The Romance of Light by Fred Hovey Allen

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Oct 6, 1904

The Romance of Light

By Fred Hovey Allen

(Concluded)

TOWARD the middle of the eighteenth century the number of lamps increased among the poorer classes, owing to the invention of colza-oil. The new liquid was far cheaper than the olive-oil used in France and Italy, or the whale-oil of England and America. Not till then began the processes of lamp regeneration. It was in 1783 that an enthusiastic and radical reformer, one Argand, discovered a lamp which consumed its own smoke, and most of the odor. By admitting oxygen to both sides of a flat flame, he increased the light so that a shade became necessary. The new lamp was at once popular in France and England. When improved by a convex reflector placed behind the flame, the light was rendered too dazzling for an ordinary room.

Fred and Phillipe Girard improved this lamp, placed the reservoir for oil below the wick, and softened the glare by the use of whitened glass, giving the first effect of beauty to artificial light. It is an interesting fact that the first appearance of the new lamp devised by the brothers Girard took place in London at a party given by the Duchess du Barry, then in exile. Josephine, hearing that it was enthusiastically admired, and jealous that it was not first seen at her soirees, ordered the brothers to bring a lamp at once to the palace. The significance of this circumstance is little beyond the fact that the lamp presented by the brothers to the empress was decorated by a young and obscure artist, struggling for bread, to be later known throughout the world as Jean Auguste Ingres.

On the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621, they adopted the Indian's method for light, using the pine knots, furnished in abundance by the virgin forests. No doubt the pitchy drippings of these knots were a source of discomfort to the cleanly housewife, and the candle, when it came, was greatly prized. Cattle were not introduced into the colony until about eleven years after the arrival of the “Mayflower,” up to which time candles were unknown except when imported at rare intervals. Elliot translated the Bible by a spluttering, smoky torch. New England literature was spattered by the dripping flame, and clouded, perhaps, by the odorous smoke.

There is a long step between the torch of the fathers, still in use at the opening of the nineteenth century, and the electric search-light, of which it was the humble progenitor.

The forerunner of the street light was the basket torch, fastened to a building at a street corner, or later swung by a chain across the street. This basket filled with pitch-pine knots made the place quite light. Such a basket, but of enormous proportions, was swung from a crane at the top of a high place in Boston, and gave the name to Beacon Hill.

In the year 1666 candle making became quite common with the Pilgrim housewife. Tallow was not plenty, so the fat of the bear and deer was added to the tallow, increasing the light, but softening the candle, making it less durable. The method usually employed was dipping, with a few molded candles for “company.” To dip, a number of wicks were placed upon the sticks a sufficient distance apart, the wick suspended vertically. These wicks were dipped or carefully lowered into a pot of hot tallow on a cold day. Tallow would adhere and quickly cool. This, repeated until the proper size was reached, secured the “taller dip” of the “mothers.”

Not alone was the oil from the sperm whale used as an illuminant, but the fatty substance which gives the name to the fish was discovered to be most excellent for candles, being more costly, but of greater power. Inclosed in little square lanterns, “spermaceti” candles lighted the streets of Boston, were suspended over the front doors of the wealthy, and adorned the front halls of some elegant mansions. That which gave happiness to the young eyes of “Dorothy Q.,” the grandmother of the genial “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” is still in existence.

Not until about 1830 did our fathers have a match to carry in their pocket. Up to that time they must light their pipe with an ember or by the tinder-box. Should the fire of the hearth go out, he must revive it by steel and flint, or make a hurried trip to the neighbor's to secure his fire. At an early hour on a cold morning this was no pastime.

In the early days of the last century, Sir Walter Scott, writing from London, to a friend in Edinburgh, said: “There is a fool here who is trying to light the city with smoke.”

Sir Walter's “smoke” was not a human invention. It was a product of nature's laboratory. Accumulations of gas from coal-beds found their way to the surface, and being highly inflammable, attracted the attention of men who erected altars over them, and their perpetual fires were dedicated to the gods. After the defeat of the Persian armies at Platea, two victorious generals, Pausanius and Aristides, were directed by the oracle to build an altar to Jupiter, and to offer no sacrifice thereon until they had extinguished every altar fire in the country, polluted by the Persians, and had relighted them with the sacred fire from Delphi. It would be natural to expect men of science to imitate a process of nature which held such promise. For thousands of years the Chinese have speculated upon the meaning of the natural gas which has escaped abundantly from the earth in several provinces.

In 1726 Dr. Hales informed chemists that by distilling a few grains of coal, he had obtained an equal number of cubic inches of “inflammable air,” and that, if attempted on a large scale, millions upon millions of cubic feet of that valuable substance could be made, and conveyed unseen along the highways of the land, and become the means for obtaining perpetual day. In 1813 Sir Walter's “smoke” was burned on Westminster Bridge in London, and one year later the streets of St. Margarets, Westminster, enjoyed illumination from gas, it being the first parish contracting for such a luxury.

The common kerosene lamp, with its chimney of glass, its varied forms of beauty, its shades modified to every grade of vision and of taste, suggests the relation of man to light. The oil, natural, cheap, brilliant, and volatile, was long known to civilized humanity as a crude outflow from the earth. It was not until about 1845 that the iridescent scum seen floating on the surface of a stream near Pittsburg suggested to thoughtful men to dig for a greater supply. Indians came from a distance, and soaked it from the water with their blankets, which they wrung out into vessels in order to secure a quantity for some secret purpose. When the American found it, he was rich beyond computation, at the same time providing at a small cost the best fuel and the cheapest light for the common people. It was not until 1860 that it passed into common use. Since that time it has driven every form of wax, grease, fluid, camphene, and whale-oil lamps from the common use of mankind.

From the clouds overhead, lowering along the horizon as the sun goes down, Franklin and Edison have drawn the electric fire, and in our chambers darkness is unknown. All the way from the pine knot to a nightless day has been won from the darkness in the lifetime of one man, and he but just reaching the century point. This is the age of light.

—Fred Hovey Allen, in Scientific American.