Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki worried that street lighting would destroy the appreciation of shadows in Japanese aesthetics.23 But in the streets, too, lighting remained patchy. Most cities, even large ones, remained a far cry from the Parisian ideal of the nocturnal city decked in garlands of light. Beirut introduced gas lights in 1889, but these were planted at street corners only. At night, whistles flew through the air, as police signalled to pedestrians at the next corner when it was safe to cross the road in the darkness.24 In Edo, Kabuki theatres were lit by gas from the 1870s but hardly any streets in the plebeian Low City had lighting. Even London, with its tens of thousands of lights, was known to be ‘the best and the worst lighted city in the world’. In 1911, photometers had difficulty picking up the dim light in poorer areas.25 The axial lighting of thoroughfares was a frequent target of complaint. Lights suspended in the middle of the street left bus passengers jumping off into the shadows and put pedestrians at risk. In cities that burnt a lot of coal, fog sometimes overwhelmed gaslights for days. Mr Goodenough, a London engineer, noted in 1910 how ‘he had gone down [from his flat], and stood at the foot of the column, and could not see the light, though the lamp was only 18 feet above the road-level.’ And where there is light, there is shadow. In the City of London, the epicentre of the world economy, the lights on Cannon Street left triangular patches of darkness, creating dangerous ‘refuges for objectionable persons’.26 The more cities were lit, the more darkness inspired fear and fascination. For every additional watt, there was another Gothic story of metropolitan shadowlands.27

  Gas and water confronted cities with unprecedented challenges. One was to decide who should provide them. Massive investments were required. Initially, these were shouldered by private firms that, in exchange, secured monopolies with price guarantees for several decades. These arrangements were a source of endless conflict about fair prices, quality and supply. Shareholders had little interest in connecting remote neighbourhoods or carrying water from hills and rivers far away. From the 1860s, more and more cities were taking on the job of providing consumers directly. By 1880, there were more public than private waterworks in British and American towns. Sweden was solidly municipalized by 1913, and in France most communes had also taken over, although Paris still received its water from the Compagnie Générale des Eaux. Spain was a singular exception to this trend, in part because its towns historically lacked strong civic authorities. In London, with its fragmented administration, public takeover of water was also delayed until 1902.28

  This movement is known as ‘municipal socialism’, though the driving force behind it had little to do with socialist parties, which were still in their infancy. The main pressure came from urban growth and the limits of nature. Unlike food and clothing, water became more, not less, expensive in the late nineteenth century. Urban sprawl meant longer pipes to suburbs and more distant, expensive sources. Private companies had maximum prices set by legislators early on, and so had little incentive to invest. Cities were forced to take over. Many businessmen were happy to swallow the pill of public ownership as long as it ensured enough water for their factories. In gas, the opposite logic was at work. Unlike water, gas was highly profitable, thanks to technological innovations. Especially for new, expanding cities without a strong revenue base, it was an attractive cash cow. As one historian has suggested, we should really be talking of ‘municipal capitalism’.29 It was the profits from gas that allowed cities to emerge as major providers of public consumption, from parks and libraries to playgrounds and swimming pools.

  What has been less appreciated is that the challenges for consumers were equally profound. Water and gas raised vexed questions about the very essence of consumption. Was water a ‘gift of God’ or a commodity? If the latter, what should be its price and how did you make people pay? At how many gallons did ‘essential’ use become ‘luxury’? From around 1850, many cities were caught in a fifty-year war over these questions. It was in these battles that many citizens for the first time came together in ‘consumers’ leagues’. Some householders and shopkeepers felt robbed by their private monopoly providers and set up their own bodies. In Paris they formed the Union des Consommateurs de Gaz Parisien (1879). In Marseilles and several provincial cities, small traders and restaurateurs tried to force down prices in the 1890s by boycotting the gas companies, without much success. Across the Channel, angry residents formed the South London Gas Consumers’ Mutual Association.30 Households were charged for lights that often flickered and gas meters that exaggerated – hence the Victorian saying ‘You lie like a gas meter.’ Engineers tore their hair out over how to stop people misreading their meters – the middle dial moved counter-clockwise – from manipulating them with magnets, or, worse, dangerously enlarging tiny gas openings with the help of a local plumber. Gas and electricity could not be sold by the kilo. What exactly were people buying: voltage, or energy and candle power? When voltage dropped, the lights dimmed, but the meters kept turning. In Paris, in 1893, the Compagnie Parisienne de l’Air Comprimé was fined and lost its monopoly for routinely supplying low voltage.31

  Battles over water took grievances to a new level. Water, like bread or sugar, could be sold by the kilo, exactly one litre, and this was what water carriers had done for aeons. As networks spread, however, water underwent a metamorphosis. Companies metered big customers by volume, but this made little sense for millions of small private households. Meters were too expensive and started to spread only from the 1880s. In their place, providers resorted to rough rules of thumb. In some countries, the charge was based on the number of individuals in a household. In the United States, the frontage of a house was used to estimate the number and comfort of the people within. In Britain, landlords paid water rates based on their local property tax, and then added a lump sum to the rent of their tenants. A frugal bachelor in his large villa paid more than his neighbour who lived with a large family in a smaller house next door.

