At Home - Bill Bryson [169]
and
The first, I am told, is for when the going is fixed, and the second for when it is not.
In our own time, Templer suggests that risers should be between 6.3 inches and 7.2 inches, and that goings should never be less than 9.0 inches, but ought to be more like 11.0, but if you look around you will see that there is huge variability. In general, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, U.S. steps tend to be slightly higher, per unit of tread, than British ones, and European ones higher still, but it doesn’t quantify the statement.
In terms of the history of stairs, not a great deal can be said. No one knows where stairs originated or when, even roughly. The earliest, however, may not have been designed to convey people upward to an upper story, as you might expect, but rather downward, into mines. In 2004, the most ancient wooden staircase yet found, dating from about three thousand years ago, was discovered a hundred meters underground in a Bronze Age salt mine at Hallstatt in Austria. It was possibly the first environment in which an ability to ascend and descend by foot alone (as opposed to a ladder, where hands are needed, too) was a positive and necessary advantage since it would leave both arms free to carry heavy loads.
In passing, one linguistic curiosity is worth noting. As nouns, upstairs and downstairs are surprisingly recent additions to the language. Upstairs isn’t recorded in English until 1842 (in a novel called Handy Andy by one Samuel Lover), and downstairs is first seen the following year in a letter written by Jane Carlyle. In both cases, the context makes clear that the words were already in existence—Jane Carlyle was no coiner of terms—but no earlier written records have yet been found. The upshot is that for at least three centuries people lived on multiple floors yet had no convenient way of expressing it.
II
While we are on the topic of how our houses can hurt us, we might pause on the landing for a moment and consider one other architectural element that has throughout history proved lethal to a startlingly large number of people: the walls, or more specifically the things that go on the walls, namely, paint and wallpaper. For a very long time both were, in various ways, robustly harmful.
Consider wallpaper, a commodity that was just becoming popular in ordinary homes at the time Mr. Marsham built his rectory. For a long time wallpaper—or “stained paper,” as it was still sometimes called—had been very expensive. It was heavily taxed for over a century, but it was also extremely labor-intensive to make. It was made not from wood pulp, but from old rags. Sorting through rags was a dirty job that exposed the sorters to a range of infectious diseases. Until the invention of a machine that could create continuous lengths of paper in 1802, the maximum size of each sheet was only two feet or so, which meant that paper had to be joined with great skill and care. The Countess of Suffolk paid £42 to wallpaper a single room at a time (the 1750s) when a good London house cost just £12 a year to rent. Flocked wallpaper, made from dyed stubbles of wool stuck to the surface of wallpaper, became wildly fashionable after about 1750 but presented additional dangers to those involved in its manufacture, as the glues were often toxic.
When the wallpaper tax was finally lifted, in 1830, wallpaper really took off (or perhaps I should say really went on). The number of rolls sold in Britain leaped from one million in 1830 to thirty million in 1870, and this was when it really started to make a lot of people sick. From the outset wallpaper was often colored with pigments that used large doses of arsenic, lead, and antimony, but after 1775 it was frequently soaked in an especially insidious compound called copper arsenite, which was invented by the great but wonderfully hapless Swedish chemist Karl Scheele.* The color was so popular that it became known as Scheele