Brilliant

by Jane Brox

  Once established, gaslight spread quickly throughout London. By the early 1820s, nearly fifty gasometers and several hundred miles of underground gas mains supplied more than forty thousand public gas lamps for the streets. The lamplighters made their rounds with relative ease, using a lighted oil lamp on the end of a pole. "I foresee in this ... the breaking up of our profession," a lamplighter in a Charles Dickens story would soon proclaim. "No more polishing of the tin reflectors^]...no more fancy-work, in the way of clipping the cottons at two o'clock in the morning; no more going the rounds to trim by daylight, and dribbling down of the ile on the hats and bonnets of the ladies and gentlemen, when one feels in good spirits. Any low fellow can light a gas-lamp, and it's all up!"

  In the intimate spaces of home, this strange new light may not have required the same daily attention as did oil lamps and candles, but it had its drawbacks. Its larger flame produced considerable soot and an acid residue that destroyed fabric and wallpaper, and it consumed so much oxygen that people suffered headaches in poorly ventilated rooms, although as time went on, gas chandeliers eventually contained their own ventilation systems. But perhaps more important, with the advent of gaslight people had to reimagine how light would inhabit their homes. Light's abstract future had begun: there was nothing to tend, no wick to see consumed, no melting wax or reservoirs of oil drawing down. The size of the flame could be controlled by a switch and did not waver, flicker, or gutter. It not only stood upright but shot out of the core sideways or upside down, in the shape of a fish tail, a bat wing, or a fan. It was not to be doused with water or extinguished with breath. Fire itself seemed to travel through the pipes. "It was strangely believed that the pipes conveying the gas must be hot!" exclaimed engineer Samuel Clegg. "When the passages to the House of Commons were lighted, the architect insisted upon the pipes being placed four or five inches from the wall, for fear of fire, and the curious would apply the gloved hand to the pipe to ascertain the temperature."

  Not only had the nature of the flame itself changed; until gas arrived, light—however meager—had always been one's own and self-contained within each dwelling. Gaslight divided light—and life—from its singular, self-reliant past. All was now interconnected, contingent, and intricate. When people installed gas, they gave up control of light to an outside interest; they no longer purchased candles or oil and carried it home. Rather, their consumption was registered by a meter, they purchased their fuel by the cubic yard, and it was delivered as it was consumed. Their homes were connected to their neighbors' homes, to the homes of strangers, to factories, and to the streets in a shared fate. It marked the beginning of the way we are now, with our nets of voices, signs, and pulses, with power subject to flickers and loss we can't do anything about.

  Although for decades gaslight remained the province of better neighborhoods, people throughout the city suffered the streets being dug up for the laying of lines, and along the lines and at the lampposts, gas leaked from ill-fitted joints and seams and from accidental ruptures. Explosions flattened buildings, sent bricks and debris flying, and killed and maimed workers, householders, pedestrians, and shoppers in nearby bakeries and butcher shops. Most affected were the neighborhoods, often among the poorest, that had to endure the presence of gasworks, with their enormous storage tanks looming above the surrounding buildings and their furnaces belching a dense, foul smoke that permeated everything with a sulfurous stench. The gasworks contaminated nearby soils and subsoils with ammonia and sulfur, polluted water supplies, and drove the surrounding area into decline. One critic of the time noted: "Wherever a gas-factory—and there are many such—is situated within the metropolis, there is established a centre whence radiates a whole neighbourhood of squalor, poverty and disease. No improvement can ever reach that infected neighborhood—no new streets, no improved dwelling, not even a garden is possible within a circle of at least a quarter of a mile in diameter, and not so much as a geranium can flourish in a window-sill."

  Manufacturers insisted that the smell of gas was good for one's health, but court testimony proved otherwise: "Mr. Arabin, deposed, that he was an upholsterer, residing ... about two hundred yards from the building belonging to the Gaslight Company.... He observed something daily issuing from the establishment exceedingly offensive: it was a kind of smoke producing a saline effluvia, which operated upon his senses, and considerably affected his respiration: the smell was of a sour and acrid nature." According to another witness, "When the effluvia was abroad, he could not open his windows.... His own lungs were hurt, and there was a certain nausea produced upon the stomach. A taste was also continually in his mouth, like sulphureous acid. There was an immense quantity of smoke proceeding from excessive large fires, and when these appeared to be at work, he was compelled to close up his doors and windows." The testimony of a third witness echoed the sentiments of the other two: "Thomas Edgely is a coal-merchant, and has a wharf adjoining the gas light manufactory, and from which there is a constant stench.... Never remembers to smell anything so offensive in his life; even the coal-heavers complain and are sickened by it. Believes it is no easy matter 'to turn a coal heaver's stomach.'"

  Fear of gasometer explosions became part of the anxiety of the age. The Times of London suggested that "at present it is clear every gasometer is a powder-magazine, and to have a gas manufactory near Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, or one of the bridges, is much the same as if we were to store our gunpowder on the Thames Embankment." The fear wasn't allayed over time, for the gasometers would only become more prominent and increase in size as the century progressed. Within the works, men—dwarfed by the furnaces and in the flare of fire—shoveled coal into the retorts. We can see them there in a moment of respite in Gustave Doré's 1872 wood engraving Lambeth Gas Works: clustered, exhausted, dressed in rags. Behind them, the even courses of the brick walls, the arch with its keystone—twice the height of the men—and the gas pipes remain unassailably solid, as do the men in the far distance working the furnaces: stiff-backed, stiff-armed, disciplined, stoking the fires in mechanical unison, seeming to be part of the machine. The men at rest aren't sheltered by the immensity—they are dominated by it, and in the uncoordinated moment of their exhaustion, with their shoulders hunched, their ragged clothes draped over them, they find no relief in not being part of the machine: they have been defeated by it.

  For all its complexities, gaslight proved to be a remarkable success in London, and that success led to its rapid establishment in other British cities and towns. Historian Stephen Goldfarb notes: "In 1821 no town in the United Kingdom with a population of more than 50,000 was without a gas company; by 1826 only a few towns over 10,000 lacked gas companies; and by mid-century a 'vast majority of towns with a population greater than 2,500 possessed gas companies.'" Across continental Europe and in America, where economies were still based on wood, gaslight appeared later, progressed more slowly, and remained largely an urban system. "Paris was illuminated in 1814 by 5,000 [oil] street lamps, serviced by 142 lamplighters.... In 1826 there were 9,000 gas burners in Paris; in 1828 there were 10,000." In the United States, Baltimore was the first city to adopt limited gas lighting, in 1817. Philadelphia and New York experimented with gaslight at the same time, but it failed to take hold, in part because of opposition from tallow manufacturers. New York's first gaslights appeared in 1825, Philadelphia's in the 1830s.

  Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in praise of gaslight:

  The work of Prometheus had advanced another stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The cityfolk had stars of their own; biddable domesticated stars.... It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that of the best wax candles. But then the gas stars, being near at hand, were more practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that they did not unfold their rays with the appr
opriate spontaneity of the planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as the need arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran with a good heart.

  Under gaslight, the true stars started to fade away. "Paris will be very beautiful in autumn," wrote Vincent van Gogh from Arles in 1888 in a letter to his brother, Theo. "The town here is nothing, at night everything is black. I think that plenty of gas, which is after all yellow and orange, heightens the blue, because at night the sky here looks to me—and it's very odd— blacker than Paris. And if I ever see Paris again, I shall try to paint some of the effects of gaslight on the boulevard." Van Gogh seems to be referring to what might be sky glow, that aspect of light pollution in which the night sky appears purplish in the glare of multitudinous lights.

  By mid-century, the long view of a gaslit city could appear simply enchanting. "The whole of Paris is studded with golden dots," a guidebook to the city observed, "as closely as a velvet gown with golden glitter. Soon they wink and twinkle everywhere, and you cannot imagine anything more beautiful, and yet the most beautiful is still to come. Out of the dots emerge lines, and from the lines figures, spark lining up with spark, and as far as the eye can see are endless avenues of light." A closer look, however, often told other stories, for the allure of an illuminated city at night is much more than a matter of streetlights alone, which are simply the strict lines of civil order and, by themselves, markedly utilitarian whether gas or oil. A city night thrives in myriad lights—shop windows, signs, theater entrances, taverns, homes—and in the gaslit neighborhoods, the brightness of all of the illuminated places increased exponentially, which in turn fed the vitality of the streets. People who lived in gaslit neighborhoods grew accustomed to the brightness and often felt safer in their larger illumination. Those districts still dependent on feeble, messy oil lamps—most often working-class and poor neighborhoods—were another country now, a place into which the well-to-do might be more reluctant to venture, as if the gloominess of oil lamps marked the edges of their territory.

  By the gaslight era, too, a rising middle class had more leisure time in the evening and more money to spend. The evening became the consumer's hour, with the advent of window-shopping as a pastime. These were the hours of glass, which had been clarifying ever since the sixteenth century, when small panes of it first began to replace muslin and oilpaper in windows. Now the glass in shop windows—no longer composed of small panes—was one large plate, which gaslight, unlike oil lamps and candles, suffused with light, illuminating the still lifes within. Steady and mute, it fell upon sequined dresses, wool coats, and silk ties; on watches and necklaces perched on folds of velvet; on fabrics, perfumes, soaps, silver candlesticks, Chinese porcelain, Indian spices, cheeses, and meats.

  Whereas plate glass gave a view into shop interiors, in noisy cafés light seemed to ramify endlessly off glass chandeliers, bottles of whiskey and absinthe, stemware and tumblers. Mirrors magnified that light even further. "During the day, often sober; in the evening, more buoyant when the gas flames glow," wrote Karl Gutzkow of Paris. "The art of the dazzling illusion is here developed to perfection. The most commonplace tavern is dedicated to deceiving the eye. Through mirrors extending along walls, and reflecting rows of merchandise right and left, these establishments all obtain an artificial expansion, a fantastical magnitude, by lamplight."

