by Jane Brox
Brilliant
The Evolution of Artificial Light
Jane Brox
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
PART I
1. Lascaux: The First Lamp
2. Time of Dark Streets
3. Lanterns at Sea
4. Gaslight
5. Toward a More Perfect Flame
PART II
6. Life Electric
7. Incandescence
8. Overwhelming Brilliance: The White City
9. Niagara: Long-Distance Light
PART III
10. New Century, Last Flame
11. Gleaming Things
12. Alone in the Dark
13. Rural Electrification
14. Cold Light
15. Wartime: The Return of Old Night
16. Lascaux Discovered
PART IV
17. Blackout, 1965
18. Imagining the Next Grid
19. At the Mercy of Light
20. More Is Less
21. The Once and Future Light
Epilogue
...
Acknowledgments
Bibliographic Note
Notes
Index
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON NEW YORK
2010
Copyright © 2010 by Jane Brox
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brox, Jane, date
Brilliant : the evolution of artificial light / Jane Brox.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-05527-5
1. Lighting — History. I. Title.
TH7900.B68 2010
621.32093— dc22 2009035441
Book design by Brian Moore
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
DEANNE URMY
and for
JOHN BISBEE
Contents
Prologue: The Earth at Night as Seen from Space [>]
PART I
1. Lascaux: The First Lamp [>]
2. Time of Dark Streets [>]
3. Lanterns at Sea [>]
4. Gaslight [>]
5. Toward a More Perfect Flame [>]
PART II
6. Life Electric [>]
7. Incandescence [>]
8. Overwhelming Brilliance: The White City [>]
9. Niagara: Long-Distance Light [>]
PART III
10. New Century, Last Flame [>]
11. Gleaming Things [>]
12. Alone in the Dark [>]
13. Rural Electrification [>]
14. Cold Light [>]
15. Wartime: The Return of Old Night [>]
16. Lascaux Discovered [>]
PART IV
17. Blackout, 1965 [>]
18. Imagining the Next Grid [>]
19. At the Mercy of Light [>]
20. More Is Less [>]
21. The Once and Future Light [>]
Epilogue: Lascaux Revisited [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Bibliographic Note [>]
Notes [>]
Index [>]
Prologue
The Earth at Night as Seen from Space
Five hundred years ago, if you could have seen the earth from above, cities, towns, and villages would have appeared nearly as dark as the oak forests. Perhaps glints of light would have leaked through doorways and shuttered windows early in the evening, or a few lanterns would have bobbed down the lanes, but no streetlights would have shone. Within, candles and lamps no brighter than those of Roman times would have lit only a bowl of porridge, a book, a shirtsleeve in need of mending, another. If someone reached for a thread or let out a long sigh, the flame would quiver, and the shadows would quiver, too. Then everything would right itself again. Such small light was precious and meted out sparingly. For much of the evening, people lay in their houses after dousing their cooking fires, sleeping and dreaming away the hours. If by chance on a clear, moonless night they stepped out of their intimate dark and looked up to the heavens, the stars would have been so many that "one could not have put a finger in between them."
Now that our nights are flooded—both outside and in—with insistent light, evidence of our illumination reaches farther into space than any other human thing. On a map of the earth at night as seen from space—made up of a composite of images from satellite photographs taken on nights of the new moon—light blooms across the continents like yeast in warm, sweet water. The edges of land are defined by blazes flaring from the center of cities and waning, though never disappearing, in the suburbs between. Across the United States and western Europe, light wends inland along highways and rivers and stipples the interior foothills, plateaus, and grasslands, diminishing only in the mountains and deserts. Even the interiors of Asia, South America, and Africa—where many people live beyond the reach of electric grids—are salted with small brilliances. The most glaring spots on the map correspond to flagrancy and prosperity rather than density of human habitation: at the moment, the eastern seaboard of the United States is brighter than anyplace in China or India. Only parts of the oceans and the poles appear completely dark.
The story of this increase—just a few centuries old—is one of technology and power, of politics, grievances, and class: the wealthy and powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it than others. But the story of light is also one of constancy and mystery, of beauty, brilliance, and shadows, and it includes those who continue to use the same types of light now as in centuries past. Even in modern societies, old forms of light live on and acquire new meaning: an open flame—brought to life by a gesture of the hand, extinguished with a breath—has always been much more than simply a utilitarian tool, for it holds the power to fix our gaze and free our thoughts, and it lies at the heart of our making, thinking, and dreaming. "We are almost certain that fire is precisely the first object, the first phenomenon, on which the human mind reflected,"wrote Gaston Bachelard.
