This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Hello beautiful homebound nerds. If I sound a little different, it's because I'm recording this at home. You might even hear some cars passing by. I'm not sick, hopefully neither

are you, but many of us are staying home so that we don't inadvertently become vectors to a

virus whose impact we don't fully understand. This is the right thing to do. We are

all part of one big ecosystem and if any part of us get sick we all suffer. We are

in this together. So my job in this world is to tell stories about all the thought that goes into the things most people don't think about.

And since many of us are stuck at home, maybe alone, maybe lonely. I thought we'd spend some time exploring

this place we call home together, just you and me. Sound good? If you answer back out loud, I won't think you're weird.

I am starting in my bedroom. I'm sitting on a Casper mattress. This is not an ad. We eat our own dog food in the podcast business, so I have a Casper mattress. This is not an ad. We eat our own dog food in the podcast business so I have a

Casper mattress, but I digress. As I look around I see I have five windows in this room.

Now if I were in England or France or Ireland or Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries

I would probably not want this many windows. That's because back then the more you had, the more tax you paid.

This was all variable from place to place and over time, but the principle was that a window

tax was a good stand-in for a progressive income tax. The bigger the house, the more windows, the higher the tax you paid.

When the window tax was instituted in 1696 in England and Wales, a home was taxed at a regular flat rate and then taxed an extra amount for each window over 10 windows that it had.

Like I said, the number of windows and the amount of tax buried a lot over time. But the tax was pretty easy to

assess by an outside observer. It was certainly considered easier to assess than an

income tax and so it persisted for quite some time in some places into the 20th century.

This had a funny side effect on architecture that you can still see today in some buildings in the UK and in Europe.

There are many instances of window spaces that are completely bricked up to avoid a tax from 100 years ago.

Now if you passed one in your neighborhood it means some tax cheat lived there a long time ago or you know an

Enterprising life hacker live there you know depending on your perspective

On a test of drawers next to my bed, sits an oscillating fan that I've had for about 35 years.

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