  Just as sanitary reforms were resolving the early-Victorian crisis of public health, new conflicts began to flare up over the rights and interests of consumers. The first battles were over water rates. Some openly called for a ‘water parliament’. Others turned to law and consumer advocacy. In the early 1880s, a network of ‘consumer defence leagues’ sprang up across London with legal advice centres explaining to residents how they had been overcharged by the private water companies and how to resist payment. A second front was opened by the battle of the bath. Legislation in the 1850s required water companies to provide water for ‘domestic’ use. The problem was that the standards of domestic life were in flux. The middle classes were installing baths and water closets. For water companies, these were not for ‘essential’ or ‘domestic’ use but ‘extras’, like gardens, to be charged in addition – 8s per item, to be precise, for a London house with an annual rental value between £100 and £200. The middle classes were furious. Sheffield’s mayor said, ‘if it was not a domestic use for a man to wash his skin and keep himself clean, he did not know what was.’ His fellow townsmen formed a Bath Defence Association and boycotted extra charges. Some painted a red line around the inside of their baths to monitor the bath water actually used and demanded to be charged accordingly. Judges were not impressed and enforced existing rates.

  Consumption and politics had come together in earlier boycotts of tea and slave-grown sugar and would do so again in campaigns against domestic sweatshops. What was remarkable about the water consumer movement was that it was initially led not by female shoppers but by propertied men. It was their stake in the community as tax-paying property owners that pushed these respectable Victorians into consumer activism. As far as they were concerned, they were fighting for their rights as citizens as much as for cheaper water for their homes. That they paid for water on the basis of local taxes (rather than gallons used) may explain why this wave of activism was so pronounced in Britain. The consumer was thus helped on to the political stage by a particular system of citizenship and governm
ent, based on the propertied male tax-payer. We should not romanticize these activists. Cities were divided. Many respectable townsmen took a myopic view: why should a city spend their hard-earned tax-payers’ money on bigger waterworks or other improvements to benefit the masses who paid no taxes at all?32 But nor should we ignore their role in introducing consumer rights into politics.

  Droughts in the 1890s opened a final, third offensive in the water wars. By now, Londoners were used to constant supply, which made the return of taps running dry all the more irritating. Attacks on water companies now came from workers and women, progressive liberals and socialists, as well as the propertied classes.33

  Consumer activists talked about rights, but what about their responsibilities? One reason why ‘the consumer’ moved to the centre of debate was that water companies laid scarcities and high prices at their door. It was the ‘wasteful’ consumer who was to blame, not the networks, their engineers or shareholders. Everywhere, contemporaries were prisoners of a simple, guiding assumption: progress involved higher levels of consumption; indeed, demanded it. ‘When iron pipes and high-pressure engines were introduced,’ Archibald Dobbs, the lawyer who spearheaded the consumer leagues in London, wrote in 1890, ‘a much larger quantity of water was used. The requirements of householders are naturally and properly always on the rise : the standard of comfort constantly improves.’34 In New York, a decade later, when the city was pondering what to do as it was fast exhausting the flow of the Croton River, a detailed report concluded: ‘Water should be supplied in the most lavish abundance and instead of restricting its use, every inducement should be held out to encourage a greater, or more lavish use than is now prevalent.’35 Asking citizens to be more economical was unimaginable. This left waste as the only target.

  The literature is full of figures of consumption per person. These need to be treated with caution. Cities did not know what individuals consumed. They recorded how much was pumped. In between lay cracked pipes and leaking taps. A British inquiry produced the following exchange in 1892 between the Royal Commission and the eminent engineer Sir Frederick Bramwell, chairman of the East Surrey Water Company. ‘The population of London having been . . . accustomed to consume large quantities of water,’ the commission asked, ‘do you not think that there would be very great difficulty in bringing down the consumption?’ ‘May I take objection to your word “consuming”,’ Bramwell interjected. ‘One moment. I used the word “consuming” because I thought it was the most general word that we could take.’ Bramwell disagreed: he preferred ‘provided’.36 What was consumed depended on one’s perspective. Was it only the water that was purposely used for washing, cooking and drinking, or should it also include the many gallons lost through dripping taps? Might it even include all the water lost through leaking mains, a kind of invisible consumption?

  Contemporaries were divided, and for good reason. In some areas, waste exceeded personal use. In Shoreditch, just north of the City of London, residents were supplied with 37 gallons a head a day in 1882. Waste inspectors and improved fittings brought this down by half. In the slightly posher Finsbury Park nearby, inspectors found that in June of that year people used 18 gallons during the day but 105 gallons whilst asleep – ‘letting their hoses run all night in the gardens’.37 If anything, constant supply and modern conveniences encouraged such practices. Laundry was left under constant running water to save on soap, the toilet flush nailed open to keep pan and pipes clean. In Newark, New Jersey, during the harsh winters of 1895–8, inhabitants kept the taps open to prevent pipes from freezing, stretching the city’s supply to its limits. An educated guess is that around 1880, before metering spread, European cities lost between a quarter and a half of pumped water through leakage. This was mainly due to faulty plumbing and worn-out faucets, rather than wilful waste – ‘tenants do not rob landlords,’ the most comprehensive inquiry into metering concluded.38

