Made In America - Bill Bryson [152]
Across the economy as a whole, it has been estimated, the average American works 163 hours more per year today than two decades ago. Men are working 98 hours more, and women no less than 305 extra hours.46 The burden is particularly heavy on working mothers who put in, on, average, an eighty-hour week when cleaning, cooking and child care are included. Not surprisingly, nearly all the recent neologisms relating to work and the workplace are negative: workaholic (1968), three o’clock syndrome (i.e., the tendency to grow drowsy in mid-afternoon, 1980), information overload (1985), sick building syndrome (a feeling of general malaise generated by a poorly designed environment, first noted in Industry Week in 1983), time squeeze (1990), and so on.
According to Schor, the average American adult enjoys just sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week after disposing of work and household commitments – though it must be said such a claim appears dubious when you consider that other studies show that the average American also devotes over twenty-eight hours a week to watching television, spends three hours in shopping malls and presumably manages to find at least a few hours for sex, eating and socializing.
What is certain is that Americans work longer hours and more days than their counterparts in almost any other nation in the developed world. Principally as a result of shorter vacations and fewer national holidays, the average manufacturing employee in America puts in the equivalent of eight weeks a year more at the workplace than a manufacturing employee in France or Germany.47
Thanks to all that hard work, America as a nation produces twice the goods and services per person that it produced in 1948. Everyone in the country could, in principle at least, work a four-hour day or a six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by our parents. Almost uniquely among the developed nations, America took none of its productivity gains in additional leisure. It bought consumer items instead.48
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14
The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
I
In 1885 a young man named George Eastman formed the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in Rochester, New York.1 It was rather a bold thing to do. Aged just thirty-one, Eastman was a junior clerk in a bank on a comfortable but modest salary of $15 a week. He had no background in business, but he was passionately devoted to photography and had become increasingly gripped with the conviction that anyone who could develop a simple, untechnical camera, as opposed to the cumbersome, outsize, fussily complex contrivances then on the market, stood to make a fortune.
Eastman worked tirelessly for three years to perfect his invention, supporting himself in the mean time by making dry plates for commercial photographers, and in June 1888 he produced a camera that was positively dazzling in its simplicity: a plain black box just 6½inches long by 3¼ inches wide, with a button on the side and a key for advancing the film. Eastman called his device the ‘Detective Camera’. Detectives were all the thing – Sherlock Holmes had been born the year before – and the name implied that it was so small and simple that it could be used unnoticed, as a detective might.2
The camera had no viewfinder and no way of focusing. The photographer or photographist (it took a while for the first word to become the established one) simply held the camera