The story is in the light—in its utility and beauty—and also in the way its increase has altered life by granting more working hours in the day and creating a night that is no longer impenetrable, no longer a void, a night easily traveled through and expansive with free time. What does it mean to have new hours for the human spirit? How have wealth and privilege shaped those hours? And what are the consequences for those who continue to live without modern light? Have our bodies and minds adapted to a world in which the tides of the day are lost and the stars appear to have vanished? What of pumas, loggerhead turtles, and cockleburs? How has the way we think about light changed now that we've left the solitary lamp behind, now that we've bound ourselves to the grid? And can an understanding of the way those in the past adapted to their own new sources of light help us to better illuminate our future?
PART I
Of time that passes by burning...
—GASTON BACHELARD,
The Flame of a Candle
1. Lascaux: The First Lamp
ALTHOUGH FIRE HAS BLAZED in hearths and flared from pine torches for half a million years, the earliest known stone lamps—fashioned by Ice Age humans during the Ple
istocene—are no more than forty thousand years old. Their quiet flames shone more weakly than those of our candles, but they were cleaner than torchwood and easier to guard and tend. Often the lamps were merely unworked flat slabs of limestone, or limestone with natural cavities for the nubs of tallow—animal fat—that had to be replenished every hour. Some were roughly carved and their reservoirs carefully shaped with sloping sides so that the melted fat could be poured off without drowning the lichen, moss, or juniper wicks. Since limestone is a poor conductor of heat, there'd have been no need to carve a handle: people could hold the lamp in the palm of their hands. Except that the cups are charred, they could be mistaken for small mortars or grinding stones.
Archaeologists have discovered such stone lamps overturned near open hearths and among cooking tools and spear-points in shallow rock shelters. They've also unearthed them far from settlements, deep in the caves of what is currently southern France, caves that are now famous—La Mouthe, Lascaux—for there isn't anything more beautiful than what Ice Age humans made by such light. Eighteen thousand years ago, while above them herds funneled through valleys on their way to the plains near the coast, people ventured far beyond the reach of day—working their way down stone corridors and twisting through narrows—to draw from memory on the limestone walls and ceilings. Sometimes their works extend higher than human reach: a man would have had to stand on scaffolding or upon a rock protruding from a wall to make marks with his hands and with bristles dipped in manganese and iron oxide. More often, the artist held the pigment in his mouth and blew it onto the cave wall to make a mark. He also blew through hollowed-out bones. Concentrated marks one after another produced the sturdy outline of an animal, while a more diffuse spray colored a flank or back. In places details are certain and fine. Elsewhere the marks are suggestive: four streaks make a cat's head. At times the contours of the wall stand for the back of a horse, a small protuberance for an eye. The artists understood how to place a leg or draw the turn of a head to create a sense of visual depth in their work.
In the chambers of Lascaux, black and brilliant animals swirl, eddy, and flow toward the deepest reaches of the cave: Galloping horses and horses superimposed on horses, a great red and black horse, a horse with a turned-back foot, a horse rolling on the ground, traces of a painted equid. A black stag, swimming stags, a fallen stag, a stag with thirteen arrows. A great stag and horse with merged outlines. A headless equid drawn in red. Two bison, the head of a bison, the head and horns of a cow, a red cow painted on the ceiling. The solitary head of a bull in the Hall of the Bulls. Panel of the Musk Ox, Panel of the Ibexes, Niche of the Felines. Wounded, grazing, fleeing, young: "The iconography of this cave," said archaeologist Norbert Aujoulat, "is, above all, a fantastic ode to life." Everything was contingent on the herds: food and clothing (needles and awls were carved from bones, while tendons provided thread and binding), as well the tallow in the lamps.
There's no evidence that Ice Age humans used more than a handful of lamps as they drew, and if carbon dioxide had built up in the chamber—as it often does in the still air of deep limestone caves—they might have had trouble keeping even their few lamps lit. It's likely they saw only a small portion of their work at any one time, that it receded in darkness behind them and lay in shadow above them: "Achieving full and accurate color perception of the cave images along a five-meter-long panel," notes French archaeologist Sophie de Beaune, "would require 150 lamps, each of them placed 50 centimeters from the cave wall." So the artists couldn't have perceived the reds, yellows, and blacks of their own marks as clearly as we moderns can under the incessant glare of electric bulbs or in contemporary color photographs of the friezes and panels.
To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it's likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly, wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 1960, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone. It differs from the others in more than the nature of the stone and its shape. (The handle was essential because sandstone conducts heat efficiently, and it would have been impossible to hold the lamp without it.) The lamp possesses a refined beauty: its maker created a perfectly symmetrical bowl, polished the sandstone smooth, and incised the handle with chevrons. Perhaps it was used for ceremonies, though that can't entirely be known. Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination.
