Nails, Noggins and Newels E-Book

Bill Laws

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 247

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Starting at the front door, this book takes a look at our homes through different eyes, revealing the history of every part from the bricks and beams to pelmets, lights and water pipes; from wallpaper, windows and paints to floors, fires and fitted kitchens. Crammed with fascinating facts about the everyday bric-a-brac of the house in which you live, Nails, Noggins and Newels is written in a lively, informal style which will appeal to any DIY enthusiast.

Leseprobe

NAILS,

NOGGINS

AND

NEWELS

NAILS,

NOGGINS

AND

NEWELS

An Alternative History of

Every House

BILL LAWS

First published in 2006 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Bill Laws, 2006, 2013

The right of Bill Laws, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9471 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Full House

1. OPEN HOUSE

Doors of Perception

Mr Chubb’s Scandalous Lock

Mrs Coade’s Dramatic Entrance

An Ingenious Idea: Jefferson’s Automatic Door

Shaker Ann’s Peg Rail

An Ingenious Idea: The Therscwald

An Ingenious Idea: The Perfect Porch

2. HOUSE STYLE

The Homely Proportions of Vitruvius

An Ingenious Idea: The Gothic Arch

Bungalow Taylor

The Adam Brothers’ Complete Design

Willam Morris’s Wallpaper

Mr Minton’s Tile Revolution

An Ingenious Idea: Walton’s Washable Wallpaper

Helen Allingham’s Country Style

3. HOUSEHOLD ESSENTIALS

The Hand-Made Roman Tile

Joseph Aspdin’s Cement

Thomas Whitty’s Carpet

Count Rumford’s Chimney

God’s Best Boiler

An Ingenious Idea: House Tax

An Ingenious Idea: The Air Conditioner

4. HOUSE WORKS

Men of Glass

The Sliding Sash

A Question of Ascent

An Ingenious Idea: The Disposable Window

Mr Shanks’s Flushing Loo

An Ingenious Idea: Gilbert Smith’s Klargester

Mr Twyford’s Bath

The Great Douche of Dr Wilson and Dr Gully

5. POWER HOUSE

William Armstrong’s Hydroelectrically Powered House

The Candle-less House

Dame Haslett’s Power Struggle

An Ingenious Idea: The Slot Meter

Leo Baekeland, Otto Bayer and Miracle Plastics

An Ingenious Idea: Underfloor Heating

The Sunshine Homes of George Cadbury

An Ingenious Idea: The Photovoltaic Cell

6. HOUSE PROUD

Flying Fitted Kitchens

Keeping Time

An Ingenious Idea: The Prefab

The True Aga Saga

An Ingenious Idea: Feng Shui

Home Do-It-Yourself

Franklin’s Safety Rods

An Ingenious Idea: The Safe House

The Final Nail

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book if I had not served time as a somewhat inept builder’s mate. Nor could I have produced it without the help of all those workers, former workers and enthusiasts who have tried to preserve their company histories.

I am particularly grateful to Richard Maggs and Dawn Roads of Aga-Rayburn; Richard Lawrence of Axminster Carpets; Beverley Longsden of Assa Abloy; Sam Rowlands at Avoncroft Museum of Buildings; Sharyn L. McCaulley of The Babcock and Wilson Company; Beatrix Zimmerman at Ein Unternehem der Bayer Business Services; Boulton Paul Heritage Project; the British Library; Alan Shrimpton and Diane Thornton at the Bournville Trust; Chedworth Roman Museum; David Birch at Celotex; Rebecca Chapman at Chubb Electronic Security UK; Simon Scott at Haddonstone; staff at Hereford College of Art library; Richard Forward and Anne Locker at the Institution of Electrical Engineers; Kim Curtis and staff at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello; Mary Welsh and Michael Smith at KEE; John Garbutt of Kingspan Insulation; Marion Culley at Lafarge Cement; the National Trust; Julie Woodward at Pilkington plc; the Harry Ransom Centre; Les Smith at Royal Doulton; Sanderson; staff at the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings; Spillers of Chard; Rod Donaldson at Source; Terry Wooliscroft at Twyford Bathrooms; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Victoria Murray of VMPR; the Wolverhampton Archives; John Dowding at Wilton Carpets; Jemma Roberts of Worcester Bosch and the Museum of Welsh Life, St Fagans.

