Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
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By mid-century, candles were also manufactured from paraffin, which was derived from the distillation of bituminous shale. An account of the time describes paraffin as "brilliantly white, inodorous, and tasteless. It resembles spermaceti in its silky feeling and physical structure...[and] derives its name from two Latin words, parum, little or none, and affinis, affinity, because of its complete neutrality and great stability.... It gives a powerful, clear flame, without soot." The name seems to have said it all—here was light unencumbered by noxious smells and smoke, light in little need of tending, that could simply shine constant, clear, and bright. These developments seemed to signal the end of earthbound light, for at last the common candle had distanced itself from the barnyard and slaughterhouse, from blood and sinew and bone, and there would be no going back. Herman Melville, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, proclaimed that even in the bowels of a whaling ship, it seemed an outlandish thing that "mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp."
Common lamp fuel, too, underwent changes. In the 1830s, "burning fluid," a mixture of camphene (distilled from turpentine) and alcohol, often called simply "camphene," arrived on the American market. Although it was thin and light, and so traveled quickly up a wick, it had a low flash point—the temperature at which oil gives off enough vapors to spontaneously ignite—which made it volatile. Because any spark or excessive heat could lead to an explosion, the flame of a camphene lamp needed to be kept at a distance from its fuel reservoir. Whale oil and grease lamps were designed with metal wick tubes that extended down into the font so that some heat could warm the oil and make capillary action more efficient. By contrast, lamps that burned camphene had long, narrow wick tubes that extended upward from the font and angled away from the center of the lamp so as to keep the flame at a distance from the fuel reservoir. You also couldn't blow out a camphene flame—a stray spark might ignite the reservoir—so burners often had extinguisher caps attached to them. Even with all these precautions built into lamps, there were thousands of deaths and injuries from explosions each year. According to the New York Times in 1854, for
any common use about the house, it must be confessed after many years of costly experience, that "burning fluid" is not safe.... Nobody will stop using it on this account, however.... Better, if you are coming to your senses, reader, take your lamps at once to the lamp-store and have them all refitted for oil, or something else than "camphene" in any of its forms. If not, be consistent, and stuff your pin-cushions and mattresses with gun-powder, and buy a rattlesnake as a pet for your growing boy to play with.
Why burning fluid was so popular is something of a mystery. Though less expensive than sperm oil, it still retailed for about 25 cents per quart in the early 1850s. And while those of the day said that it produced a brilliant white flame—enough, perhaps, to risk the dangers—historian Jane Nylander claims that "a burning fluid lamp produced a dimmer light than a tallow candle or a single wick whale oil lamp." It may have been that burning fluid was simply the new thing and at a clear remove from age-old animal fuel.
Lamps and candles, whatever their fuel, were now easier to light because people no longer had to borrow fire from an existing flame or coals, or resort to a tinderbox. Even in the early nineteenth century, the few alternatives to such methods were for the wealthy alone, who might carry phosphoric tapers, or "Ethereal Matches," with them. These were short strips of paper tipped with a bit of phosphorus, and each was contained within a thin glass vial. When the user broke the glass, the phosphorus burst into flame. Such matches came with their share of injuries, since they might also burst into flames if the vial was accidentally broken.
In 1826 Englishman John Walker developed what would eventually evolve into the common match. He made his "friction-light" by dipping wooden splints into a paste of potassium chlorate, starch, antimony sulfide, gum arabic, and water. He dried the splints and then ignited them by nipping them between folded sandpaper. Early matches sparked and stank, and Lucifers—as the matches came to be called—carried a warning: "If possible avoid inhaling gas. Persons whose lungs are delicate should by no means use Lucifers." One Parisian exclaimed, "The chemical match is, without doubt, one of the vilest devices that civilization has yet produced.... It is thanks to this that each of us carries around fire in his pocket.... I ... detest the permanent plague, always primed to trigger an explosion, always ready to roast humanity individually over a low flame."