  The theater, too, was transformed by gaslight—and limelight, which was used first as a signal by surveyors and then adapted for the theater in the 1830s. Not only had the candlesnuffer with his interruptions become a thing of the past, but light could now be dimmed and heightened with ease, which allowed for more sophisticated lighting effects, and the stage could be more intensely lit than the rest of the theater, which formally isolated the performance from the audience. Actors had to adjust to the new light. "The new mode of illumination made it rather difficult for old-line declamatory actors ... to practice the tricks of their trade," notes theater historian Frederick Penzel. "All of a sudden, gestures seemed overbroad, and facial expressions seemed greatly exaggerated. What had apparently worked before murky candlelights was no longer effective before the gaslights. Even the makeup appeared garish. Things only half-seen before were now totally revealed, and all had to be toned down."

  Gaslight also transformed the crowds walking the streets: darting eyes, staring eyes, averted hooded eyes; myriad sounds and colors; confinement and freedom—all became illuminated. What was a walker but "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness," according the street a soul, according it the power to take one's own away? Humanity at night had become the sea. "As the darkness came on, the throng momently increased," Edgar Allan Poe wrote; "and, by the time the lamps were well litten, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door." But the streetlights, as Poe saw it, also illuminated different aspects of human nature:

  As the night deepened ... not only did the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out into bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den,) but the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy and threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre. All was dark yet splendid.

  Buoyant, frivolous, expansive, uncontainable humanity: light seemed not only to extend the hours of the day but also to have created life out of absence and to have allowed for different qualities in human nature to have their say. Surely, the medieval cities lay buried under paving stones, and the ancient perimeter gates had been lost in the sprawling reaches. "Night"—that one old, taut syllable once uttered with fear and apprehension—no longer sufficed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new word was minted: "nightlife."

  But what happened when the old night returned, as it inevitably did when a gas explosion or a gasworkers' strike occurred? Such instances didn't darken an entire city—most municipalities of any size were served by various competing gas companies, each having contracts for certain districts. Also, when a retort shut down or an explosion occurred, a vestige of gas remained in the system, so the lights continued to shine for a while, then dimmed before disappearing completely. Still, even a few hours in darkness caused major alarm—and more alarm as the century progressed and the dependence on gaslight grew. A New York Times account titled "Bereft of Light" detailed the events in a neighborhood in the wake of a gas explosion at the Metropolitan Gas Works on December 23, 1871, which darkened the area between Thirty-fourth and Seventy-ninth streets. The explosion shattered windows, sent bricks flying, stopped clocks, and startled horses. There was a fire, put out in several hours, which injured a fireman. But by far the most newsworthy part of it all was the anxiety:

  Some rushed about from house to house while the more thoughtful ones besieged the Police Stations.... The storekeepers lighted up their shops with candles and lamps as well as they could, but yet there was no real show of light.... They bought pounds of candles and made temporary rustic candlesticks of fruits and vegetables for the purpose of showing off their stock, but it was of no avail; the citizens seemed to be too much concerned about the loss of gas to think of spending a cent on fruit or anything else ... and it is probable that for many years so many of the citizens of the City have not retired to rest so early in the evening. The various bank officers were in a great state of agitation. They rushed to the Police Precincts on the first alarm, and, having obtained strong guards, immediately set to work to arrange kerosene-lamps with reflectors over them around the safes.

  For those hours, the well-heeled were more exposed and helpless than those living by oil and candles. No longer privileged in the night, anxious for some power beyond them to restore the lamps so that life could fold back into its hurry, they could only wait in the midst of the old quiet, where light had circumference again.

  5. Toward a More Perfect Flame


  THE FIRST DECADES OF the nineteenth century brought marked changes not only for those living within the sphere of gaslight but also for households that continued to rely on oil lamps and candles alone. Manufactured candles became cheaper and improved so much in quality that even the smallest flame in an ordinary home possessed some of the properties of beeswax and spermaceti. Part of the improvement could be attributed to plaited wicks and wicks impregnated with boric acid, which helped to diminish guttering, but much of it had to do with the substance of the candles themselves. Commercial tallow manufacturers developed a way to refine animal fat so that it no longer smoked or stank as it burned. The famed scientist Michael Faraday explained the process in The Chemical History of a Candle:

  A candle, you know, is not now a greasy thing like an ordinary tallow candle, but a clean thing. The fat or tallow is first boiled with quick-lime, and made into a soap, and then the soap is decomposed by sulphuric acid, which takes away the lime, and leaves the fat rearranged as stearic acid, while a quantity of glycerin is produced at the same time.... The oil is then pressed out of it;...how beautifully the impurities are carried out by the oily part ... and at last you have left that substance, which is melted, and cast into candles.