Our everyday gestures are the ultimate expression of the historical changes that have taken place.
Il lustri’m.
The first thing in the morning: turn off the alarm clock. For most of our history we lived without having the day divided into hours, we only cared about seasons and days.
Since when do we measure hours?
It begins with the monks and the need to fix prayer times, but the great advance in accuracy in measurement is linked to the appearance of the railway in the 19th century and the telegraph. Paris sent the time to all its colonies.
Now it dominates us.
The demand for precision is brutal, the first mechanical watches only had the hour hand, now stock market transactions are measured in thousandths of a second.
The subject of washing has changed a lot.
We tend to think of hygiene as something that has progressed progressively over the years, but throughout history there have been setbacks, so a person in the middle ages could be cleaner than someone in the early of the 18th century.
What happened in the 18th century?
The scientific revolution begins and it seems that reason prevails, doctors believed that bathing soaked the internal organs and the skin, which, by opening the pores, allowed diseases such as the plague to enter.
Did doctors advise against bathing?
Yes, that’s why they wore those powders that covered the skin and the big wigs, because the smell that accompanied them couldn’t be pleasant at all. And in the case of London, for example, they were cleaned with excrement.
…!
The Thames was a river full of dirt and excrement that was used by a population that in the 19th century already had a million inhabitants. All the water that people used for drinking, cooking and washing came from the river, and hence all the epidemics.
After washing, we get dressed.
A Westerner today has far more clothes in his Modern Bed Designs than the wealthy had for most of our history. Today’s access to cheap clothes is unique, a gentleman in the 16th century had a shirt or two because his clothing was covered, but even kings had little underwear because they didn’t change it very often.
And then we have breakfast.
Coffee, tobacco, tea, all the stimulants that arrived from Asia and Africa, and then America, were associated with the devil. But Pope Clement VIII tasted the coffee, loved it and became fond of it; paraphrasing his boss: he saw it was good. So, to solve the problem and be able to consume it without having to worry about his soul, he blessed it.
Who invaded cities with cars?
They came as a surprise as to how the urban planners of the late 19th century imagined their inhabitants would move. Ildefons Cerdà, for example, when designing Barcelona’s Eixample, thought of rectilinear, parallel and transversal streets, because he predicted that movement through cities would take place on urban railways.
But the car prevailed.
It was the big oil companies that aborted the use of public transport in the city. And that they conspired to turn America into a country behind the wheel.
We arrive at the office.
It is surprising how many sociologists, economists, psychologists and architects have been thinking about how the perfect office should be, the one that allows work to be productive.
I?
It has been a failure, studies show that the office does not help productivity, and that in the chats of the coffee machine, where people speak much more freely than in meetings, is where ideas emerge.
Dinem.
There have been devastating famines that have decimated populations that had first-rate nutritional sources within reach but that no one thought to eat, such as potatoes and corn and wheat. Cereals for millennia were considered weeds.
Pick up the girls at school.
Throughout most of history, children have been little more than small adults. The high infant mortality meant that no one cared too much about it. At the other extreme, the sons of the nobles were treated like the lords they would become.
The children were potential adults.
Yes, the concept of childhood does not appear until the Enlightenment with Rousseau, despite the fact that he could not stand children.
return home
It is a proven fact that, despite the proliferation of screens, the overstimulation of stories that surround us, there are still millions of children who, every night, fall asleep while an adult reads them a story.