by Bill Bryson
What unquestionably consolidated long working hours was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the factory system. In factories, workers were expected to be at their places from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays, but during the busiest periods of the year—what were known as “brisk times”—they could be kept at their machines from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.—a nineteen-hour day. Until the Factory Act of 1833, children as young as seven were required to work as long as adults. In such circumstances, not surprisingly, people ate and slept when they could.
The rich kept gentler hours. Writing of country life in 1768, Fanny Burney noted: “We breakfast always at ten, and rise as much before as we please; we dine precisely at two, drink tea about six and sup exactly at nine.” Her routine is echoed in countless diaries and letters from others of her class. “I will give an account of one day and then you will see every day,” a young correspondent wrote to Edward Gibbon in about 1780. Her day, she wrote, began at nine, and breakfast was at ten. “And then about 11 I play on the harpsichord, or I draw; at 1 I translate and 2 walk out again, 3 I generally read, and 4 we go to dine, after dinner we play at backgammon, we drink tea at 7, and I work or play on the piano till 10, when we have our little bit of supper and 11, we go to bed.”
Lighting was of many types, all pretty unsatisfactory by modern standards. The most basic form was rushlights, which were made by cutting meadow rushes into strips about a foot and a half in length and coating them in animal fat, usually mutton. These were then placed in a metal holder and burned like a taper. A rushlight typically lasted fifteen to twenty minutes, so a good supply of rushes and patience was required to get through a long evening. Rushes were gathered once a year, in spring, so it was necessary to work out with some care how much illumination was needed over the coming twelve months.
For the better off, the usual form of lighting was candles. These were of two types—tallow and wax. Tallow, made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that it could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal and so it was cheap—or at least it was until 1709, when Parliament, under pressure from the chandlers’ guilds, enacted a law making it illegal to make candles at home. This became a source of great resentment in the countryside and probably was widely flouted, but at some risk. People were still permitted to make rushlights, though this was sometimes a largely notional freedom. Because rushlights required a supply of animal fat, and during times of hardship peasants generally didn’t have animals to slaughter, they often had to pass their evenings not only hungry but in the dark.
Tallow was an exasperating material. Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to forty times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow candle got, the more malodorous it grew. Far superior were candles made of beeswax. These gave a steadier light and needed less trimming, but they cost about four times as much and so tended to be used only for best. The amount of illumination one gave oneself was a telling indicator of status. Elizabeth Gaskell in one of her novels had a character, a Miss Jenkyns, who kept two candles out but burned only one at a time, and constantly, fussily switched between the two to keep them at exactly equal lengths. That way if guests came they wouldn’t find candles of unequal sizes and deduce her embarrassing frugality.
Where conventional fuels were scarce, people used whatever would burn—gorse, ferns, seaweed, dried dung. In the Shetland Islands, according to James Boswell, stormy petrels were so naturally oily that people sometimes just stuck a wick down their throats and lit it, but I suspect Boswell was being a touch credulous. Elsewhere in Scotland dung was gathered and dried out to be used as an illuminant and fuel. The loss of fertilizing dung from fields left a lot of land impoverished and is said to have accelerated the agricultural decline there. Some people were luckier than others. In Dorset, around Kimmeridge Bay, the oil-rich shales on the beach burned like coal, could be gathered for free, and actually provided a better light. For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient option, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Even over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy. In At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett records how one girl who had attended a party in New England where the lamps smoked reported afterward, “Our noses were all black, & our clothes were perfectly gray and … quite ruined.” For that reason, many people stuck with candles even after other options became available. Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in The American Woman’s Home, a sort of American answer to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, continued providing instructions for making candles at home until 1869.
Until the late eighteenth century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some three thousand years. But in 1783 a Swiss physicist named Ami Argand invented a lamp that increased lighting levels dramatically by the simple expedient of getting more oxygen to the flame. Argand’s lamps also came with a knob that allowed the user to adjust the flame’s level of brightness—a novelty that left many users almost speechless with gratitude. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast and remarked in frank admiration how a single Argand lamp could provide illumination equal to half a dozen candles. He was so impressed that he brought back several Argand lamps from Paris in 1790.
Argand himself never got the riches he deserved. His patents were not respected in France, so he relocated to England, but they weren’t respected there either or indeed anywhere else, and Argand made almost nothing from his devoted ingenuity.
The best light of all came from whale oil, and the best type of whale oil was spermaceti from the head of the sperm whale. Sperm whales are mysterious and elusive animals that are even now little understood. They produce and store great reserves of spermaceti—up to three tons of it—in a cavernous chamber in their skulls. Despite its name, spermaceti is not sperm and has no reproductive function, but when exposed to air it turns from a translucent watery liquid to a milky white cream—and it is obvious at once why sailors gave the sperm whale its name. No one has ever worked out what spermaceti is for. It may somehow assist with buoyancy, or it may help with the processing of nitrogen in the whale’s blood. Sperm whales dive with great speed to an enormous depth—up to a mile—without evident ill effects, and it is thought that the spermaceti may in some unfathomed way explain why they don’t get the bends. Another theory is that the spermaceti provides shock absorption for males when they fight for mating rights. This would help explain the sperm whale’s infamous predilection for headbutting whaling ships, often lethally, when angered. But it isn’t actually known whether sperm whales headbutt one another. No less mysterious is the very valuable commodity they produce known as ambergris (from French words meaning “gray amber,” though in fact ambergris is as likely to be black as gray). Ambergris is formed in the digestive system of sperm whales—only recently has it been determined that it is made from the beaks of squid, the one part of that animal that they cannot digest—and excreted at irregular intervals. For centuries it was found floating in the sea or washed up on beaches, so no one knew where it came from. It made a peerless fixative for perfumes, which gave it great value, although people who could afford it ate it as well. Charles II of England thought ambergris and eggs the finest dish in existence. (The taste of ambergris is said to recall vanilla.) In any case, the presence of ambergris alongside all that precious spermaceti made sperm whales hugely attractive as prey.
In common with other types of whales, the oil of sperm whales was also craved by industry as an emollient in the manufacture of soaps and paints and as lubrication for machinery. Whales also yielded gratifying quantities of baleen, a bonelike substance taken from the upper jaw, which provided a sturdy but
flexible material for corset stays, buggy whips, and other items that needed a measure of natural springiness.
Whale oil was an American speciality, both to produce and to consume. It was whaling that brought so much early wealth to New England ports like Nantucket and Salem. In 1846, America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together. Whale oil was taxed heavily throughout Europe, so people there tended to use colza (a type of oil made from cole seeds) or camphene (a derivative of turpentine), which made an excellent light, though it was highly unstable and tended, unnervingly, to explode.
Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about three hundred thousand were slaughtered in the four decades or so leading to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer—up to four years became common and five years not unknown—and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50—half an average worker’s weekly wage—yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale—possibly all—would have vanished forever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on Earth.
Gesner was a physician by profession, but he had an odd passion for coal geology. While experimenting with coal tar—a useless, sticky residue left over from the processing of coal into gas—he devised a way to distill it into a combustible liquid that he called (for uncertain reasons) kerosene. Kerosene burned beautifully and gave a light as strong and steady as that of whale oil, but with the potential to be produced much more cheaply. The problem was that production in volume seemed impossible. Gesner made enough to light the streets of Halifax and eventually started a plant in New York City, which ensured his personal prosperity, but kerosene squeezed from coal was never going to be more than a marginal product in the world at large. By the late 1850s, total American output was just six hundred barrels a day. (Coal tar itself, on the other hand, soon found applications in a vast range of products—paints, dyes, pesticides, medicines, and more. Coal tar became the basis of the modern chemical industry.)
Into this quandary strode another unexpected hero—a bright young man named George Bissell, who had just stepped down as superintendent of schools in New Orleans after a brief but distinguished career in public education. In 1853, on a visit to his hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire, Bissell called on a professor at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, and there he noticed a bottle of rock oil on the professor’s shelf. The professor told him that rock oil—what we would now call petroleum—seeped to the surface in western Pennsylvania. If you soaked a rag in it, the rag would burn, but nobody had found any use for rock oil other than as a constituent of patent medicines. Bissell conducted some experiments with rock oil and saw that it would make an outstanding illuminant if only it could be extracted on an industrial scale.
He formed a company called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and bought mineral leases along a sluggish waterway called Oil Creek, near Titusville in western Pennsylvania. Bissell’s novel idea was to drill for oil, as you would for water. Everyone before had dug for it. To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free. To enhance his stature, Bissell and his associates sent correspondence to Drake addressed to “Colonel E. L. Drake.”
With a wad of borrowed money, Drake commissioned a team of drillers to begin the search for oil. Although the drillers thought Drake was an amiable fool, they gladly accepted the work and began to drill to his instructions. Almost at once the project ran into technical difficulties. To the astonishment of all, Drake showed an unexpected knack for solving mechanical problems and was able to keep the project moving. For more than a year and a half they drilled, but no oil came. By the summer of 1859, Bissell and his partners were out of funds. Reluctantly, they dispatched a letter to Drake instructing him to shut down operations. Before the letter got there, however, on August 27, 1859, at a depth of just under seventy feet, Drake and his men hit oil. It wasn’t the towering gusher that we traditionally associate with oil strikes—this oil had to be laboriously pumped to the surface—but it produced a steady volume of viscous blue-green liquid.
Although no one remotely appreciated it at the time, they had just changed the world completely and forever.
The first problem for the company was where to store all the oil they were producing. There weren’t barrels enough locally, so for the first few weeks they stored oil in bathtubs, washbasins, buckets, and whatever else they could find. Eventually, they started making purpose-built barrels with a capacity of forty-two gallons, and these remain today the standard measure for oil. Then there was the even more pressing question of exploiting it commercially. In its natural state, oil was really just horrible gunk. Bissell set to work distilling it into something purer. In so doing he discovered that, once purified, it not only made an excellent lubricant but also produced as a side product very considerable quantities of gasoline and kerosene.* The gasoline had no use at all—it was way too volatile—and so was poured away, but the kerosene made a brilliant light, as Bissell had hoped. Even better, kerosene cost much less than Gesner’s coal-squeezed product. At last the world had a cheap illuminant to rival whale oil.
Once others saw how easy it was to extract oil and turn it into kerosene, a land rush was on. Soon hundreds of derricks crowded the landscape around Oil Creek. “In three months,” John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, “the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other towns throughout the region sprang up—Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president.”
In the year of Drake’s discovery, America produced two thousand barrels of oil; within ten years, it produced well over four million barrels, and in forty years that figure was sixty million. Unfortunately, Bissell, Drake, and the other investors in his company (now renamed the Seneca Oil Company) didn’t prosper to quite the degree that they had hoped. Other wells produced far greater volumes—one called Pool Well pumped out three thousand barrels a day—and the sheer number of producing wells provided such a glut for the market that the price of oil plunged catastrophically, from $10 a barrel in January 1861 to just 10 cents a barrel by the end of the year. This was good news for consumers and whales, but not so good for oilmen. As the boom turned to bust, prices of land collapsed. In 1878, a plot of land in Pithole City sold for $4.37. Thirteen years earlier it had fetched $2 million.
While others were failing and desperately trying to get out of the oil business, a small firm in Cleveland called Clark and Rockefeller, which normally dealt in pork and other farm commodities, decided to move in. It began buying up failed leases. By 1877, less than twenty years after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Clark had vanished from the scene and John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business. Oil not only provided the raw material for an exceedingly lucrative form of illumination but also answered a desperate need for lubrication for all the engines and machinery of the new industrial age. Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and to grow fantastically rich in the process. By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes. No human being
in modern times has been richer.
Bissell and his partners had more mixed fortunes, and at a decidedly more modest level. The Seneca Oil Company made money for a while, but in 1864, just five years after Drake’s drilling breakthrough, it could no longer compete and went out of business. Drake squandered the money he made and died soon after, penniless and crippled by neuralgia. Bissell did much better. He invested his earnings in a bank and other businesses, and accrued a small fortune—enough to build Dartmouth a handsome gymnasium, which still stands.
While kerosene was establishing itself as the illuminant of choice in millions of homes, particularly in small towns and rural areas, it was challenged in many larger communities by another wonder of the age: gas. For the well-to-do in many large cities, gas was an additional option from about 1820. Mostly, however, it was used in factories and shops and for street lighting, and didn’t become common in homes till closer to the middle of the century.
Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors, gas blackened ceilings, discolored fabrics, corroded metal, and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence, and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph. Gas also needed some care in use. Most gas-supply companies reduced gas flow through their pipes during the day when demand was low. So anyone lighting a gas jet during the day had to open the tap wide to get a decent light. But as the pressure was stepped up later in the day, the light could flare dangerously, scorching ceilings or even starting fires, wherever someone had forgotten to turn down the tap. So gas was dangerous as well as dirty.