Eventually, matches were coated with white phosphorus, and they became safer for those who carried them, but not for those who made them. Match makers who were exposed to phosphorus vapor for long periods of time commonly suffered from painful, disfiguring phossy jaw, which was fatal. Deposits of phosphorus in the jawbone would eventually begin to abscess, and the bone would rot away. The sufferer would then die from organ failure. Although less toxic red phosphorus began to replace white phosphorus in the mid-nineteenth century, white phosphorus was still used in the production of "strike-anywhere" matches until early in the twentieth century.
The light of even common whale oil lamps improved in the early nineteenth century, as a wide array of new lamp designs came on the market in the wake of Ami Argand's revolutionary invention of the tubular wick in 1784. Wall lamps, table lamps, night lamps, student lamps, and chandeliers were crafted of pressed glass, pewter, silver, iron, brass, nickel plate, and japanned tin. The more complex models attempted to improve on the delivery of thick whale or colza (rapeseed) oil to the wick so as to eliminate the obscuring reservoir of the Argand lamp. The Carcel lamp used a clockwork pump to feed fuel; the moderator lamp had a strong spring that pressed down a piston, which squirted oil up a narrow tube; and the astral lamp featured a ring-shaped oil font. The complexity of such lamps, and their prodigious fuel requirements, meant they were out of economic reach for people of limited means, but eventually even manufacturers of the most simple single-burner lamps adopted hollow wicks and glass chimneys, which increased oxygen flow and stabilized flames. The new lamps often had double or even triple wicks, which meant that one lamp could burn with different intensities, a preliminary version of the contemporary three-way bulb.
But the most significant improvement to the lamp since Argand's invention came in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the advent of kerosene. "We dreamed of the lamp which gives luminous life to dark matter," wrote Gaston Bachelard of the kerosene lamp. "How could a dreamer of words not be moved when etymology teaches him that petroleum is petrified oil? The lamp makes light ascend from the depths of the earth." "Rock oil" had been gathered from seeps for thousands of years and was used in its crude form, mostly as a lubricant or medicine, all over the world. North American Indians collected surface oil by soaking it up with blankets. They then applied the oil as a salve or used it to waterproof their canoes.
In 1849 Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner developed a way to extract what he called "kerosene" from asphaltum—a type of mineral pitch—and subsequently oil refiners discovered that they could use Gesner's process to produce kerosene from petroleum. Its production wouldn't become commercially viable until 1859, when Edwin Drake drove the first successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, which yielded a reliable supply of petroleum for refining.
Housewives adopted kerosene for myriad uses: they wiped it over bedding and on kitchen walls and screen doors to keep bugs away; poured it on anthills and cleaned flyspecked brass with it; used it to clean their porcelain sinks, marble washbowls, windows, and cookstoves; removed rust, fresh paint, and grease from their graniteware with it; and added it to hot starch to keep the starch from sticking to clothes. But they valued kerosene most highly for light. Although the quality of a kerosene lamp's flame varied with the quality of the fuel and the size and cleanliness of the lamp and the wick, at its best it burned clear, hardly smoked, and was relatively odorless. One kerosene lamp burned as brightly as five to fourteen candles.
Unlike animal fuels, kerosene would not spoil on the shelf over time, and quality kerosen
e was considered safe and stable because it had a high flash point. It also was light—much lighter than whale oil and colza—so it required no clockwork or pistons to travel up a wick. Since there was not yet competition from the internal combustion engine for petroleum supplies, it was economical—cheaper than either whale oil or gas. By 1885 it was claimed that this new fuel "could supply a family's needs for about ten dollars a year 'while it was not uncommon for the gas bill of the more well-to-do householders to run that much per month.'" Kerosene was, as William O'Dea notes, "the kind of oil people had dreamed about for centuries."
The immediate demand for kerosene ushered in the age of oil. In the months following Drake's first well, land prices around Titusville shot up, and the population multiplied many times. Within a year, numerous refineries in the oil regions of Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh began operation. Early shipments went to New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. After the Civil War, kerosene spread into the Midwest and more slowly penetrated the postwar South. Eventually, more than half of the American supply was shipped overseas to Europe and Russia, which established the fortune of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Still, the supply could appear fragile. During those first decades of drilling, all the kerosene produced was derived from the Pennsylvania oil fields, and the extent of the reserves was unseen and unknown. Yet oil had already become so essential to modern life that in 1873 the Titusville Morning Herald proclaimed: "The production of petroleum has now become of such commercial and social importance to the world that if it were suddenly to cease no other known substance could supply its place, and such an event could not be looked upon in any other light than of a widespread calamity."
There was little place left for whale oil in such a world. Within a year of Drake's oil rig, kerosene had replaced it as the popular fuel. In truth, though, the northeastern American whaling fleet was already in decline by 1859. Although sperm whales had not become extinct, they had grown scarce by the latter part of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the hunt for them was more time-consuming, arduous, and costly. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, cautious northern merchants kept their ships tied up in port—it wasn't worth risking capture by Confederate cruisers—and after several years, the hulls of the whaling ships began to rot in the wharves. Once the war was under way, in an effort to blockade Charleston and Savannah harbors, the Union purchased forty old whalers, loaded them with stones, and sank them. When peace arrived in 1865, the fleet was a fraction of what it had been, and since a good share of their market had been lost to kerosene, most merchants chose not to replace their old vessels. The ships that did set out were obliged to take on more and more risk in order to fill their holds, sailing longer into the northern winter and escaping the freeze-up by increasingly narrow margins.
It was also true that the northeastern fleet, in an age of steam, had failed to modernize, which was essential, since the whaling grounds had shifted largely to the Arctic, where conditions for both seamen and ships were brutal. The rudders of sailing ships had to be kept free of ice, and in frigid conditions ice formed on the riggings, and the ships were in danger of capsizing from the weight. When, in the early winter of 1871, thirty-two ships became locked in Arctic ice—the crews surviving by making their way to vessels in open water—the loss of more ships meant that the hunt, for the northeastern fleet, was nearly finished.
Although animal fuel would not again feed more than an occasional lamp, demand for baleen and other products made from whale blubber—margarine, soap, lubricants—continued. Faster steam whalers that shipped out of San Francisco and northern Europe hunted species that could not have been captured under sail alone. Although the sperm whale had grown scarce, it was still hunted as well, for its oil retained its lubricating qualities in extreme temperatures. Sperm oil would grease the machines of the industrial age long after the last whale oil lamp went out. Prior to the 1982 international moratorium on whaling, sperm oil—harvested from a mammal that could dive to depths of more than four thousand feet, the deepest of all mammals—would lubricate the precision instruments on spacecraft.
For all its popularity, kerosene had some drawbacks. In the first decades of its manufacture, there was little regulation of the supply, and unscrupulous traders adulterated it with benzene or naphtha, which lowered the flash point and made it more volatile. The members of the Buffalo, New York, Board of Trade noted:
The country has been flooded with all sorts of compounds and mixtures and greases that pretend to do everything and accomplish nothing. In refined oils particularly, low-test oils and fluids have been thrown on the market by unprincipled men, with perfect impunity, throughout the country.... The inspector may do his duty, and brand the oil—the legal test; but how easy it is for the refiner or the dealer to add a few gallons of death-dealing naptha [sic], for profit's sake and thereby endanger lives and property.
Responsible housewives had to be vigilant about the quality of the oil they purchased. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in their 1869 guide to domestic science, The American Woman's Home, advised:
Good oil poured in a teacup or on the floor does not easily take fire when a light is brought in contact with it. Poor oil will instantly ignite under the same circumstances, and hence, the breaking of a lamp filled with poor oil is always attended by great peril of a conflagration. Not only the safety but also the light-giving qualities of kerosene are greatly enhanced by the removal of these volatile and dangerous oils. Hence, while good kerosene should be clear in color and free from all matters which gum up the wick, and thus interfere with free circulation and combustion, it should also be perfectly safe.