Many others have contributed to these stories including Bobbie Blackwell, Hugh Bryant, Howard Hammersley, Graham Garner, Sandy Green, Peggy Laws, Tim Lambe, John Oxford, David Petts, Jerry Ross, Liz Rowse, Tom Schaefer, Richard Sidwell of Monmouth House Books, Dr Jill A. Warner and Annabel Watts. I am indebted to Jaqueline Mitchell and Hilary Walford for their editorial skills; to my agent, Chelsey Fox of Fox & Howard; and to my family, Abby, Sarah, Kahlia and Rosie, for their support.

All photographs are by the author unless credited otherwise.

Introduction

Full House

We live in an age of change, especially where our homes are concerned. Who calls at the hardware store nowadays to order stiles, rails and muntins, those essential components of the medieval door? Who fetches up at the do-it-yourself warehouse to fill their trolley with newels and noggins? (The newel was a constituent part of the staircase; noggins, derived from the Danish word knog meaning a wooden peg, initially referred to the bricks used to fill the framework in a half-timbered building, but then became common parlance for the blocks of wood used to reinforce partitions, roofs and ceilings.) Now we shop for flat-pack furniture, wood-grain, textured fibreglass doors, lumber from sustainable sources for our laminated floors and fitted kitchens (which are nothing of the sort). ‘While new it is admired; when old, everybody will agree that it was always hideous,’ suggests Charles L. Eastlake. He was writing in 1868.

With all the excitement over the hottest lifestyle ideas and the latest makeovers, it is easy to forget the intriguing histories that lie behind the four walls of the house. For every stick, stone and stitch in the fabric of the home was devised and built by someone, somewhere, once upon a time..

Down the centuries this ‘laborious class’ has produced a virtual alphabet of inventions for the home, including air conditioning, baths, boilers, carpets, chimneys, concrete floors, doors, electric switches, fitted kitchens, gas lights, glazed windows, central heating, insulation, lightning rods, locks, nails, noggins, plastics, porches, sash windows, septic tanks, stairs, stoves, ceramic tiles, toilets, underfloor heating and wallpaper. ‘From this fountain’, noted William Hutton, ‘do we draw our luxuries and our pleasures.’

Cross the threshold and your shadow falls on a multitude of long-forgotten inventions with a curious past: the peg rail that was a product of America’s biggest religious cult; decorative tiles devised in the little Dutch town of Delft; a plastic light switch developed by an obsessive recluse destined to live – and die – on a diet of tinned food. Lock the door, draw the curtains on the windowed night and clamber into bed and you brush past a host of ingenious innovations, from a door lock devised by a blacksmith’s apprentice (and scandalously picked in public by a New York lock maker) to an expensive window-pane ritually broken when there was a death in the house. Stumble down the stairs in the morning and you encounter kitchen units developed by wartime aero engineers, a fireplace perfected by an American-born British spy, and a famous stove conceived by a blind Swedish Nobel Prize winner.

In Nails, Noggins and Newels, our first encounter with this history of the home is the front door, a place which has been constantly meddled with by the good and the great, including the world’s most famous postman, Rowland Hill, and a man better known for his scientific theories on gravity than for his invention of the doggie door and the cat flap, Sir Isaac Newton.

Poised on the threshold and ready to turn the scandalised lock on the door, we glimpse the magical mystery doors at President Thomas Jefferson’s home before encountering two women whose influence on the home still holds sway today. The first, Eleanor Coade, an astute businesswoman in the days before businesswomen legally existed, framed the doorway with elegant statuary and sculpture. The second, the equally remarkable Shaker Mother Ann Lee, inadvertently did so much to clear up the clutter in the hall.

A tidy house is not necessarily a stylish house. House style is as important now as it was in 1903 when the pioneering American interior decorator Candace Wheeler was reminding her readers that the House Beautiful could ‘dignify any circumstances, from the narrowest to the most opulent. We gather to ourselves what we personally enjoy,’ she said, ‘and will not take our domestic environment at second hand.’ Yet we owe our home style to some very second-hand inventions: the proportions of our rooms, from the height of the skirting board to the position of the dado, were dictated by a Roman engineer around two thousand years ago. More mysteries surround the history of the staircase, not least because it is the second most haunted place in the house.

Meanwhile the concept of coordinated design, of matching everything from carpets to curtains and candlesticks, was dictated by two young men from Kirkcaldy around 200 years ago. These brothers brought the Adam style to Britain and the Federal style to America.

