The birth of the modern fitted kitchen and the creation of Cluedo
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We did something that no one else had ever done.
There was such an excitement and energy about this moment.
It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed.
Witness history. History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so.
I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
Witness history from the BBC World Service.
Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there. This week we learn some surprising details about the origins of the board game Cluedo, including the first murder weapons.
The original included an axe, a bottle of poison, a poker and a hypodermic syringe and a bomb.
Plus the deadly floods and mudslides of 1999 in Venezuela. Afghan Star, the TV talent contest that flourished when the Taliban weren't in power. And the spread of the 1986 computer virus, thought to be the world's first.
This virus was not, or this piece of code was not, intended to damage, steal or harm anything. That's all coming up later.
But first, we're heading into the kitchen. This is a really special kitchen. It comes from the 1920s and was designed by the Austrian architect Margarita Schutelechotsky. Her plan for a highly functional food preparation workspace, the Frankfurt kitchen, is credited as being the first modern fitted kitchen, as Jill Kersley has been finding out.
If I had known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else, I would never have built that damned kitchen.
Those were the words of Margarita Schutte-Lihotsky, spoken at the age of 101 in a newspaper interview, reflecting on the legacy of her most famous creation, the Frankfurt kitchen. It was a groundbreaking design. Margarita was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1897. She was the country's first female architect and contributed to major projects. She championed women's rights and played a role in the Austrian communist resistance against the Nazi regime. For that, she was arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But today, we're going to talk about that damned kitchen.
Much later, in the 1980s, when I got to know her, then this kitchen was reported as the only or the most important element of her entire work. And that then annoyed her.
But the Frankfurt kitchen had now become a design icon. This is Christina Zwingli, an architect and expert on Margarita Shute-Lahotsky. She was still a student when she met Margarita for the first time.
And then from 1985, when I had finished my studies, me and other colleagues visited her. We wanted to know more about her and then we also started to help her with the research in her own archive.
It was through this that Christina got to hear Margarita's story at the Frankfurt kitchen. Around 1919, just after World War I ended, Vienna became the capital of the new First Republic of Austria. Life was very difficult. Many people were poor, hungry and struggling to survive. At that time, a new social movement began in Vienna called the Settlement Movement. It aimed to improve living conditions for working-class people. Margarita got involved with the planning of new settlement houses.
From the start, she was also concerned with the topic of household management, with questions like, what does daily life require and what does that mean for the design of a home?
During this time, it was mainly women who did the housework and cooking. Margarita wanted to make these tasks easier for them. She met German architect Ernst May when he visited Vienna and showed him her designs.
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