Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
So one great lump of the servant's toil will practically disappear. Two
others are already disappearing. In many houses there are still the
offensive duties of filling lamps and blacking boots to be done. Our
coming house, however, will have no lamps to need filling, and, as for
the boots, really intelligent people will feel the essential ugliness of
wearing the evidence of constant manual toil upon their persons. They
will wear sorts of shoes and boots that can be cleaned by wiping in a
minute or so. Take now the bedroom work. The lack of ingenuity in
sanitary fittings at present forbids the obvious convenience of hot and
cold water supply to the bedroom, and there is a mighty fetching and
carrying of water and slops to be got through daily. All that will
cease. Every bedroom will have its own bath-dressing room which any
well-bred person will be intelligent and considerate enough to use and
leave without the slightest disarrangement. This, so far as "upstairs"
goes, really only leaves bedmaking to be done, and a bed does not take
five minutes to make. Downstairs a vast amount of needless labour at
present arises out of table wear. "Washing up" consists of a tedious
cleansing and wiping of each table utensil in turn, whereas it should be
possible to immerse all dirty table wear in a suitable solvent for a few
minutes and then run that off for the articles to dry. The application
of solvents to window cleaning, also, would be a possible thing but for
the primitive construction of our windows, which prevents anything but a
painful rub, rub, rub, with the leather. A friend of mine in domestic
service tells me that this rubbing is to get the window dry, and this
seems to be the general impression, but I think it incorrect. The water
is not an adequate solvent, and enough cannot be used under existing
conditions. Consequently, if the window is cleaned and left wet, it
dries in drops, and these drops contain dirt in solution which remain as
spots. But water containing a suitable solvent could quite simply be
made to run down a window for a few minutes from pinholes in a pipe
above into a groove below, and this could be followed by pure rain water
for an equal time, and in this way the whole window cleaning in the
house could, I imagine, be reduced to the business of turning on a tap.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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