The question of what constitutes good and bad taste rests on shifting sands. ‘The faculty of distinguishing good from bad design in the familiar objects of domestic life is a faculty which most educated people – and women especially – conceive that they possess,’ declared Charles Eastlake, adding as an afterthought, ‘how it has been acquired few would be able to explain.’ Even as he committed his thoughts to paper in his Hints on Household Taste in 1868, two Victorians, William Morris and Herbert Minton, were starting to transform the look of the average suburban villa. Their tasteful styles and designs endure to this day.

In ‘Household Essentials’ our innovators are more concerned with ingenuity than style, in roofing the house with Roman tiles, casting concrete floors, creating the forerunner of the fitted carpet, finding a solution to the smoking chimney and warming up, or cooling down, the home. These inventors provide the nuts and bolts of the home: Joseph Aspdin, the nineteenth-century Leeds bricklayer who helped to floor our houses with his Portland cement; the little Devon carpet maker who found a web of intrigue woven around his carpet loom; the British spy who Rumfordised our fireplaces, and the taxmen who profited by it; Mr Wilson, Mr Babcock and Mr Baxendale whose safety boilers were destined to become the biggest labour-saving device in the home (in the 1930s people spent an average of ten hours a week just keeping the home fires burning); and Willis Haviland Carrier who only developed his domestic air conditioner when he noticed customers crowding around the commercial cooler he had installed in a department store.

In ‘House Works’ we turn to the functioning elements of the home and the men who made them. Pliny the Elder attributed the discovery of glass to a cooking accident on a Syrian beach, but it was ‘the little master in the jacket’, 14-year-old Robert Lucas Chance, who glazed the way for the more famous Mr Pilkington. Both men glazed the sash window, although the identity of its inventor remains a mystery: do we owe a debt of gratitude to a Dutchman, an American or a Yorkshireman?

Few today would choose to live without their bath, shower or, heaven forbid, the flushing toilet. The power shower was brought to its apotheosis by a brace of Malvern doctors, but it was more Victorian ingenuity, in particular the contributions of sanitation engineers like Shanks, Johns and Twyford, who put an end to the privy and the tin bath (not before, in America, Sangamon County’s champion privy-builder demonstrated how the position of the privy could influence the height of the woodpile).

In the ‘Power House’, arms manufacturer William Armstrong lightened the darkness with his friend Joseph Swan’s invention (despite his protestations to the contrary, Thomas Edison was not the father of the electric light); Pennsylvania’s oil supplies helped to snuff out the candles; and a former suffragette opened the first all-electric home in Bristol to relieve the domestic drudgery of her sisters. Meanwhile the miracle materials invented by Leo Baekeland and Otto Bayer radically transformed the home, while an early trial with solar energy in the Birmingham suburb of a chocolate magnate turned to triumph.

Finally it’s time to consider those elements of the home which are such a source of domestic satisfaction, from fitted kitchens, clocks and the true saga of the Aga stove to do-it-yourself and home safety, where Benjamin Franklin’s rods and Feng Shui play a pivotal role. We go there safe in the knowledge that, despite the occasional DIY disaster, no home improver was ever sent to the gallows, at least according to Shirley Hibberd. William Hutton, meanwhile, uncovers the truth behind the half-naked women of Walsall – slave labour.

History can be unkind to inventors. Perillus of Athens invented a brazen bull for the execution of criminals (they were to be locked away in its belly and baked by fires lit beneath). He became the first man to die inside the bull. The medieval instrument of torture known as the Iron Cage was first tested out on its unfortunate inventor, the Bishop of Verdun. And Henry Winstanley, staying overnight in the lighthouse he had built on the Eddystone rocks off the Cornish coast, was swept to his death when a storm destroyed it in 1703. But is it a worse fate to be forgotten? The countless minor inventions that went into the making of our homes have been neglected for too long, along with the curious, the intriguing and the occasionally bizarre stories of the men and women who invented them.

1

Open House

Doors of Perception

Every culture in every corner of the globe has made the most of its front door. In eastern Europe farmers on Muhu Island off Estonia customarily decorated their doors with elaborate, geometric paintings, while southern Europe’s Mudéjar craftsmen – Muslims working in Spain after the Christian reconquest – traced intricate patterns with nails in their metal-faced doors. In many countries a red door is auspicious, red being judged a lucky colour, although a red cross on a door in the Middle Ages marked a house visited by the plague. The front door was always a place for leaving signs, symbols and messages. The Revd Francis Kilvert, tramping through his Welsh borders parish to visit one of his flock, would leave a tell-tale on the door: ‘At Rhos Goch Lane House no-one was at home so I stuck an ivy leaf into the latch hole’, he wrote in March 1870. Spanish Arabs left their own welcoming message on the front door, furnishing it with door knockers shaped in the Hand of Fátima, the Islamic symbol of greeting extended to the stranger. In the west Christmas and Thanksgiving wreaths traditionally decorate the front door.