Light as it would be for ages to come: light, its limits, and then the dark. Over time, lamps were fashioned out of shells, then pottery shaped like shells or slippers, and there were gradual improvements in the design: some bear turned-over lips on their terra cotta cups, which prevented spills. The cloth or rope wicks lay horizontally within wick channels shaped like thick spouts—perhaps suggested by the flutes of shells—which helped the oil to climb the wick and keep the flame steady. Ancient Greek and Roman lamps had enclosed reservoirs, which protected the oil from dirt or flies and guaranteed a little safety, but the flame itself was unguarded by glass.
It is believed that the Romans might have fashioned the first beeswax candles, which gave a fragrant, clear, steady flame and burned so evenly they were eventually used to divide time into hours. The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great wished to "render to God, with a good heart, the fourth part of the service of his body and of his mind, both by day and by night." So as to tell accurate time in the dark or in the rain, he ordered that beeswax equal to seventy-two pence in weight be made into six candles, each twelve inches long. He needed to prevent drafts from affecting the burning time of the candles, for "the violence of the winds blew too much upon them ... day and night without ceasing through the doors of the churches and the windows, and the chinks and holes in the woodwork, and the many rifts in the walls, and the thin tents." To do so, he "ordered a lantern to be well made of wood and ox-horn, for the horns of oxen, when white and planed down to a thin sheet, are as clear as glass.... And when this device had been so executed, six candles, one after another, burned for twenty-four hours without intermission, neither too quickly or too slowly. And when they went out others were lighted."
Rare and costly beeswax was long the province only of the Roman Catholic Church and the wealthy. Most other people depended on fat they pressed or rendered from animals, fish, or vegetation near at hand: manatees, alligators, whales, sheep, oxen, bison, deer, bears, coconuts, cottonseed, rapeseed, and olives, the chosen oil of the Mediterranean. In England tallow candles from domestic herds provided the main source of light. The highest-quality candles contained a large portion of hard, white mutton tallow, while softer beef tallow made a taper of lesser quality. Poor people couldn't be fussy about their tallow and would use almost any household grease available for their lights, which were most often made of rushes that had been gathered from the marshes in late summer or fall. The work of making such lights was usually reserved for children and the old, who soaked the rushes and peeled away the outer skin. They dried the inner pith in the sun, then repeatedly dipped the rush in melted fat. Rushlights were frail and slim—"an object like the ghost of a walking-cane," wrote Charles Dickens, "which instantly broke its back if it were touched." A simple iron pincer held the rush at a slant, for upright it consumed itself too quickly. A well-made two-foot rushlight would burn shy of an hour.
Light, it seems, could be gained from any viable thing at hand. In the West Indies, the Caribbean, Japan, and the South Sea Islands, people saw by the light of numerous fireflies, which they captured and kept in small cages. South Sea
Islanders skewered oily candlenuts on bamboo to make torches, while those on Vancouver Island placed a dried salmon in the fork of a stick and lit it. Shetland Islanders caught, killed, and stored storm petrels by the thousands. The petrel, it's said, was named after Saint Peter, because it seems to walk on water as it feeds: a sea bird, full of buoyant, insulating oil. When the islanders needed a lamp, they'd affix a petrel carcass to a base of clay, thread a wick down its throat, and set it alight.
The first American colonists—possessing no domestic herds in the early years of settlement, but being surrounded by abundant woodlands—often used pine knots, called candle-wood, for their lights. The knots smoked heavily and dripped pitch, so they were usually placed in the corner of a fireplace or on a stone slab. Wood splinters set in iron pincers provided portable lights. Even after herds were established in the colonies, poorer people continued to use candlewood, as did rural families: "It was said that a prudent New England farmer would as soon start the winter without hay in his barn as without candle-wood in his woodshed."
New Englanders sometimes made fragrant candles from the waxy outer coating of bayberries, which they rendered by boiling the berries. They also made use of deer, moose, and bear fat, although once they established herds of sheep and cattle, they used the fat of their domestic animals as well. Women spent long hours painstakingly dipping candles—"a serious undertaking ... sevenfold worse in its way even than washing-day," claimed Harriet Beecher Stowe. "A great kettle was slung over the kitchen fire, in which cakes of tallow were speedily liquefying; a frame was placed quite across the kitchen to sustain candle-rods, with a train of board underneath to catch the drippings." The day could not be too warm, or the quality of the candles would suffer. The tallow had to be "cut very small, that it may be speedily dissolved; for otherwise it would be liable to burn or become black, if left too long over the fire." The wicks couldn't be dipped too quickly, or the candles would be brittle. After the first three dips, "water, proportionate to that of tallow, [was] poured in for precipitating the impure particles to the bottom of the vessel." It could not be done sooner, "as the water, by penetrating the wicks, would make the candles crackle in burning, and thereby render them useless." Afterward, the candles had to be cooled slowly, or they would be likely to crack. They softened in warm weather and, being made of animal fat, spoiled on the shelf over time. They had to be stored where the mice and rats couldn't get at them.
