At Home - Bill Bryson [5]
So the risks were considerable and keenly felt, yet after only a few days of fretful hesitation the commissioners approved Paxton’s plan. Nothing—really, absolutely nothing—says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century’s most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. Paxton’s Crystal Palace required no bricks at all—indeed, no mortar, no cement, no foundations. It was just bolted together and sat on the ground like a tent. This was not merely an ingenious solution to a monumental challenge but also a radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before.
The central virtue of Paxton’s airy palace was that it could be prefabricated from standard parts. At its heart was a single component—a cast-iron truss three feet wide and twenty-three feet, three inches long—which could be fitted together with matching trusses to make a frame on which to hang the building’s glass—nearly a million square feet of it, or a third of all the glass normally produced in Britain in a year. A special mobile platform was designed that moved along the roof supports, enabling workmen to install eighteen thousand panes of glass a week—a rate of productivity that was, and is, a wonder of efficiency. To deal with the enormous amount of guttering required—some twenty miles in all—Paxton designed a machine, manned by a small team, that could attach two thousand feet of guttering a day—a quantity that would previously have represented a day’s work for three hundred men. In every sense the project was a marvel.
Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass—so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed—sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but it cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically in limitless volumes.
Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of many period buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It is sometimes rather a shame that they aren’t still.) The tax, sorely resented as “a tax on air and light,” meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live in airless rooms.
The second duty,