Smell of 1820

Are you sensitive to smell? Do you avoid sitting near a bathroom in a restaurant because it would disturb your dining? Can you smell a person who smokes when they walk past you?

If the answer to these questions is 'yes', you should be very grateful to be living in the modern era. You should be grateful to commerce that has created the modern era.

As recently as the 1980s in the United States and still today in much of the world a cigar smoker can enjoy a good cigar in a restaurant, hotel room or in a taxi. Buses had their diesel exhausts at tire level.

That is trivial compared to the smell left on the street by horses as recently as the 1930s. In urban areas there were still horse drawn vehicles and police patrols on horseback.

From the 1920s, on back in time, the majority of the population did not bathe regularly (certainly not the English or French) and drank so much alcohol to cover up medical pain problems that it was very easily detected.

I picked the title of this blog as 1820 because that is the earliest time at which commerce became industrial and began to improve the lives of ordinary people. In most urban areas of the United States and Europe that time predates the separation of sewers from street side and from fresh water intake.

Until late in the 1800s, horses and other animals lived in homes including urban homes.

If you want to know what everyday life, all day every day, smelled like for an ordinary person you need to stand next to a modern homeless person. Homeless people have a combined smell of their individual excrement's. To get the smell of 1820 precisely you need to occasionally add the smell of perfume that was used to cover up bodily and horse manure smell.

If smell bothers you you should seriously give thought to any of your long-held Luddite or anti-commercial political values. You could well be living in an 1820 environment that the Left so romantically aspires to.

I should definitely note that some societies were very clean in 1820 and have been for millennia. Primarily those derived from the original cluster of tribes around Lake Baikal.  The Japanese, Turks, Hungarians and Finns.