Ordinary Abundance

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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.

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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...