Technology in the Home and the Oe149did adopt a more streamlined approach to furniture manufacturing, they also found that the introduction of new materials, such as aluminum, into civilian life, was not as easy as it appeared. Di�rent kinds of economic necessities a�cted the use of aluminum in everyday life. Nowadays it is taken for granted, most notably as a component in soda cans. Prior to World War I, however, it had trouble ding a usage in everyday life (some manufacturers even tried selling it in the form of postcards). By 1919, a few companies tried to incorporate aluminum into furniture making (notably in England) but found this could be done only at the level of chairs�structure, for fear of turning away clients used to noble wood. Anecdotal though it appears, this episode also rects a wish on the part of those who experienced the war to return to a pre1914 life where technology did not appear to pervade every aspect in life. Hand-made furniture would continue to exist, but the march was on to adopt mass production. The iron tubing, as expressed in Marcel Breuer introduction of the cantilevered metal chair, o�rs a case in point. The home would eventually receive modernist material, sometimes because it was trendy, more generally because it was cheap. Other transformations would take longer and be part of a reform of social mores. CLEANLINESS The advent of running water in the home encouraged not only a new application of the principles of cleanliness that nineteenth-century medicine had begun to stress but also a recasting of the bathroom (see chapter 10). Since the nineteenth century, the family home had become the new safe haven to the social unit of the nation. Victorian England had crystallized such a notion, though it was to be found in all industrial nations. As such, the outer business world was dirty, and it followed that the inner sanctum should be spotless. It should be emphasized, however, that this was a middle-class urban ideal. Grooming overall remained limited outside the city, for access to water was limited in the countryside (and would remain so until after World War II). Furthermore, an old belief still followed claimed that to bathe made one skin soft and therefore vulnerable. Dirt implied health. One might splash water on the face and hands prior to a religious service or a special event, but that was all (Prost 85). As middle-class ideals became the new standards for ideal living conditions (thus displacing the nobility), the notion of cleanliness may have become accentuated as a means of distinguishing old and new but also social background. Cleanliness became a factor that helped justify power relationships between castes. Bathrooms rected this changing state of a�irs. First installed with running water in the late nineteenth century, they gained in engineering sophistication rapidly. Designers of sanitary ware stressed white
