All the Modern Conveniences

American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890
Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-0-8018-6370-7
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 20, 232 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 346 g

Reihe: Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology

As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid to its history. Now, in All the Modern Conveniences, Maureen Ogle presents a fascinating study that explores the development of household plumbing in nineteenth-century America.

Until 1840, indoor plumbing could be found only in mansions and first-class hotels. Then, in the decade before midcentury, Americans representing a wider range of economic circumstances began to install household plumbing with increasing eagerness. Ogle draws on a wide assortment of contemporary sources—sanitation reports, builders' manuals, fixture catalogues, patent applications, and popular scientific tracts—to show how the demand for plumbing was prompted more by an emerging middle-class culture of convenience, reform, and domestic life than by fears about poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation. She also examines advancements in water-supply and waste-management technology, the architectural considerations these amenities entailed, and the scientific approach to sanitation that began to emerge by century's end.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ogle, Maureen

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Bauingenieurwesen Gebäudeausbau
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Domestic Reform and American Household Plumbing, 1840-1870
2. Water Supply and Waste Disposal for the Convenient House
3. Convenience Embodied: Midcentury Plumbing Fixtures
4. The End of Convenience: Science, Sanitation, and Professionalism, 1870-1890
5. The Sanitarians Take Charge: Scientific Plumbing in the American Home
Conclusion
Notes
Note on Sources
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ogle, Maureen
Maureen Ogle is former assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama.