杏吧原创

Electromechanical thrills: looping the loop in Atlantic City in 1901 (Image: Library of Congress)

Packaged Pleasures explores the sensual mass marketing that technological innovation in the 19th century make possible

HOW did we get our senses sold back to us? Gary Cross and Robert Proctor鈥檚 ambitious book examines the 鈥減ackaged pleasure鈥� revolution, as late-19th-century technologies for mass manufacture bumped up against the new 鈥渟cience鈥� of marketing to create cheap, accessible products that offered the consumer sensual satisfaction.

Focusing on tubularisation (think cans and toothpaste tubes), foodstuffs, sound and sight, and 鈥渕ultisensual鈥� amusement parks, the authors carefully describe how rare sensations became commonplace.

What we see, taste, touch, hear and smell is fleeting, constrained by the limits of the human body, the changing of the seasons and collective memory. Packaging pleasures preserved them in amber (or at any rate, gelatin); sensual experiences once considered rare and fragile were made accessible, knowable and repeatable. ; water achieved temporary effervescence after being impregnated with carbon dioxide.

Cross and Proctor are historians, and their book comes into its own when it hunkers down on the detail of the social and technological systems that pushed hard candy, rollercoasters, cigarettes and moving pictures into the world. There are no heroic narratives or stories of astonishing invention. Instead, the authors emphasise how messy and incremental innovation is. Tinned goods developed through a series of small changes that led to the tops and bottoms of cans being 鈥渟tamped鈥� and their sides sealed. was born from industrial slaughterhouse waste.

And none of this would have happened without the railways which, while delivering eager crowds to the electromechanical thrills of amusement parks, brought in their wake the telegraphs and telephones needed to keep up with the boom in trade.

Marketing was essential in carving out a place for these products. Women, who had limited access to alcohol and tobacco, were targeted by sweet sellers, and moralists worried that young women might be lured into unsavoury romances by boxes of seductive sweets.

, advertising of a wide range of products, including soap, ginger ale and tyres, played on parents鈥� fears for their children鈥檚 health, even as mothers who once bought professional 鈥渕ortuary photos鈥� of their deceased children were taking spontaneous images of happy and energetic babies with new, easy-to-use Kodak cameras.

Cross and Proctor have a keen ear for detail and anecdotes, and their stories are more compelling than the context in which they set them. Theirs is a complicated tale. Nevertheless, while networked technologies are reconfiguring associations between the senses, space and society 鈥� with work emails checked on holiday, selfies taken at funerals and 3D objects printed locally from a CAD file stored in the 鈥渃loud鈥� 鈥� Packaged Pleasures offers a timely reminder of the longer history of the relationship between technology, industry and the self.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩iding the tube鈥