Chalice-shaped lamp from the tomb of Tutankhamun. The cup was intended to be filled with oil and when the wick was lit, then the scene of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun was visible. Ancient Egyptian, New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty, 1333–1323 BC.
It’s not hard to imagine why people were willing to spend so much time manufacturing candles at home. Consider what life would have been like for a farmer in New England in 1700. In the winter months the sun goes down at five, followed by fifteen hours of darkness before it gets light again. And when that sun goes down, it’s pitch-black: there are no streetlights, flashlights, lightbulbs, fluorescents—even kerosene lamps haven’t been invented yet. There’s just a flickering glow of a fireplace, and the smoky burn of the tallow candle.
Those nights were so oppressive that scientists now believe our sleep patterns were radically different in the ages before ubiquitous night lighting. In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods. When darkness fell, they would drift into “first sleep,” waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of “second sleep.” The lighting of the nineteenth century disrupted this ancient rhythm, by opening up a whole array of modern activities that could be performed after sunset: everything from theaters and restaurants to factory labor. Ekirch documents the way the ideal of a single, eight-hour block of continuous sleep was constructed by nineteenth-century customs, an adaptation to a dramatic change in the lighting environment of human settlements. Like all adaptations, its benefits carried inevitable costs: the middle-of-the-night insomnia that plagues millions of people around the world is not, technically speaking, a disorder, but rather the body’s natural sleep rhythms asserting themselves over the prescriptions of nineteenth-century convention. Those waking moments at three a.m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.
The flicker of the tallow candle had not been strong enough to transform our sleep patterns. To make a cultural change that momentous, you needed the steady bright glow of nineteenth-century lighting. By the end of the century, that light would come from the burning filaments of the electric lightbulb. But the first great advance in the century of light came from a source that seems macabre to us today: the skull of a fifty-ton marine mammal.
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IT’S A STORY THAT BEGINS with a storm. Legend has it that sometime around 1712 a powerful nor’easter off the coast of Nantucket blew a ship captain named Hussey far out to sea. In the deep waters of the North Atlantic, he encountered one of Mother Nature’s most bizarre and intimidating creations: the sperm whale.
Hussey managed to harpoon the beast—though some skeptics think it simply washed ashore in the storm. Either way, when locals dissected the giant mammal, they discovered something utterly bizarre: inside the creature’s massive head, they found a cavity above the brain, filled with a white, oily substance. Thanks to its resemblance to seminal fluid, the whale oil came to be called “spermaceti.”
To this day, scientists are not entirely sure why sperm whales produce spermaceti in such vast quantities. (A mature sperm whale holds as much as five hundred gallons inside its skull.) Some believe the whales use the spermaceti for buoyancy; others believe it helps with the mammal’s echolocation system. New Englanders, however, quickly discovered another use for spermaceti: candles made from the substance produce a much stronger, whiter light than tallow candles, without the offensive smoke. By the second half of the eighteenth century, spermaceti candles had become the most prized form of artificial light in America and Europe.
In a 1751 letter, Ben Franklin described how much he enjoyed the way the new candles “afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softening; that their Drops do not make Grease Spots like those from common Candles; that they last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing.” Spermaceti light quickly became an expensive habit for the well-to-do. George Washington estimated that he spent $15,000 a year in today’s currency burning spermaceti candles. The candle business became so lucrative that a group of manufacturers formed an organization called United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, conventionally known as the “Spermaceti Trust,” designed to keep competitors out of the business and force the whalers to keep their prices in check.
Despite the candle-making monopoly, significant economic rewards awaited anyone who managed to harpoon a sperm whale. The artificial light of the spermaceti candle triggered an explosion in the whaling industry, building out the beautiful seaside towns of Nantucket and Edgartown. But as elegant as these streets seem today, whaling was a dangerous and repulsive business. Thousands of lives were lost at sea chasing these majestic creatures, including from the notorious sinking of the Essex, which ultimately inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick.
Extracting the spermaceti was almost as difficult as harpooning the whale itself. A hole would be carved in the side of the whale’s head, and men would crawl into the cavity above the brain—spending days inside the rotting carcass, scraping spermaceti out of the brain of the beast. It’s remarkable to think that only two hundred years ago, this was the reality of artificial light: if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.
Spermaceti whale of the Southern Ocean. Hand-colored engraving from The Naturalist’s Libray, Mammalia, Vol. 12, 1833–1843, by Sir William Jardine.
Somewhere on the order of three hundred thousand sperm whales were slaughtered in just a little more than a century. It is likely that the entire population would have been killed off had we not found a new source of oil for artificial light in the ground, introducing petroleum-based solutions such as the kerosene lamp and the gaslight. This is one of the stranger twists in the history of extinction: because humans discovered deposits of ancient plants buried deep below the surface of the earth, one of the ocean’s most extraordinary creatures was spared.
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FOSSIL FUELS WOULD BECOME CENTRAL to almost all aspects of twentieth-century life, but their first commercial use revolved around light. These new lamps were twenty times brighter than any candle had ever been, and their superior brightness helped spark an explosion in magazine and newspaper publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the dark hours after work became increasingly compatible with reading. But they also sparked literal explosions: thousands of people died each year in the fiery eruption of a reading light.
Despite these advances, artificial light remained extremely expensive by modern standards. In today’s society, light is comparatively cheap and abundant; 150 years ago, reading after dark was a luxury. The steady march of artificial light since then, from a rare and feeble technology to a ubiquitous and powerful one, gives us one map for the path of progress over that period. In the late 1990s, the Yale historian William D. Nordhaus published an ingenious study that charted that path in extraordinary detail, analyzing the true costs of artificial light over thousands of years of innovation.
When economic historians try to gauge the overall health of economies over time, average wages are usually one of the first places they start. Are people today making more money than they did in 1850? Of course, inflation makes those comparisons tricky: someone making ten dollars a day was upper-middle-class in nineteenth-century dollars. That’s why we have inflation tables that help us understand that ten dollars then is worth $160 in today’s currency. But inflation covers only part of the story. “During periods of major technological change,” Nordhaus argued, “the construction of accurate price indexes that capture the impact of new technologies on living standards is beyond the practical capability of official statistical agencies. The essential difficulty arises for the obvious but usually overlooked reason that most of the goods we consum
e today were not produced a century ago.” Even if you had $160 in 1850, you couldn’t buy a wax phonograph, not to mention an iPod. Economists and historians needed to factor not only the general value of a currency, but also some sense of what that currency could buy.
This is where Nordhaus proposed using the history of artificial light to illuminate the true purchasing power of wages over the centuries. The vehicles of artificial light vary dramatically over the years: from candles to LEDs. But the light they produce is a constant, a kind of anchor in the storm of rapid technological innovation. So Nordhaus proposed as his unit of measure the cost of producing one thousand “lumen-hours” of artificial light.
A tallow candle in 1800 would cost roughly forty cents per thousand lumen-hours. A fluorescent bulb in 1992, when Nordhaus originally compiled his research, cost a tenth of a cent for the same amount of light. That’s a four-hundred-fold increase in efficiency. But the story is even more dramatic when you compare those costs to the average wages from the period. If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages.
Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today’s illuminated wonderland. That something was the electric lightbulb.
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THE STRANGE THING about the electric lightbulb is that it has come to be synonymous with the “genius” theory of innovation—the single inventor inventing a single thing, in a moment of sudden inspiration—while the true story behind its creation actually makes the case for a completely different explanatory framework: the network/systems model of innovation. Yes, the lightbulb marked a threshold in the history of innovation, but for entirely different reasons. It would be pushing things to claim that the lightbulb was crowdsourced, but it is even more of a distortion to claim that a single man named Thomas Edison invented it.
The canonical story goes something like this: after a triumphant start to his career inventing the phonograph and the stock ticker, a thirty-one-year-old Edison takes a few months off to tour the American West—perhaps not coincidentally, a region that was significantly darker at night than the gaslit streets of New York and New Jersey. Two days after returning to his lab in Menlo Park, in August 1878, he draws three diagrams in his notebook and titles them “Electric Light.” By 1879, he files a patent application for an “electric lamp” that displays all the main characteristics of the lightbulb we know today. By the end of 1882, Edison’s company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan.
Thomas Edison
It’s a thrilling story of invention: the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world. The problem with this story is that people had been inventing incandescent light for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it. A lightbulb involves three fundamental elements: some kind of filament that glows when an electric current runs through it, some mechanism to keep the filament from burning out too quickly, and a means of supplying electric power to start the reaction in the first place. In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy had attached a platinum filament to an early electric battery, causing it to burn brightly for a few minutes. By the 1840s, dozens of separate inventors were working on variations of the lightbulb. The first patent was issued in 1841 to an Englishman named Frederick de Moleyns. The historian Arthur A. Bright compiled a list of the lightbulb’s partial inventors, leading up to Edison’s ultimate triumph in the late 1870s.
At least half of the men had hit upon the basic formula that Edison ultimately arrived at: a carbon filament, suspended in a vacuum to prevent oxidation, thus keeping the filament from burning up too quickly. In fact, when Edison finally began tinkering with electric light, he spent months working on a feedback system for regulating the flow of electricity to prevent melting, before finally abandoning that approach in favor of the vacuum—despite the fact that nearly half of his predecessors had already embraced the vacuum as the best environment for a sustained glow. The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps. The British inventor Joseph Swan had begun lighting homes and theaters a year earlier. Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace.
So why does Edison get all the credit? It’s tempting to use the same backhanded compliment that many leveled against Steve Jobs: that he was a master of marketing and PR. It is true that Edison had a very tight relationship with the press at this point of his career. (On at least one occasion, he gave shares in his company to a journalist in exchange for better coverage.) Edison was also a master of what we would now call “vaporware”: He announced nonexistent products to scare off competitors. Just a few months after he had started work on electric light, he began telling reporters from New York papers that the problem had been solved, and that he was on the verge of launching a national system of magical electrical light. A system so simple, he says, “that a bootblack might understand it.”
Despite this bravado, the fact remained that the finest specimen of electric light in the Edison lab couldn’t last five minutes. But that didn’t stop him from inviting the press out to Menlo Park lab to see his revolutionary lightbulb. Edison would bring each reporter in one at a time, flick the switch on a bulb, and let the reporter enjoy the light for three or four minutes before ushering him from the room. When he asked how long his lightbulbs would last, he answered confidently: “Forever, almost.”
But for all this bluffing, Edison and his team did manage to ship a revolutionary and magical product, as the Apple marketing might have called the Edison lightbulb. Publicity and marketing will only get you so far. By 1882, Edison had produced a lightbulb that decisively outperformed its competitors, just as the iPod outperformed its MP3-player rivals in its early years.
In part, Edison’s “invention” of the lightbulb was less about a single big idea and more about sweating the details. (His famous quip about invention being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration certainly holds true for his adventures in artificial light.) Edison’s single most significant contribution to the electric lightbulb itself was arguably the carbonized bamboo filament he eventually settled on. Edison wasted at least a year trying to make platinum work as a filament, but it was too expensive and prone to melting. Once he abandoned platinum, Edison and his team tore through a veritable botanic garden of different materials: “celluloid, wood shavings (from boxwood, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar, rosewood, and maple), punk, cork, flax, coconut hair and shell, and a variety of papers.” After a year of experimentation, bamboo emerged as the most durable substance, which set off one of the strangest chapters in the history of global commerce. Edison dispatched a series of Menlo Park emissaries to scour the globe for the most incandescent bamboo in the natural world. One representative paddled down two thousand miles of river in Brazil. Another headed to Cuba, where he was promptly struck down with yellow fever and died. A third representative named William Moore ventured to China and Japan, where he struck a deal with a local farmer for the strongest bamboo the Menlo Park wizards had encountered. The arrangement remained intact for many years, supplying the filaments that would illuminate rooms all over the world. Edison may not have invented the lightbulb, but he did inaugurate a tradition that would turn out to be vital to modern innovation: American electronics companies importing their component parts from Asia. The only difference is that, in Edison’s time, the Asian factory was a forest.
The other key ingredient to Edis
on’s success lay in the team he had assembled around him in Menlo Park, memorably known as the “muckers.” The muckers were strikingly diverse both in terms of professional expertise and nationality: the British mechanic Charles Batchelor, the Swiss machinist John Kruesi, the physicist and mathematician Francis Upton, and a dozen or so other draftsmen, chemists, and metalworkers. Because the Edison lightbulb was not so much a single invention as a bricolage of small improvements, the diversity of the team turned out to be an essential advantage for Edison. Solving the problem of the filament, for instance, required a scientific understanding of electrical resistance and oxidation that Upton provided, complementing Edison’s more untutored, intuitive style; and it was Batchelor’s mechanical improvisations that enabled them to test so many different candidates for the filament itself. Menlo Park marked the beginning of an organizational form that would come to prominence in the twentieth century: the cross-disciplinary research-and-development lab. In this sense, the transformative ideas and technologies that came out of places such as Bell Labs and Xerox-PARC have their roots in Edison’s workshop. Edison didn’t just invent technology; he invented an entire system for inventing, a system that would come to dominate twentieth-century industry.
Edison also helped inaugurate another tradition that would become vital to contemporary high-tech innovation: paying his employees in equity rather than just cash. In 1879, in the middle of the most frenetic research into the lightbulb, Edison offered Francis Upton stock worth 5 percent of the Edison Electric Light Company—though Upton would have to forswear his salary of $600 a year. Upton struggled over the decision, but ultimately decided to take the stock grant, over the objections of his more fiscally conservative father. By the end of the year, the ballooning value of Edison stock meant that his holdings were already worth $10,000, more than a million dollars in today’s currency. Not entirely graciously, Upton wrote to his father, “I cannot help laughing when I think how timid you were at home.”
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World Page 15
