Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  The verb lanterner must have meant little to those in the French countryside, who endured in darkness the same hunger and want as the poor of Paris. Once the night had been the same for all; now light began to separate more fully country from city. Little by little, the city night began to influence the rhythms of its day. The privileged and wealthy, who had always been profligate with light—the more their parties and dances were brilliantly illuminated, the greater seemed their position and power—now habitually rose late in the day, so that rising late, too, became a mark of prestige. One of their contemporaries complained that the courtiers altered "the order of nature by making the day into night and the night into day, namely when they stay awake in order to indulge in their entertainments, though other people sleep: afterwards to restore the vigor lost by their sensual pleasure they sleep while other people are awake and attend to their business." As more people stayed up later at night, the hours of the market shifted: merchants' stalls in Paris, which had previously opened at four in the morning, "now [opened] hardly at seven o clock," and shops stayed open after daylight began to fail.

  The cities began to develop their own seasonal rhythms as well. In the countryside, as the days grew shorter and colder, everything began to draw in: the birds scratched at bark and scraped at snow, the sheep huddled in their folds, and people lived confined to the one or two rooms warmed by their fires. Meanwhile, in the city the streetscape seemed to grow livelier, as the wealthy returned from their summer refuges, and the night seasons of the opera, theater, and ballet began. In winter, the light and warmth of cafés and taverns seemed particularly inviting. By the twentieth century, one observer would claim: "The city lives at cross-purposes with nature: cold not heat brings it to life.... It is during the fall and winter that the sense of renewal is at its height, for as one place dies another comes to life."

  The greater the hours of illumination, the more the city at night worked its way into the human imagination, until the illuminated city and the glamour and liveliness of its night came to define almost completely what it meant to be urban and urbane, and any metropolis possessing less than a brilliant, vibrant night was deemed provincial. Later, in the twentieth century, Elizabeth Hardwick would write that Boston was

  not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature.... In Boston there is an utter absence of the wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark.

  3. Lanterns at Sea

  ALTHOUGH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CITIES had begun to emerge from their ancestral night, the world's oceans remained couched in it. Ships under sail or at anchor might display a lantern on deck, but lamps carried the old danger of fire to the cramped holds of wooden sailing vessels. To avoid disaster at sea, merchantmen often dressed and ate in the dark—for them, wrote Herman Melville, oil was "more scarce than the milk of queens." Emigrant ships prohibited lamps below deck, although some travelers were allowed to carry enclosed lanterns. Slaves were denied any light at all.

  If something blazed on the seas, it was likely a whaling ship in the hours after a catch—its try-pots boiling and smoke fogging the rigging, while almost all hands flensed the blubber from the whale and minced it into portions to feed the vats. "The oil is hissing in the trypots," wrote J. Ross Browne.

  Half a dozen of the crew are sitting on the windlass, their rough weather-beaten faces shining in the red glare of the fires, all clothed in greasy duck.... The cooper and one of the mates are raking up the fires with long bars of wood or iron. The decks, bulwarks, railing, try-works, and windlass are covered with oil and slime of black-skin, glistering with the red glare of the try-works. Slowly and doggedly the vessel is pitching her way through the rough seas, looking as if enveloped in flames.

  During the eighteenth century, hundreds of whaling vessels sailed the seas in search of their quarry, for though many people still made or bought tallow candles, and those in continental Europe often fed their lamps with colza (rapeseed) oil, whale oil—cheap and abundant—fueled much of the growing brilliance of the domestic and municipal night. Common whale oil was also called "train oil," from the Old High German word trahan, meaning "drop" or "tear," because, it's said, the oil was originally pressed bit by bit from the blubber. It ranged widely in quality and price. The most expensive pale oil burned clear and clean, while cheaper brown oil—usually rendered from old blubber—smoked readily and stank of old fish.

  The whaling trade had evolved over thousands of years, having begun with the harvesting of stranded whales. Whales have always inexplicably beached themselves, and once out of their element, they can't survive for long. Exposed fully to the sun, their skin burns, and they are crushed by their own weight. "When the flesh has moldered away, the skeletons are left, which the inhabitants of these shores use for building their houses," explains a perhaps fanciful account from the time of Alexander the Great. "The large bones at the side form the beams of their houses, the smaller ones the lathes. From the jawbones they make doors." Whether or not people made houses of whalebone, those living along protected bays throughout the world cut up the carcasses for food and rendered the fat to use for fuel and lubricants. What remained after the harvest they let wash away with the tide.

  As the demand for blubber and whalebone grew, men took to their boats and forced the whales toward shore. "When they come within our harbors, boats surround them," one early New Englander wrote. "They are as easily driven to the shore as cattle or sheep are driven on land. The tide leaves them, and they are easily killed." This method of herding whales was never as effective as harpooning them, a practice that the Basques along the Bay of Biscay undertook as early as the tenth century. In time, harpooning became the favored method for hunting whales throughout the world.

  Early whalers eagerly took any whale they encountered, though by the eighteenth century they were on the hunt for Eubalaena glacialis, the North Atlantic right whale, and Eubalaena australis, the southern right whale—so named because they were the right whales to hunt. Their blubber yielded good-quality oil, they were slow moving enough to be harpooned, and they floated after death—unlike the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, which swam too fast for harpooners to reliably capture them and, if struck, invariably sank upon dying. The right whale—black, with white patches on its belly and callosities mottling its face—possesses a massive broad back; the Japanese call it semi kujira, meaning "beautiful-backed whale." It can reach sixty feet in length and weigh more than eighty tons. "The respiratory canal is over 12 inches in diameter," observed William Davis, "through which the rush of air is as noisy as the exhaust-pipe of a thousand-horse-power steam engine; and when the fatal wound is given, torrents of clotted blood are sputtered into the air over the nauseated hunters.... [Yet] the right whale has an eye scarcely larger than a cow's, and an ear that would scarcely admit a knitting needle."

  As for the blubber, or blanket, of the whale, Davis suggested that it could "carpet a room 22 yards long and 9 yards wide, averaging half a yard in thickness." He continued: "The lips and throat ... should yield 60 barrels of oil, and, with the supporting jaw-bones, will weigh as much as twenty-five oxen of 1,000 pounds each. Attached to the throat by a broad base is the enormous tongue, the size of which can be better conceived by the fact that 25 barrels of oil have been taken by one. Such a tongue would equal in weight ten oxen."

  Old Norse legend has it that for all its bulk, the right whale "subsists wholly on mist and rain and whatever falls into the sea from the air above." It could seem so, as it plows through the ocean's surface, taking in gray-green water swarming with krill, plankton, and schooling fish. The right whale is a filter feeder: it strains seawater through the hairy fringes of its comblike baleen plates—"th
at wondrous Venetian blind," Melville called them—which every day capture more than a ton of small and microscopic sea life. The plates—each up to seven feet long—hang from its upper jaw, and there are more than two hundred pairs in the whale's mouth. Baleen is composed of sturdy, flexible keratin—the same substance as our fingernails—and in the eighteenth century, baleen brought in good money for whalers because it was perfect for making the products of the day: umbrella handles, buggy whips, fishing rod tips, carriage springs, tongue scrapers, shoehorns, boot shanks, divining rods, policemen's clubs, and corset stays. Yet the blubber was a greater prize. The rendered fat from one right whale—after being strained and bleached on shore—could yield more than 1,800 gallons of oil: 60 barrels, each containing 31½ gallons.

  "It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks," wrote Herman Melville of a ship's tryworks.

  The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height.... On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity.... Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls.

  In earlier times, the trying out had been done on shore, but as whaling trips grew longer due to increased demand for oil and whalebone—and the increased scarcity of whales—the blubber, especially in warm weather, would begin to spoil over time. Residents of whaling ports, who had suffered the stench and smoke of the tryworks, may have welcomed the move to shipboard rendering, for there was nothing refined about the business. The first fire of a voyage would be lit with wood, but "the unmelted skin of the whale made a wonderful fuel, and the whale was therefore cooked in a fire of his own kindling." The green hands had to get used to the smell—"like the left wing of the day of judgment"—for in flush times the try-pots could boil for a week, and the hands minced unceasingly for their i/15oth of a share. At any moment, the sails and rigging might catch fire while they were trying out, and the ship would burn to the waterline. If the seas were rough, the boiling oil could splash and scald them; they could be crushed by slabs of blubber as they stripped it from the whale, which hung from chains off the side of the ship. They might slash themselves with the sharp blades of their tools or slip on decks slick with oil and blood as they cut the blubber into slabs called blanket pieces. These were cut into horse pieces—so named because they were cut on sawhorses—which were then cut partway through into thin slices, or "leaves," so that the slab remained intact on one side, looking very much like the pages of a book. "'Bible leaves! Bible leaves!' This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer," wrote Melville. "It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by doing so the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality."

  After the men finished rendering the blubber, they dumped what remained of the carcass back into the sea amid a frenzy of sharks, then scoured the ship with lye leached from the cinders and ashes of the fires. No matter the scrubbing, they never got rid of the smoky stench, which seeped into the wooden deck, the canvas sails, their clothes, and their own pores. It was said that sailing vessels downwind of a whaling ship could smell it from miles away. The only "clean ship" was one that returned to port without any oil in its hold.

  Upon their return to port, the hands might have nothing to show for their time at sea, as they'd borrowed against their share of the profits, so they had no choice but to ship back out again, into the drift ice and doldrums and winter storms, the fevers and scurvy, the salt pork and hardtack. Is it any wonder that Melville imagined that the men squandered what oil they could? "There they lay," he wrote of the Pequod's crew, "in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.... See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil ... sweet as early grass butter in April."

  By the mid-eighteenth century, as city streets and homes grew brighter and the demand for oil (and whalebone) continued to grow, the number of ships pursuing and capturing whales increased. During the years just before the American Revolution, more than 360 whaling vessels sailed from New England and New York alone, and the industry had not yet reached its height. But after centuries of persistent slaughter, the right whale had grown scarce in its known grounds, and of necessity whalers undertook even l onger trips to farther, deeper waters in pursuit of any kind of whale that might prove to be profitable. The English and Dutch headed north in search of the polar whale—or whalebone whale, as the seamen called it—known now as the bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, also a filter feeder. The New England fleet sailed to grounds off Newfoundland, along the coast of Labrador, to the west of Greenland, and farther, seeking not only the right whale but also the sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus —also known as the cachalot. This whale travels the world's oceans, heading north in summer and into tropical waters in winter in pursuit of squid. The fleet followed it to the Arctic and as far as the South Pacific.

  Although the sperm whale isn't a filler feeder, and thus has no baleen, and one whale might yield only twenty-five to forty-five barrels of oil (far less than a right whale), the quality of the harvest made it worth the chase. At its best, the oil from a sperm whale burned clear and clean and was almost odorless. But even more valuable was the spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the head which could be made into candles of the highest quality. These candles had a high melting point and gave off twice the light of candles molded from tallow. And the flame did not smell foul—a quality dearly valued in an age of sputtering, stinking tallow candles and dim, finicky grease lamps, which also stank. Spermaceti candles were probably first molded around the mid-eighteenth century; it's likely that Benjamin Franklin was referring to them when he wrote of "a new kind of Candles very convenient to read by.... They afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softening.... They last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing."

  The sperm whale can grow to more than sixty feet, weigh more than sixty tons, and possess a blanket of blubber almost a foot thick. But its greatest feature is its massive, scarred, and battered head, flecked with the sucker marks of squid. According to Herman Melville,

  In the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.

  That head houses a brain of about eighteen pounds—the largest on earth—and contains two large cavities, known to whalers as the "case" and the "junk." The case, at the top of the head, is full of a mixture of oil and spermaceti—also called "head matter"—an almost-clear amber or rose-tinted waxy liquid that whalers hauled out of the carcass with buckets. Once out of the whale and exposed to cold air, the head matter crystallized and hardened to a pure white mass, which was stored in barrels for the rest of the voyage. There could be up to five hundred gallons of it in an average sperm whale, nine hundred in a large bull.

  The junk, located in the lower half of the forehead, contains a spongy material impregnated with sperm oil. The oil squeezed from the junk made the finest lamp oil. Additionally, whalers harvested oil from the blubber of the sperm whale. The price of oil always depended on supply and demand, as well as on the quality of the oil, w
hich varied from whale to whale even within a given species. But sperm oil always fetched a price three to five times that of common whale oil. In 1837, when the annual sperm oil yield of the American fleet was more than 5 million gallons, it sold for $1.25 per gallon. The price peaked in the 1860s at $2.55 per gallon.

  Unlike tallow, spermaceti couldn't be dipped or molded into candles by a housewife in her kitchen, for the complex process of making spermaceti candles took almost an entire year to complete. After the spermaceti arrived in port, it was brought to the candle works, where the candlemakers boiled it to filter out impurities and then stored it until the cold weather, when it would fully congeal. On a mild winter day, when the spermaceti softened a bit, they shoveled it into woolen bags and pressed it between the wooden leaves of a large screw press. The oil they squeezed from the spermaceti then was called "winter strained sperm oil"—clear and clean—and they sold it as lamp oil, which commanded the highest price. They stored the remains until spring, when they heated it again to filter out more impurities, then cooled it, molded it into cakes, and shaved it into small pieces before they pressed it again—this time in cotton bags and under greater pressure—to produce "spring strained sperm oil," which was a lower-quality oil. What remained in the bags they pressed a third time to make "tight pressed oil" or "summer oil." The remaining solid after these three pressings was almost pure spermaceti—waxy, brownish or yellowish in color, and streaked with gray. They stored it for the summer, then heated it again, this time with potash to bleach and clarify it—clear as spring water, it was said—before molding it into candles that would fetch twice the price of those made of tallow. Spermaceti candles had no comparison, except perhaps those made from beeswax, and like beeswax candles, they would always remain the province of the well-to-do. So steady and clear was their light that the brightness of the flame of a pure spermaceti candle that was seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and weighed one-sixth of a pound would eventually become a standard of measure for luminous intensity—one candlepower—against which the light of other candles, all lamps, and even the first electric lights would be measured.