Even with quality kerosene, the simplest lamp found in the most modest of homes required meticulous daily attention. Only a well-cleaned lamp would give off good light, and a poorly trimmed wick made for a flickering and smoky flame, which left soot on the chimney and sent soot throughout the house. Indeed, the ritual of spring-cleaning was largely a response to a winter's worth of soot from hearths and lamps. But daily cleaning was also a matter of safety. In the late nineteenth century, in the United States alone, five thousand to six thousand people a year died in lamp accidents. Although many of these were due to adulterated oil, clumsiness, and carelessness—spills and breakages, or someone leaving a lamp too near to curtains or bedclothes, failing to lower the wick before blowing out the light, or trying to extinguish a lamp by blowing down the chimney—inattentive or inexperienced housekeeping increased the danger. If the burner was dirty, the lamp might overheat the chimney and break the glass. If the oil in the reservoir was too low, the vapors could ignite when someone carelessly jarred the lamp. A Connecticut newspaper, the Willimantic Chronicle, often reported lamp accidents due to "exploding lamps":
Wed., September 1, 1880: The house of George Leavens in Danielsonville came near being consumed by fire by the explosion of a kerosene lamp last week.... Wed., August 29, 1883: Early Saturday morning the body of Simon B. Squires was found in the back yard of the Southport National bank, Southport, burned in a shocking manner. It is thought he rose during the night when his lamp exploded and set his clothes on fire.... Wed., April 23, 1884: Mrs. Mary McGoldrick, aged 73 years, of New Haven, Ct., and Emma O'Brien, aged 3 years, of Erie, Pa., were yesterday burned to death by the explosion of kerosene lamps.
The authors of The Woman's Book, a guide to household management published in 1894, went into a lengthy, precise discussion about the cleaning of lamps:
There is as much wit goes to the care of lamps as to the boiling of eggs. In the first place they should receive due attention every day.... Carry the lamps to the kitchen or pantry and set them down upon double-folded newspapers. If they have porcelain shades, wipe these.... Should they need washing, put them into a basin of hot water which you have softened with a little ammonia or borax.... This done turn up the wicks of the lamps and with a bit of stick or match scrape off the charred edges.... Remove the rims that surround the burners and wipe them off with old flanne
l.... Now fill the lamps and do it carefully.... Wipe the outside of the reservoirs after you have filled and closed them, that the persistently percolating oil may have not unnecessary encouragement to exude. Be very sure that no drops of oil have trickled down upon the outside of the lamps.... Give a final rub to the outside of each lamp, replace chimney, rim, and shade, and thank Fate that this, one of the least pleasant of the housekeeper's duties, is done for the day.
However much work the lamps proved to be, for those living in towns, villages, and farms beyond the reach of gaslight, kerosene brought significantly more light into homes. Not only was each lamp brighter, but the low cost of fuel also encouraged people to use lamps more frequently and to purchase more lamps. Kerosene goods, such as reservoirs, wicks, and chimneys, became an advertised standard in catalogs and general stores. With the kerosene lamp's ease came a certain thoughtlessness, and perhaps an appreciation for the beauty of the flame itself. Certainly, people could read or knit with far less strain, and work more steadily by its light. Since by the second half of the nineteenth century, enclosed wood and coal stoves had begun to replace open hearths, the kerosene lamp—the last open fire in the home—often became a gathering place for the family in the evening.
Even some city people connected to gas lines reserved gas for the utilitarian spaces of their homes, such as hallways and kitchens; they continued to use oil lamps in more intimate drawing rooms and bedrooms. Historian Wolfgang Schivelbush argues that it wasn't gaslight's palpable drawbacks—the soot and the bad air—that made most people hesitant to fully give in to gas. Rather, it had to do with the industrial source of its flame and all that implied of a connection with, and a dependence on, the brick and gray life looming beyond, the cinders and ash settling over cities and towns. And more: "By keeping their independent lights, people symbolically distanced themselves from a centralised supply," Schivelbush notes. "The traditional oil-lamp or candle in a living-room expressed both a reluctance to be connected to the gas mains and the need for a light that fed on some visible fuel."