“[Simon & Schuster] had given us advantages, and like any young writers we had spent them and hadn’t done the work…We were well-qualified to write the book, except when we got to the chapter on storage: we simply could not write the required 5.000 words.
This produced frustration of an acute sort.
We had done all sort of research; we knew, for instance, that housewives’ pet peeve was inadequate closets. We also knew that closets were very good vor clothes, but not so good for golf clubs or coffee percolators or watering cans, but we couldn’t break through anywhere to write 5.000 words.
I was sitting in my office, staring at the wall, miserable; we had just had another angry call from the publisher. I was looking at the wall and something in my head said, ‘What’s inside, how thick is that wall?’.
I thought, ‘Who cares how thick the wall is, it’s probably 4 or 5 inches, go away.’
And again, the real feeling of a dialogue with an unwanted visitor:
‘What is inside the wall?’
‘Hollow tile with plaster on top of it’
‘What else?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Do you mean there is a vacuum?’
‘Not a vacuum, air’
‘Air’ was the trigger. Suddenly all those unrelated things crashed together and I realized that the essential element in any storage unit of any sort or size was air. A closet has so much air. And I thought, ‘My goodness, if you took those walls and pumped more air into them and they got thicker and thicker until maybe 12 inches thick, you would have hundreds and hundreds of running feet of storage. It didn’t take enough inches off the room on either side to be noticed’ ”
This was the birth of the storagewall.
Simply as that 😉
The book Nelson talks about is, ‘Tomorrow’s House‘. A 1945‘s best -seller that changed forever the modern/contemporary house living.
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