Often
we don’t have a really explicit idea of what we mean when we say “We’ve come a
long way….”
For
instance, 130 years ago doing the household laundry was a bona fide chore—it
was hard work. Why? In 1886 a study estimated that “washing, boiling and rinsing a single
load of laundry used about 50 gallons of water.”
So what? Think about it: in the days
before indoor plumbing, somebody (think Mom and the kids) had to haul that
water from some source outside the house, maybe a pump, maybe a well, maybe a
nearby spring or waterway.
That’s 8-10 trips—or more—to haul
enough water for the wash, almost enough water to fill an oil drum.
That’s just to do the white and
light-colored stuff. Think about doing it again for the dark load.
Things did get better, but slowly. By
1940, roughly 40 percent of homes had heating (not from a fireplace or stove),
about 60 percent had flush toilets indoors, 70 percent had water coming out of
a tap inside the house and a whopping 80 percent had electricity.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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