One of the things I most love about my simple ranch home is the large windows that take up entire walls in almost all the rooms. They are 108” wide and 84” tall almost from the floor to the ceiling, in six of the nine rooms in our home. Only the bathrooms and the mudroom lack full these spectacular connections with the outside world. And since we live in the woods, there is greenery at all turns. Those windows alone were what it took to say, “This is home,” when we walked into the house the first time.
Today, this essay is just a short romp about windows, or, rather, about their history. It includes a few tasty bits about throwing people out of windows, flying through them with Edison anti-gravity underwear, taking a census of window breakage in London in 1857, and Windows 95, etc.
First, here's a fantastic piece that I never thought about reading, let alone writing—on throwing people from windows, by Thom Sliwowski, Windows Onto History: The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997), at the wonderful Public Domain Review.
It strikes me that if you turn this image upside down, it begins to resemble a print that I had seen in Puck’s Almanac for 1879:
Yes, they were having rather a time of it, those puckish folks, trying for themselves Thomas Edison’s newest invention, anti-gravity underwear. Here at least when you go through a window with Tommy Underwear you’ll be able to fly and not fall.
More on windows, this being a rather nice and expanded history of windows from Architect Magazine.
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