Every brick in the world fits in a bricklayer’s grip, and that constraint has held for five thousand years
The Bricklayers Arms holds a 4.4 from eight hundred and forty-two people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and a brick is the size of a hand.
Why a brick is that size
Because a bricklayer holds it in one hand.
And he holds the trowel in the other – and he must be able to pick up a brick, turn it, butter it, and place it, without putting anything down.
Which means the brick cannot be larger than a hand can grip.
And it cannot be smaller
Because then you need more of them, and every brick is a separate pick-up, and a separate placement, and a separate joint.
The labour is per brick, not per volume.
So the brick is exactly as large as one hand can comfortably manage, and no larger – and it has been, in various civilisations, for something like five thousand years.
Roman bricks. Mesopotamian bricks. Victorian bricks. Modern bricks.
They vary. They do not vary much.
Eight postcodes and a thousand and eighty-eight articles: the constraint made the product – and the constraint here is a human hand, and it has not changed.
The ratio
Which is the other piece of engineering, and it is deliberate.
A standard brick is roughly twice as long as it is wide, plus a mortar joint.
Which means you can lay a brick across the wall and it will exactly span two bricks laid along it.
And that is what makes a bond possible – the interlocking pattern that ties the two skins of a wall together and stops it splitting apart.
Every brick wall in the world depends on that one proportion, and it is the reason a brick is not a cube.
And the brick tax
Which is the best fact.
Britain taxed bricks from 1784, per brick, to pay for a war in America.
So manufacturers immediately started making them bigger – because the tax was per unit and not per volume, and a larger brick meant fewer bricks and less tax.
And the government responded by taxing large bricks at a higher rate.
Which produced a decade of extremely tedious argument about exactly how big a brick was allowed to be.
You cannot police an incentive. You can only remove it.
It was repealed in 1850.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
Go, and pick up a brick, and notice how it fits.
And the window tax
Which is the same lesson and which you can still see.
Because Britain taxed windows – per window – from 1696, and the result was immediate and permanent.
People bricked them up.
And you can see it, today, on Georgian buildings all over this country: blank rectangles of brick where a window used to be, filled in to avoid the charge.
Whole floors of houses were left dark. It was, by the standards of the time, a genuine public health disaster – a tax on light and air, levied on people who could not afford to pay it and could not afford to move.
You cannot police an incentive. You can only remove it.
It took until 1851.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The specific knowledge throughout suggests someone’s keeping detailed records of their transformation from believer to cynic.