Inevitably people’s taste in door furniture has sometimes verged on the vulgar. According to Charles Eastlake in his Hints on Household Taste published in 1868 the most superior door knockers were to be sourced from Wurzburg in Bavaria. ‘They . . . afford a pleasant contrast to the hackneyed portraits of tame lions and grinning satyrs which have been adopted as types of the modern door knocker.’ But by 1908, according to Henry Walker, correspondent for The Country Home, the fate of the traditional door knocker was sealed by the invention of the electric bell. ‘The knocker is doomed,’ he lamented. ‘The first nail in its coffin was driven when the wire bell-pull was invented, and it will receive its coup de grâce as the use of electric bell-pulls becomes more general.’

In his review of the door knocker Walker also reported on a bizarre feud over a precious door knocker at Brasenose College, Oxford. It seems that in the fourteenth century resentment between students from the north and those from the south led to the northern students abandoning Oxford’s hallowed towers and setting up their own hall of learning at Stamford in Lincolnshire. As if to remind themselves of old Oxford they took with them the door knocker from the door of Brasenose College, repelling an attempt by the Sheriff of Lincoln to retrieve it. While Oxford students were required subsequently to swear an oath ‘not to attend lectures at Stamford’, the aldermen of Stamford steadfastly refused to return the Brasenose knocker and the Oxford college had to perform a piece of subterfuge (by purchasing the Stamford building in 1888) to retrieve their missing knocker.

Meanwhile, the invention that Walker so feared, the electric bell, had been patented by Joseph Henry, the first director of the American Smithsonian Institute, in 1831. (It was a discovery that greatly assisted Alexander Graham Bell, who later remarked ‘If it wasn’t for his invention I’d never have invented the telephone.’) Walker’s fear that the electric bell would usurp the door knocker proved unfounded and the traditional panel and frame door, a design imported to England from Flanders in the fifteenth century, would have survived un-mutilated to this day but for the inventions of post-master Roland Hill and the dog-loving Sir Isaac Newton.

On 4 October 1892 George E. Becket registered a new invention at the US Patent Office. His device, he explained, was intended to be permanently secured to the door, ‘having an opening or mouth formed therein increasing in width in a vertical direction from the front’. He called his invention a ‘house-door letter-box’. Yet British carpenters had been cutting horizontal openings in their customers’ doors since January 1840 when the former schoolmaster Rowland Hill launched his Uniform Penny Post. Many doubted that Hill’s idea – charging customers to send mail with a pre-paid, gummed label – would ever catch on. A Penny Post had been introduced by London merchant William Dockwra in 1680, but by 1835 it would cost a Humberside housemaid a day’s wages to send a letter to her lover in Liverpool. The alternative was to send the letter ‘caller collect’, with the recipient paying on delivery. But it was said that unscrupulous senders simply wrote their message in secret code on the envelope. When the letter arrived the recipient read the code and then refused delivery, thus avoiding payment. Hill predicted that his Penny Post would prevent such frauds and persuade more people to use the postal system.

He was proved right. On the first day of the Penny Post the pre-paid mail trebled. Before long, plain Mr Hill had become Sir Rowland, his system of gummed labels (or ‘stamps’) was being copied across the world, and everyone wanted to deface their doors with a letter-box. As elegant Georgian doors, which had never seen a letter-plate, were subjected to a flurry of modernising carpentry work, ironmongers rushed out a range of ornate and decorative letter-plates, many of them, much to Henry Walker’s relief, combined with a door knocker. In 1894 Henry Davis efficiently dealt with what might have become a new crime – stealing mail from the letter-box – with his ‘improved Thief-proof letter-box’.

The invention of the cat flap and the dog door is attributed to the brilliant seventeenth-century mathematician who first formulated the law of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton, although the pet world had no serious impact on door architecture until the twentieth century. Until then the proper place for the dog was the doghouse outside, while the cat was expected to wait its turn at the back door just like anybody else. Gradually, as these animals wheedled their way into the warm kitchen, back doors began to be damaged and disfigured by spring-loaded, magnet-locking cat flaps and dog doors automatically controlled by passive infra-red eyes. One scientist even tried to patent a device that would trigger a nuclear strike on any neighbour’s cat that tried to trespass on his own cat’s door. The patent office regretfully refused his application.