  The more cities were built upward into the skies, the less waste there was. After the greater number of baths and WCs, this was the other reason why American figures were so stunningly high. New American cities were less compact than old European ones, and more detached houses meant more fixtures and pipes. In 1890 Berlin, each service pipe supplied seventy households. In Detroit, it was a mere handful. Put differently, if 30 per cent of water was lost through leakage, this meant 5.4 gallons per Berliner a day but 75 gallons in Detroit. These factors force us to revise actual consumption figures downward, but they do nothing to change the three-tier hierarchy that had emerged by 1900, with German cities at the bottom (5–30 gallons per head per day), British cities in the middle (17–40, with Glasgow ahead, thanks to the Scottish preference for a three-gallon flush); and Americans on top (30–100+ gallons). In 1903 spot checks in Manhattan – not yet metered – suggested 30 gallons were truly used by the average person, while over 50 gallons leaked away or could not be accounted for at all; another 50 gallons went on commercial and public use. Even this figure obscures class differences within the city. After deducting leakage, engineers found that a typical resident in a Brooklyn tenement used on average 39 gallons a day. In a richer apartment house on the Upper West Side, it was five times that.39

  There was a lively exchange of knowledge and technologies between cities. Liverpool’s Deacon waste-water meter helped locate waste by strategically monitoring mains in select districts overnight and then comparing their flow during the day. It was tried out in Boston and briefly also in Yokohama and Frankfurt; in Boston, it reduced consumption by a third in 1883–4. Newark forced meters on several thousand wasteful culprits. Berlin went for comprehensive metering and was much admired by American authorities. We do not have exact figures for the impact of meters on personal consumption; Berlin metered owners of entire apartment houses, not individual tenants. We do know, however, the percentage of services metered. This allows a rough but instructive comparison. In Atlanta, domestic meters dramatically reduced waste. In Newark and Providence, by contrast, they had little impact. Once serious offenders had been served with a compulsory meter, additional metering saved little. Germany saw success stories like Berlin but also failures like Dresden. Würzburg and many other cities still resisted meters. By 1920, two thirds of American cities were metered.

  The odd man out was Britain – only the tiny towns of Abingdon and Malvern metered homes. From today’s perspective, this might appear as yet another example of British exceptionalism, a laissez-faire disregard of the environment. We must remember, however, that no country at the time saw the meter as an instrument of lifestyle change. It was designed to reduce leakage, not use. Advocates of metering, in fact, prided themselves on the fact that, by encouraging landlords to repair fittings, they were enabling residents to bathe more. An inquiry in New York in 1906 concluded that ‘the blame for the present conditions . . . rests not upon the hundreds of thousands of users of water, but upon the relatively few owners who neglect to keep their plumbing in order’.40 The British approach was to focus on those few. Armed with the Deacon meter, waste inspectors tracked down careless landlords and made them install fittings tested and stamped by the company; Manchester conducted 40,000 inspections in 1905 alone. In some districts, this cut ‘consumption’ by half.41 No British city confronted waste on the scale of Detroit or Atlanta. London’s thirst was manageable. But so was Berlin’s. That, unlike Berlin, London and other British cities did not think it necessary to charge consumers for what they really used also reflected political values and realities. Taking on all landlords Prussian-style was not an attractive option in liberal Britain. As the engineer Bramwell told the Royal Commission, ‘if out of 100 persons who are supplied 10 are wasting and 90 are not, you do not trouble the 90 . . . you simply trouble the 10 who deserve it.’42

  What were the effects of taps and running water on people’s habits? One claim, inspired by Michel Foucault, is that they made people turn inwards, physically and mentally. Toilets were enclosed private cubicles. Hygiene and running water inculcated the se
lf-discipline needed by liberalism, teaching individuals to rule themselves. ‘Liberal governmentality’ came through the pipes.43 In reality, spaces and practices were less secluded and private than one might think. As we have already seen, by tying households together into an interdependent network, constant supply also forged public connections. Technologies spread slowly and unevenly, depending on class-specific spaces and habits. In the 1890s, a bathroom with a shower was such a novelty even in affluent homes in London that hosts would show them off to dinner guests. In Berlin, there was one bathtub for every seventy-nine people. As late as 1954, only one in ten French homes had a bathroom.44

  Water closets spread more quickly – by 1913, they were the norm in London as much as in Leipzig and Lille. Still, for most people, these were not entirely private spaces. An inspection of the 14th arrondissement in the south of Paris in 1904 found that only every fifth flat had its own toilet. The rest shared a WC on the stairs or on the ground floor; private taps were equally rare.45 Personal hygiene and neighbourly contact and conflict remained intimately connected. In Hanover, every third family shared the loo with a dozen or more persons, often in a communal courtyard – a commentator after the war recalled the foul smell from the proximity of human and kitchen waste.46 In working-class Barcelona in the 1930s, the toilet was often in the kitchen. In Britain, concerned parents made their teenage boys leave the toilet door open to keep sinful hands in view.