Remember that this is the top one percent of one percent of one percent before electricity.
The picture above is from the novel "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens published in the mid1800s, contemporaneously. This room is the office, library and parlor of a rich man meeting with his lawyer. The background is fascinating. This is the best that the British could do. They had tens of thousands of sailing ships moving trade goods between continents. They had colonies in every time zone in the world. They were just about to build a world wide telegraph network and laying cables between New York and London. They ran the world. That pesky colony, that had rebelled from England a century ago, was just about to suffer a devastating civil war. Better to be rid of those thugs who couldn't even manage their own colonies.
But enough of the philosophizing. Let's examine this room in detail. Start at the very top, the ceiling. It appears to be some elaborate wood or metal tiles. Manufactured tiles. Stamped. But individually installed. In a high ceilinged room, with lots of extra space not needed, but exploited for cultural reasons. Extravagance. What's next? As you proceed downward from the ceiling, you get crown molding, more extravagance, to make the environment look 'interesting.'
Next we get to the walls. These walls are about 12' high, 50% higher than typical walls today. Another sign of opulence. And what do we see hanging from these walls, covering them completely? Hand painted portraits of their ancestors. Very expensive portraits. And there is a minimum of 20 portraits around the room. So ten generations of ancestors, documenting hundreds of years of stewardship of the surrounding lands.
The wall is covered in an expensive wall paper, with elaborate medallions in it (between the paintings, or that might be a gas light?) Next we encounter several vases and statues on another line of crown molding. Probably some are hand made and some are from the new factories of companies like Wedgewood, that was industrializing the production of fine porcelain from China (which they had finally succeeded in duplicating and were now starting to mass produce.)
This drawing appears as if it is lit by the sun coming through windows on the opposite side of the room. Another sign of extravagance, it looks like large windows, maybe on a wintry day. Built of glass and steel. A new technology that was just being rolled out into solariums across England, allowing them to grow fruits and vegetables year round. Eventually to be rolled out to the world allowing the construction of buildings over ten stories (not possible before this invention, and only feasible with the invention of electricity to power elevators. A steampunk elevator would be very complicated.)
What do we see next on the walls? Books. The industrialization of information. Books. Hundreds of books. About the world, about accounting, about architecture, about farming, about politics, about history. The rich used to have their books copied by hand to get into their libraries. Now, they could purchase them from book printers. Dickens himself made a living selling books. He may have sold more books than any author living up to that time.
There's some more statues (hand made or mass produced stone ware?) on pedestals. There's other furniture in the room, a few ornate chairs, a table with what appears to be a candle on it. and several books, hard to tell. And there's some device to the left of the picture, maybe a safe door? or a stove? And standing behind it, fading into the background, is a maid-servant.
Normally, the lighting at this time would be gas and candles. Maybe rugs from the orient to cover the floors. Their clothes are ornate, built to ornate details using automated looms in large factories, which rapidly brought down the price of clothing in the coming decades. And, of course, they are meeting with an expensive lawyer. Never a good sign, lawyers are expensive. Another extravagance.
Fifty years later, after the introduction of electricity into England, what was missing from the average household compared to this picture? Two story drawing rooms with hand pointed portraits of your ancestors? Yes, but they had... books, light, better light, cheaper light, carpets and wall paper, heating and indoor plumbing, color prints, daily papers, mail service and phone systems in the big cities! A telegram will come right to your door! It's a different game now. Electricity made a change in what it was possible for everyone to do. And it's still going on.
Fifteen years ago, after watching the progress in self-driving cars at the DARPA trials, I vowed that the next car I bought would be self-driving. And I’m still not there. Again, I won't buy another dishwasher until it can actually gather the dishes to wash. Electricity was invented one-third of the way between us and these Britishers. The changes have always been much more glacial than expected in the short term and so much more profound in the long term as to be utterly unbelievable. Progress is just as slow as it was then, but the changes in the long run are profound. A 3% change in productivity on average since then means we can produce 100 times as much, but we don’t, we produce 100 times more different things: Radios, TVs, computers, self-driving cars and rockets to mars, industrialized junk mail and dick pics. Charles wouldn’t recognize what we think of as common. And it continues skyrocketing into the future. What will my future self say looking back on today in 150 years?