Mr Chubb’s Scandalous Lock

Houselessness, the hero of Charles Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller, is trudging the London streets. ‘Now and then in the night Houselessness becomes aware of a furtive head peering out of a doorway a few yards before him, and, coming up from the head, you find a man standing bolt upright to keep within the doorway’s shadow, and evidently intent upon no particular service to society.’ Pitted against those intent on breaking down the back door and performing ‘no particular service to society’ was a contraption that had made millionaires of its inventors, the Chubb family. ‘Chubb locks were the first exhibits we regularly inspected and they really are wonderful, of every shape and size. He [John Chubb] explained to us the ingenious manner by which an attempt to force the lock is discovered,’ wrote the effusive Queen Victoria in her diary for 10 June 1851 after meeting Mr Chubb at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, London. She had reason to be grateful; her Tudor predecessor Henry VIII was obliged to take his portable Beddington lock with him and have it screwed to the bedroom door wherever he stayed.

As official lock makers to the Prince Consort, the Victorian Chubb family enjoyed prestige and power. No one, least of all John Chubb, was prepared for the scandal that would be unleashed when a young American picked Mr Chubb’s most famous lock in public.

John’s father Charles Chubb and his uncle Jeremiah had been brought up in the pastoral peace of the Hampshire village of Fordingbridge, where, as Henry Longfellow would have it,

Under a spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands.

It was to a Winchester smithy that both boys were apprenticed. In his early 30s Charles Chubb opened a naval ironmongery shop in Portsmouth. The year was 1804, the year before Admiral Nelson routed the French fleet at a little-known place called Trafalgar. Business was brisk, and it became considerably brisker following a serious robbery in the Portsmouth dockyard when thieves opened a dockyard lock with a set of duplicate keys. The government offered a £100 reward, not for the return of the stolen goods but for a better lock – a lock that could be opened only with its own key. In 1818 Jeremiah designed the Chubb Detector Lock, won the government prize and patented the product.

Until then most householders had relied on an old-fashioned bar across the door to secure their homes, which was a fine arrangement as long as there was someone at home to lift the bar on their return. An alternative was a primitive lock with a specially shaped plate, fixed over the bolt, which was supposed to prevent any but the correct key being slipped inside. The plate, however, was easily forced. For smaller items, such as a sea-chest or kitchen dresser for example, there were keyless locks, which relied on combinations of numbers or letters. These had been in use in England since the early 1600s:

A cap case for your linen, and your plate,

With a strange lock that opens with A.M.E.N.

run the lines of one early seventeenth-century play.

Mr Chubb’s new lock was a revelation. To publicise it Chubb adopted the sales methods of his rival Joseph Bramah. Bramah had patented his own Bramah safety lock in 1784 and offered a reward to anyone who could pick it. Jeremiah similarly offered a £100 reward, and a convict and former lock maker languishing on one of the prison ships moored in Portsmouth’s docks took up the challenge. The government doubled the odds by offering the felon a free pardon if he could pick the lock. But he could not and, resigning himself to his continued stay behind bars, he declared it the most secure lock he had ever handled.

The convict’s testimonial spurred on sales, and between them the Chubb brothers sold over two and a half million Detectors in the next fifty years. They won a royal warrant for their products and in 1828 let it be known that even the Duke of Wellington had chosen to make his London home safe with a Chubb lock. Ironically it was Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 which made the door lock so essential. The war left the continental markets depressed and some 400,000 redundant British soldiers roaming the countryside. Crime, and more significantly the fear of crime, soared.

Those of a nervous disposition could choose to move to the safest town in England, Willenhall in Staffordshire. Willenhall, with neighbouring Bilston and Wolverhampton, was the home of the locksmith industry. By the 1850s there were 340 small lock makers in the town, which was nicknamed Humpshire by mocking neighbours, a reference to the lock makers who, having spent their working lives bent over their benches, developed curved spines and hunched backs.

In 1851 the Chubb and Bramah locks were both put forward for the Great Exhibition, that showcase for all things inventive. Bramah was now offering £200 to anyone who could pick his lock. The looming ‘Great Lock Controversy’ would see both Bramah and Chubb pay up.

