Academic Reading — All-Types Test 2

Reading passage

The History of the Umbrella A. The umbrella is now such an ordinary object that few people pause to consider its long and rather surprising past. Its earliest known forms had nothing to do with rain at all. In the hot kingdoms of ancient Egypt, Assyria and India, a canopy carried on a pole was chiefly a device for creating shade, and the shade it created carried meaning beyond mere comfort. Only rulers, priests and other people of high standing were entitled to walk beneath one, usually held aloft by a servant. The object therefore announced a person's status as plainly as fine clothing or jewellery did, and the word most European languages later adopted for it, derived from the Latin for a little shade, preserves this original sunny purpose. B. The shift from sun to rain seems to have happened gradually and in more than one place. Written sources from ancient Rome mention women holding a light canopy over themselves at open-air shows, and there is a suggestion that these could be oiled to keep off a passing shower. Much further east, artisans in China were treating paper canopies with lacquer and wax so that water ran off them rather than soaking through, an innovation that made the object useful in wet weather as well as bright. Some historians believe that traders and travellers slowly carried these waterproofing techniques westward along the routes that linked Asia to the Mediterranean, though the trail of evidence is faint and much remains guesswork. For a very long time, in any case, the umbrella in Europe remained firmly associated with women, sunshine and social display, and a man who carried one in the street was likely to be mocked as effeminate or foreign. C. That prejudice was worn down in Britain largely through the efforts of a single determined traveller. Jonas Harwell, a merchant and writer who had seen umbrellas used freely by both sexes on the Continent, began carrying one openly through the streets of London in the middle of the eighteenth century. He was jeered at by passers-by and, according to one account, deliberately splashed by the drivers of hackney coaches, who correctly sensed that a population content to stay dry might have less need of their services. Harwell persisted for some thirty years, and by the time of his death the sight of a gentleman with an umbrella had become unremarkable. For decades afterwards the object was still known in some quarters simply as a "Harwell", a small linguistic monument to his stubbornness. D. Early umbrellas were heavy, awkward things. The ribs that held the covering open were made of whalebone or split cane, and the covering itself was oiled cotton or silk that grew stiff in cold weather and gave off an unpleasant smell. A wet umbrella took a long time to dry and could not easily be folded away, so it was as much a burden as a convenience. Owners frequently paid to have the frame mended or the fabric replaced, since buying a new one outright was an expense few could justify lightly. The decisive improvement came in 1852, when an English inventor named Samuel Fife patented a frame built from thin, grooved steel ribs. This design was far lighter and stronger than anything made of bone, and its basic geometry has scarcely changed since; the umbrella a commuter carries today is, in essence, Fife's. E. In the twentieth century the umbrella completed its journey from luxury to disposable commodity. The invention of a compact folding model in the 1920s, and later the mass production of cheap versions using aluminium and synthetic fabric, put the object within reach of almost everyone. Something was lost in the process. The umbrella ceased to be a repairable possession that a person might keep for a lifetime and became instead a thing routinely abandoned on trains and in cafes, or turned inside out by the first strong gust and dropped into a bin. Yet in ceremonial settings the ancient meaning survives. A canopy held above an important figure on a formal occasion still says exactly what it said three thousand years ago: that the person beneath it matters.