about four times the price of tallow.

(Shortform note: In medieval England, beeswax candles cost a sixpence per pound—which was equivalent to a day’s wages for an artisan. Churches used these candles in large quantities during the 14th century for large candlelight displays at funerals and ceremonies. As a result, the candle business was incredibly profitable: One wax chandler charged the modern equivalent of £200,000 just for setting up candle displays for King Henry V’s death. Eventually, Parliament had to step in to regulate prices to stop candlemakers from charging too much for their ceremonial candles and wax figures.)

Oil lamps: While they provided efficient light, oil lamps required daily cleaning and maintenance because soot built up in their chimneys. Whale oil provided the best lighting but was expensive. Later, kerosene (derived from petroleum) emerged as a more affordable option.

(Shortform note: Whale oil powered glass lamps known as toy lamps because they were smaller than standard lamps. The Sandwich Glass Company in Massachusetts made these simple lamps with just a brass or pewter cap to hold the wick. Before the Civil War, American whalers hunted an estimated 10,000 whales annually for fuel for these lamps, driving many species to the brink of extinction. This aggressive hunting damaged whale populations so severely that even today, most species haven’t returned to their original numbers.)

Gas lighting: Gas lighting emerged in the mid-1800s, and it provided 20 times more brightness than previous lighting methods and became increasingly popular. However, it came with its own problems—it damaged ceilings and metals, killed plants, and was often a safety hazard.

Electric lighting: Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison both independently developed incandescent light bulbs in the late 1870s. However, while Swan demonstrated the first working bulb, Edison was more commercially successful because he developed the entire electrical system needed to make lighting practical, from power plants to wiring to switches. Despite people’s initial fears of electrocution, fires, and other health risks, electric lighting quickly became standard in cities by 1900.

The Transition From Gas to Electric Lighting

When electricity emerged as a competitor, gas lighting companies tried various strategies to stay relevant. They developed new technologies like the incandescent gas mantle, which produced much brighter light than traditional gas flames, helping gas remain competitive against early electric options. The improvements were so significant that many cities kept their gas streetlights well into the 1950s, since replacing the entire infrastructure would have been extremely expensive.

Within the home, gas companies tried to win customers by making their fixtures more attractive—even creating decorative Chinese-style lamps in the 1920s and ’30s. However, electric lighting gradually became the preferred indoor choice: They were brighter, cleaner, and more modern. By the 1930s, electric lighting had spread from just 6% of British homes in 1919 to about two-thirds of households.

The Lives of Servants

Bryson writes that many Victorian households had servants—even those that struggled financially tried to maintain servants, and the wealthy employed a large number of staff. He explains that despite their importance, household servants faced harsh working conditions. Their areas in homes were often cramped and inadequate, even in wealthy households. Servants typically worked from before dawn until late at night, performing physically demanding tasks like carrying water, cleaning, and maintaining the house with few breaks or comforts.

Bryson adds that servants were often treated as less than human. They faced constant humiliation and degrading treatment from their employers: Masters frequently tested servants’ honesty by leaving out valuables as traps, suspected them of helping burglars, and sometimes forced them to adopt new names for their convenience. The social divide was so extreme that some servants had to press themselves against walls when family members passed by.

Modern Domestic Workers Still Experience Harsh Living Conditions

In Hong Kong, over 350,000 foreign domestic workers face inhumane living conditions not unlike those experienced by Victorian servants. The majority of domestic workers don’t have a private room and sleep in storage rooms, kitchens, or even bathrooms. Some employers even measure workers’ bodies to determine the smallest possible sleeping space they can provide.

These domestic helpers typically work 13- to 18-hour workdays and often face verbal abuse and harassment. Some employers even install surveillance cameras to monitor them constantly. However, domestic helpers face challenges to leaving harsh working conditions: Due to Hong Kong’s two-week rule, workers who lose their jobs have just 14 days to find new employment before being forced to leave the country. This policy, combined with the requirement to live with employers, creates a system where workers often endure poor treatment rather than risk losing their jobs.

The mistreatment and lack of proper living spaces harm workers’ physical and mental health. Research shows that domestic workers suffering from sleep deprivation face increased risks of diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. A recent study found that nearly one-third of female domestic workers in Hong Kong experience depression, while 17% suffer from anxiety.