The man behind the scandal was the New York salesman and lock maker Alfred Charles Hobbs. He had visited the Exhibition and bought himself a fine lock made by Charles Aubin of Wolverhampton. Shortly afterwards he presented himself at Great George Street in Westminster, London, and announced his intention to pick the unpickable Chubb lock on display. He did so in just 25 minutes. Bramah’s lock was his next target. It took a lot longer – 44 hours spread over sixteen days, but finally Hobbs publicly picked the lock.

The nation was horrified. Nervous widows trembled in their beds. Wealthy home-owners purchased large, dangerous guard dogs. One correspondent wrote a letter to The Times newspaper to reassure its readers, commenting that, ‘our English locks . . . previous to the celebrated “lock controversy” of 1851, had borne a high character for skilful construction, beauty of workmanship, and undoubted security’. Lock manufacturers pointed out that no burglar would ever have the opportunity to spend 44 uninterrupted hours picking a lock. Such remarks reassured neither the public nor the bankers and insurance companies who, naturally, took the locksmith’s craft seriously. The Royal Society of Arts was persuaded to mount a major public relations exercise and to offer a prize for the perfect, unpickable lock. A Mr Saxby, amid almost audible sighs of relief from the industry, duly collected the prize for his winning design. The resilient Mr Hobbs then stepped forward and picked the lock. In three minutes.

Only when a police superintendent declared in public that he had never known a burglar unpick a Chubb lock in his twenty-seven years’ experience was public confidence restored. Hobbs’s success led him to found his own locksmiths (taken over, ironically, by Chubb in the 1960s) while Mr Chubb, his pride somewhat dented, continued to lock the nation’s doors for another century.

Mrs Coade’s Dramatic Entrance

The attention lavished on an entrance way was always intended to indicate the level of craftsmanship inside. And creating a good impression in the eighteenth century was an all-consuming passion for those of a certain class. England then was a peaceful and prosperous place. The population was expanding and there was talk of building whole new terraces of smart town houses in Bath, London, Dublin, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells. The scene was set for a golden age for the house. The building boom stimulated demand for decorative stonework, for keystones, pillars and pinnacles, for caryatids and cherubs, for balusters, finials and front steps – anything, in fact, that drew attention to the house’s entrance. As the quarrymen and masons fell behind with their orders a remarkable woman, Eleanor Coade, arrived on the household scene, determined, despite her gender, to make a living from this explosion in home building.

AN INGENIOUS IDEA

Jefferson’s Automatic Door

The earliest door was no more than a curtain of animal skin, draped like a Mediterranean fly-screen across the entrance. The transformation from animal hide to panelled door came by way of many minor inventions, the most useful one being that of the eighteenth-century cast-iron butt hinge, still in use today. But the progress of door technology must surely have appeared to guests of Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s to have reached its apotheosis. Here at Monticello, his home in Virginia, stood an elegant pair of mahogany-framed, glass-partitioned doors, leading from the hall to the parlour. When one door opened, its twin opened too, as if by magic and with no visible mechanical means. Not until the 1950s, when the floors were removed during a major renovation, were the secret workings of the doors revealed. The door maker had hidden beneath the floor two drums, each fixed to a pivot at the base of the doors; when one door was opened, a chain wrapped around the drums gently and discreetly pulled open the second door.

It took over two years to have the doors made. Despite being, as Jefferson described him, ‘skilled in the orders of architecture’, the joiner James Oldham could not at first lay his hands on enough ‘good lumber for the purpose’. Then he could source no kiln-dried timber. If Richmond builders ‘do all their housejoinery with green stuff they are much behind even what I had expected,’ grumbled Jefferson.

‘Mrs’ Coade (the title was a Georgian courtesy: Eleanor Coade never married) took over a factory opposite the Houses of Parliament at King’s Arms Stairs, Narrow Lane, Lambeth, to meet the insatiable demand for every kind of architectural ornament. Before long the factory was making gate piers, fountains and figurines, mermaids and sphinxes, Medici vases, nimble water nymphs and Bacchanalian processions, which could be set so they seemed to dance along the chimney-piece. The Coade catalogues listed sculpture that could be bought by the yard and, most important of all for those who wished to make a grand entrance, there were lions designed to stand guard on either side of the door and the heads of river gods intended to be set above it, sandwiched between rusticated voussoirs.

The business had been established by Daniel Pincot two years before, but he lacked Coade’s Midas touch. He struggled (and ultimately failed) to survive the building trade’s prejudice against its product, artificial stone. As he put it: