AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING: BEFORE THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY

 Before the invention of the incandescent light bulb and the upcoming age of electricity, the world was a dark and dangerous place. During medieval times, typical household lighting revolved around a central hearth, few tallow candles, rushlights, oil lamps, and torches made from wood, tinder and cloth bound together and dipped in animal fat. Having a little light meant all sorts of problems, starting from the extreme stench of boiling animal fat for candle-making, which in addition dripped and smoked heavily, and not to mention the need for wick trimmers to prevent the flame from guttering.

Candles Are Old: Before the invention of candles, people would soak the fibres obtained from dried rush plants in animal fat and place them in specially designed holders held precisely at an angle of 45 degrees. In this manner, a typical 12-inch long 'rushlight' would last for about 10-15 minutes, giving good illumination. The native Americans, on the other hand, made a very striking discovery. They found that during spawning, fishes such as the stormy petrel or the candlefish (eulachon) would contain high levels of fat, and if properly dried, they could be used as makeshift candles. In some places, particularly in the tropical island nations, people captured numerous fireflies in small cages as a source of illumination. 

                                    Some sources claim that the Egyptians used candles as early as 3000 BC. But the earliest surviving candles originate from China around 200 BC and were made from the wax procured from whale blubber. Ancient Indians obtained wax by boiling cinnamon fruits. Around 500 BC, the Romans truly excelled in making dipped candles. Although expensive than tallow, they discovered beeswax to be a better substitute for it burned cleaner, and of the top, it was sweet-smelling. However, in terms of affordability, beeswax was out of bounds for the ordinary mass, who either resorted to boiling cauldrons of stinking animal fat or giving away their day's earnings to procure a little light. Tallow was never a good material for candles. Owing to high viscosity, it faced difficulty climbing up the cotton wick, and because of its low melting point, the whole thing came tumbling down from its own heat. While some candles demanded a slanting position, others required constant trimming of the wick, and in the worst-case scenario, the wax melted only near the base of the wick while the surface remained solid. As a result, the candle burned its insides and collapsed upon itself, or as the molten wax trickled down the sides, the flame flickered and smoked heavily. And at last, any failure to properly extinguish the candles would result in a putrid-smelling smoke, strong enough to puke one's guts out.

The oldest beeswax candles date back to 6th or 7th century A.D., found at the Alamannic Graveyard of Oberflacht, Germany
Image Credits: Landesmuseum Württemberg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

                From the mid-18th century, improvements in candle-making were brought forward when French chemists Michael Eugene Chevreul and Gay Lussac obtained a patent for candles made from stearin/stearic acid. Animal fat is basically a mixture of saturated fatty acids (26% palmitic acid, 14% stearic acid and 3% myristic acid), monosaturated fatty acids (47% oleic acid and 3% palmitoleic acid), polyunsaturated fatty acids (3% linoleic acid and 1% linolenic acid) and the smelly component named glycerin. When boiled with quick-lime (calcium oxide), fatty acids unite, and glycerin separates, leaving behind crystallized stearin. Stearin based candles were a lot better than ordinary tallow.   

The typical yellowish tallow candles. Instead of burning steadily, they smoked, dripped, and gave off a foul odour. Even the illumination was not great enough for reading or writing, let alone weaving. 
Image Credits: Auckland Museum, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

                 Near about the same time, James Young patented the process of candle-making from the newly discovered substance named paraffin. Originally obtained from coal in the 1830s by Karl Reichenbach and later by Young himself, via distillation of petroleum, the easy availability of the new substance revolutionised the candle-making industry for the last and the final time. It is worth mentioning, since ancient times, wicks have improved considerably. Rush was replaced with cotton and linen wicks, which in the long run got further supplanted by braided (also known as self-trimming) wicks (which consumes themselves in the burning process, thereby eliminating the need for wick trimmers). 

Patented almost a 190 years ago, paraffin when mixed with stearin yields the perfect substance for candle making with its desired properties such as optimum melting point, viscosity, steady, bright flame, etc.,
Image Credits: Photo by form PxHere

Whale Oil: Whaling began as early as 6000 BC, and reached its peak between the 16th to mid-19th centuries, after which the industry faced a steady decline due to environmental protection laws and the discovery of cheap alternatives to whale oil. Already prized for its spectacular use as lamp fuel, as an engine lubricant, whale oil became the life-blood of the industrial era Europe and Colonial America. Other than beeswax and tallow candles, spermaceti wax, found in the head of sperm whales, burned longer, cleaner and brighter. The demand for spermaceti rose to such heights that the sperm whale (and others such as baleen, pilot, killer, humpback, beluga, narwhal, etc.), has been hunted to near extinction, and the populations have not yet recovered to pre-industrial times. 

There was a time when the only way for a boy to become a man was to bring back a barrel of whale oil aboard specially designed whaling ships. The above image shows a bottle and a can of sperm oil derived from the blubber of sperm whales. 
Image Credits: Raphael D. Mazor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lanterns: Since prehistoric times, all open sources of lighting (candles, lamps, rush) had one common drawback - they could not be used in places of strong winds, rain and hail. Time and again, an unguarded light source frequented the risks of fire inside wooden houses or ships. Hence the art of glass-blowing and metal-working ushered in a new era of lighting technologies, where the open flames could be enclosed in glass chimneys or metal frames and protect them from strong winds. Thus lanterns became immediately popular. Their design was kept simple at first; just a metal case with some perforations, or glass windows attached to a metal frame, and finally a hoop on the top to hang the whole fixture or carry it if it is portable enough. The light source generally included a burning candle, oil lamp, or in the latter time, a mantle filled with gas. 

Sky lanterns were popular among various cultures of the ancient world. These paper lanterns, resembling mini hot air balloons, were used for sending distress signals, secret military messages, and also to mark the beginning of a particular season or to honour the dead. 
Image Credits: https://www.hippopx.com/en/sky-lanterns

The Argand Lamp: The Argand lamp, invented in 1780 by Aime Argand, a student of Antoine Lavoisier, surpassed every other contemporary lighting fixture. This was the first scientifically designed oil lamp, fitted with a central burner, and a flat wick to increase the flow of air, and resulting in complete combustion of the fuel. Argand's original design of the central burner included two concentric metal tubes, one on the inside and the other on the outside. As a result, air could pass through the centre of the wick and surroundings, which resulted in a cleaner, brighter flame. Finally, he added a hard glass chimney on the outside, which would enhance the brightness of the light further by moving in air inside the cylindrical chimney. However, there was only one drawback. The fuel had to be gravity fed, i.e.,  the reservoir of oil had to be on a higher level than the burner. The bulky oil tank would cast a heavy shadow, limiting the available illumination. Others improved upon his design and invented the gas lamp, the next in line with the technological evolution of artificial lights. 

Gas Lamps: In Europe, coal miners occasionally hit pockets of flammable gas (which the miners described as firedamp) that burst into flames, resulting in several deaths, which were reduced only after the invention of Davy's Safety lamp in 1815. Soon it was discovered that coal-gas, stored in containers, would retain its flammable properties and could be used as a possible replacement for candles as a source of illumination. William Murdoch was the first to obtain coal-gas by the process of destructive distillation, i.e., heating coal in a sealed container, and that too in a near absence of air. This process separated the solid coal into its gaseous counterparts such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, ethylene, and other volatile hydrocarbons. In 1797, Murdoch used this gas to illuminate, at first his house, then his workplace (The Soho Foundry) and awed the public at his demonstration of this marvelous thing. Gas lights were much brighter than the contemporary candles. Also known as manufactured gas or town gas, coal gas was the principal source of lighting throughout the 19th century and even up to the early years of the twentieth century. 

A set of six Welsbach gas mantles installed inside a street lamp
Image Credits: Pentachlorphenol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

                        It was now necessary to modify the design of the Argand lamp and make it suitable for burning gas. The first burners relied on the concept of open flames pointed upwards, with gas supplied via brass, iron or copper tubings fitted with an on-off valve. It is worth mentioning that F.W. Robins in his book The Story Of The Lamp presents a very interesting note on the invention of gas burners. He writes, '' ....Murdoch...took practical steps towards gas lighting, distilling gas from coal in iron retorts and burning it at the end of an open tube. Later, the tube was closed at the end and holes pierced literally to act as burners. It is said that this idea was the result of an accidental discovery ... using his wife's thimble to close the end of the tube and the thimble having been worn and holed, tiny gas jets resulted''. The early gas burners had distinct names, starting from rat tail (a simple metal tube closed at one end with a single hole), cock-spur (a similar tube but with three holes giving a triple flame), cockscomb (more holes, more light), batswing (small pear-shaped steel burner), fishtail (different from the previous single jet burners; the first twin-jet gas burner) and many others. Gas lights were installed on top of long poles, placed at a suitable distance for lighting up the streets, and lamplighters were appointed. 

These gas lights, fixed atop an iron pole were quite common even in the 21st century.  
Image Credits: Photo by form PxHere

                 The Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach was a pioneer in the chemistry of rare earth metals and has been credited with the discovery of neodymium. Sometime around the 1880s, he observed that certain rare earth metal oxides such as lanthanum, zirconium, yttrium, cerium, thorium, and osmium gave off an intense illumination subjected to the flame of a bunsen burner (a contemporary single jet gas burner, invented by Robert Bunsen in 1852). Welsbach decided to impregnate fabrics such as silk, cotton and rayon with salts of the rare earths, shaped in the form of small bags (mantles) and suspended over an open flame. The flame burned away the fabric, leaving behind the mantle of metallic oxides. The Welsbach mantles simplified gas lighting and became insanely popular. 

                          Theatres require an intense illumination to have the necessary dramatic effects, which is quite hard to achieve via candles or oil lamps, no matter how many are used. So with the advent of gas lights, 19th-century theatrical lighting witnessed a rapid shift. Apart from open flame gas burners, theatres also made use of the limelight effect. Lime, when exposed to the 2500℃ flame of an oxy-hydrogen torch, emits an intense light via black body radiation. As the name suggest, this limelight effect, was first discovered by Goldsworth Gurney. After further research, Thomas Drummond invented the Drummond Light. 

Kerosene Lamps: In 1846, Abraham Gesner discovered a new oil in the process of distilling solid coal into coal gas. The clear, less viscous fluid burned with a considerably clean flame, emitted less smoke and soon became an excellent substitute for whale oil or spermaceti as indoor lighting. He named the new oil kerosene or keroselaion, meaning wax-oil. 

Vintage Kerosene Lamps
Image Credits: Photo by form PxHere

                                     Ignacy Lukasiewicz invented the modern kerosene lamps. These lamps were conceptually similar to the Argand's central burner fitted with a control mechanism to adjust the wick, and necessary engineering to maintain a steady draught of air. In this regard, the portable hurricane lanterns deserve special mention. The name hurricane comes from their ability to withstand strong wind draughts. Patented in 1869 by John H. Irwin, these lanterns, through a combination of air vents, would maximize the flow of fresh air and, in turn, provide bright illumination. 

But The World Was Still Dark: For much of history, the world has remained practically dark after sundown. Having a candle was one thing, but lighting it was in itself another story. Before the invention of safety matches (in 1846), every household had a fire-box which included a piece of fire steel (flint) and fine cloth as tinder. In those days, lighting a candle was hard, and once lit, people would literally die in order to preserve the light. Losing the light meant collisions with indoor furniture, or in the worst-case scenario, people would fall down a flight of stairs and ultimately end up with a pair of broken legs. The outside world was equally grim. Laws were passed to restrict nighttime activity and those who stayed out after sundown were usually thieves, burglars, prostitutes, and homosexuals. If it was absolutely necessary to go out at night, people were required to take lamp bearers to light the way and ward off potential foes. Although street lighting improved the situation to a great extent, they were few in number, and the light was dim. But all in all, speaking of an age without severe light pollution, the night sky glimmered with thousands of stars, and people might have enjoyed a good time. 

Sources: 

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle
   
2. https://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/lighting/lighting.htm
3. https://www.stouchlighting.com/blog/the-historical-evolution-of-lighting
4. Brox, Jane. Brilliant: The Evolution Of Artificial Lighting. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, New York, 2010
5. Robins, F.W. The Story Of The Lamp (And The Candle). Oxford University Press, London, New York, Toronto, 1939

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