The Romance of Light by Fred Hovey Allen

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Sep 29, 1904

The Romance of Light

By Fred Hovey Allen

THERE are few objects in daily use about which we stop to ask how they came to us, and through what stages of development they passed before arriving at that perfection which we now enjoy. Should we turn a retrospective eye toward “those good old times,” we should be amazed at the slow steps of progress, and the almost infinite struggles through which inventions came into acceptance.

The connection between a burning fagot and an electrolier may seem remote, but every link in the chain is perfect. From the smoky rays of the first flaring brand of the cave-dweller, to the electric light, filling the most spacious halls with its glory and making the streets of our cities luminous as the day, the way has been paved with human effort and illumined by human genius.

The pine torch was no doubt coeval with fire in the hands of men. The resinous knot was the first step in artificial illumination. Its use is found in every savage tribe and nation, while it is a necessity in the lives of all first settlers in new countries. When the nineteenth century dawned, the children of America were learning to read by the light of pine knots and the crackling of logs of an open fireplace; so closely are we related to what may seem the remote past.

It is hard to believe that the world groped on to the thirteenth century without discovering even the tallow candle; yet so it is. The expression that “mankind was plunged in darkness during the early ages” is true in every sense. It was perhaps the accidental burning of a bit of fat of some slain animal that suggested its use as a luminant, while the hollow shell from the sea, a concave rock, or a mold of sun-baked clay held the fat, which was burned by placing a rush in the fat, with the lighted end projecting over the edge of the rude dish. Step by step the lamp was fashioned into a thing of beauty, though barely a joy forever. Thus came the first improvement in the art of domestic illumination.

Admirable specimens of lamps in terra cotta, in stone, in brass, and in bronze have been found in sites of Hebrew cities and in the temples of Hindustan. From the tombs of Egypt, from the tumuli of Assyria and ancient lettered Babylon, from the opened graves of Chaldean sages, come examples of household lamps, revealing a general use many centuries before the Christian era. Herodotus speaks of a procession of lamps as a scene of imposing magnificence, and Homer sings of a torch borne upon a staff, its flame no doubt feeding upon the wax from the wild honey, and the resinous gums of the forest trees, nearly a thousand years before the Christ.

So, from the fat of slain animals, the resinous products of the forest trees, and the wax of the wild bee came those lights which gleamed upon fair women and brave men at Belshazzar’s feasts, the revels of Dives, and the grand balls given by the first Napoleon in the palace of the Tuileries.

When men discovered the art of extracting oil from the olive and other vegetable sources, the use of the lamp became very general among the wealthy and noble. Only they could enjoy the less offensive methods. Lamps wrought in cunning forms, of marble, silver, and gold, ornamented with precious stones, inlaid with curious handicraft and artistic workmanship, indicate a high position for this method of illumination. Even the terra-cotta specimens, used in cottages, are graceful in shape, with an elegance of finish which no art of modern times can surpass.

Beautiful as indeed they were, of how little practical use! An eighteen-penny lantern of the eighteenth century, with its tin reflector and its bull’s-eye of third-rate glass, diffused a better light than any lamp of Rome or Greece in the days of their greatest glory.

As they knew no method for refining oil, they made it a luxury by mixing with it the perfumes of the rose and of sandal wood. Although detracting from its burning properties, the fragrance was supposed to compensate for diminished light. The flame emitted an enormous amount of smoke, and fluttering in the slightest breeze, spluttered out altogether in a gust of wind. At the end of an evening conference a party of noble Romans would resemble a congregation of chimney sweeps.

From Rome the oil lamp passed successively into Germany, Gaul, and Britain. In these countries, torches, rushes, dipped in grease and a very odorous fish oil, were the methods of artificial lighting until the Roman conquest. The rushlight of that day consisted in a notched wooden stick set in a wooden base. Stalks of the rush were peeled to the pith save for one strand of husk, and passed through hot grease. Sometimes three or more were twisted together, and when cold were placed in a notch of the standard, to be pushed up when the fire neared the wood. It

emitted a strong flame and a similar odor. You may make one of these, and enjoy for an hour the ancient light of Britain, and that which to this day dispels the gloom of night in remote Irish cabins. The candle of the common people was the rushlight of our ancestors. It burned where candles made from wax were too dear, and before Chevreul and others found a way to refine a cheap candle grease from the fat of animals.

The Picts and Scots, the Danes, and the tribes of Scandinavia had not advanced to the use of the rushlight at the time of the conquest. When torches were necessary, they stuck a bit of wood into the body of some fat bird, and supporting the stench as best they could, allowed this dismal sort of a candle to burn until the bird became a cinder.

The lamp as brought from Rome continued in use without being greatly modified until well into the thirteenth century, when the invention of candles made an artificial light of comfort to those who could afford it.

The curfew-bell, which tolled at eight o’clock, was no hardship to our ancestors, considering the badness of the lamps which lighted their houses or hovels as the case might be. Through all the medieval ages, men were supposed to rise at daylight, and retire soon after the sun had set.

The first step toward the use of the modern candle was the invention of a tallow torch which came into use about the last of the twelfth century. This remained in use for about a hundred years, when the tallow candle, either dipped or molded, made its appearance, much as it now exists. The haughty barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Charta at Runnymede would have considered a bundle of tallow dips of almost as great value as the rights which they wrung from the unwilling hand of their sovereign. To have stolen one from the kitchen table would have incurred the noose without hope of pardon. Not until the fifteenth century were the burgesses and tradespeople able to purchase a tallow candle. At the opening of the nineteenth century they were sold singly for about twelve cents each.

Flax being the wick, they burned rapidly. Cotton was more expensive than silk, and to use it for wicks was extravagant folly. Three pounds sterling was the price of a pair of cotton stockings one hundred years ago. Tapers made of wax had been in use in churches since the ninth century, but no one ever dreamed of using so expensive and sacred an article for domestic purposes. Toward the close of the fourteenth century they were timidly introduced in a few palaces and the homes of great noblemen. To offer a wax taper at a shrine was a princely gift, and absolution followed the presentation of a taper weighing one pound. To vow a taper to the Virgin Mary was like vowing a hundred doves to Venus, or a heifer to Juno. At a cost of four hundred crowns in gold, King Henry sent two wax tapers weighing twenty pounds each to Thomas a Becket, hoping thereby to appease the great primate of Canterbury.

In the Cathedral of Pisa a ton of bronze slowly swings from the lofty dome. A keen-eyed student watches its regular oscillations as its hundred wax tapers flash upon a thousand worshipers engaged in evening prayer. The great candelabrum, almost a world’s wonder at the time, was weaving a message of light in Galileo’s brain, and from the cathedral he went away to startle the world with the story of its motion, and to reveal the secrets of the pendulum as a means for measuring time. Still swings the chandelier under the cathedral’s dome, with the same potent motion as when its flashing lights taught the old astronomer the deeper story of the world’s life.

In the year of 1509 a few enterprising chandlers conceived the idea of mixing animal fat with the wax, but the deceit being discovered, the king by royal edict debarred every chandler of the realm from making and offering for sale any mixed substance or composite article in the place of wax.

It was no doubt after seeing on his grocery bill that he was paying thirty-six shillings a dozen for candles that Oliver Cromwell, in the year 1654, blew out one of the two candles on his wife’s work-table, on the ground of unnecessary extravagance. Louis XV complained that he could keep a regiment, music and all, with what was spent in lighting the palace at Versailles. It is related of Voltaire, that, when dissatisfied with the salary afforded by Frederick the Great, he used to put in his pocket the wax candle ends of his royal master, and from them turned quite a pretty penny. The cost of lighting the Tuileries under the first Napoleon with wax candles was about what it would be were the electric lamps of the present day employed—namely, four thousand dollars per annum. When the emperor was giving magnificent fetes at Dresden, he often spent six hundred dollars for the wax candles of a single night’s carousal.

When, however, wax and tallow had been sufficiently cheapened to allow their use in drawing-rooms and boudoirs, the oil lamp and the rushlight were relegated to the parlors and kitchens. No room in which costly paintings and gilded furnishings began to exhibit elegance and refinement could tolerate the smoky and greasy contrivances which remained without improvement through the centuries.—Fred Hovey Allen, in Scientific American.

(To be concluded)