Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  In later years, women used tin or pewter molds to make candles. Their work then was simpler and quicker, though still laborious, for a farm wife would have to make hundreds of candles to last for a winter of meager light. Historian Marshall Davidson notes that "even the best-read people remained sparing with candlelight. In his diary for 1743 the Reverend Edward Holyoke, then president of Harvard, noted that on May 22 and 23 his household made 78 pounds of candles. Less than six months later the diary records in its line-a-day style, 'Candles all gone.'"

  Unlike the paraffin candles of modern times, tallow candles were not easy to keep lit. Not only did they soften in warm weather, but they also burned unevenly and lost their brilliance as they burned. To maintain more than a few at any one time required constant work: each would have to be snuffed—that is, the charred wick had to be trimmed—and rekindled at least every half-hour to be kept from guttering. (Guttering occurs when the melted wax channels down the side of the candle, which makes the taper burn unevenly and causes the flame to flicker.) A draft would misshape and often douse a candle. If it wasn't properly extinguished, it would give off excessive smoke and an acrid stench, which was all the more problematic in well-to-do households, where many candles might be extinguished at once. Jonathan Swift gave extensive advice to servants concerning the dousing of candles:

  There are several Ways of putting out Candles, and you ought to be instructed in them all: You may run the Candle End against the Wainscot, which puts the Snuff out immediately: You may lay it on the Floor, and tread the Snuff out with your Foot; You may hold it upside down until it is choaked with its own Grease; or cram it into the Socket of the Candlestick: You may whirl it round in your Hand till it goes out: When you go to Bed, after you have made Water, you may dip the Candle End into the Chamber-Pot: You may spit on your Finger and Thumb, and pinch the Snuff until it goes out: The Cook may run the Candle's Nose into the Meal Tub, or the Groom into a Vessel of Oats, or a Lock of Hay, or a Heap of Litter.... But the quickest and best of all Methods, is to blow it out with your Breath, which leaves the Candle clear and readier to be lighted.

  As for lamps, even with tallow of the highest quality, they needed frequent cleaning to work well. Tallow, being thick, had trouble climbing up the wick—often nothing more than a twisted rag in poorer households—which had to be pulled up from time to time and trimmed. If the fire was starved of fuel, it would produce a thin, smoky flame, though given too much, it would smoke as well. And it smelled gamy: "stinking tallow," Shakespeare called it.

  In every century, those who had easy access to an ample fuel supply could enjoy adequate light, as did the wealthy everywhere, who also brightened their homes and halls by making use of precious mirrors to magnify the flames and who could be profligate with their beeswax. "At the Court of Louis XIV of France no candle was ever re-lighted and the ladies-in-waiting made quite a good thing out of selling, as their perquisite, the candle ends of expensive wax," notes historian William O'Dea. "This seems to have been the custom in other royal households." But for those who had to buy candles, the cost was dear: "In the middle of the fifteenth century in Tours, a laborer had to work half a day to earn enough for a pound of tallow. And wax was priceless."

  The lamp was one thing; lighting it was another, especially before the invention of the safety match in the nineteenth century. The earliest intentional fires were started with sparks made by striking flint against iron pyrites, or from the friction between hardwood and softwood, for which the fire builder might lay a hardwood stick set with drilled holes on the ground or across his knees, then insert a softwood stick into one of the holes and twirl it steadily—perhaps for less than a minute on a day with no rain—until the abrasion created enough heat to start the wood smoldering. Once he saw smoke rise, he would throw crushed dry leaves on it, cup the smoldering leaves with his hands, and blow the smolder into a blaze. Then he'd turn the fire over onto a small pile of twigs and leaves. It would be easiest to start with good dry sticks, which were often much cherished. Of the Karankawa Indians of Texas it is said: "Their fire sticks they always carried with them and kept them carefully wrapped in several layers of skins tied up with thongs and made into a neat package; they were thus kept very dry, and as soon as the occasion for their use was over they were immediately wrapped up again and laid away."

  In eighteenth-century Europe, getting a flame was hardly any easier. The tinderbox found in almost all kitchens would have contained fire steel, flint, and tinder—usually charred linen. To make a fire by striking flint against steel and setting off sparks, which were aimed toward the charred cloth, fed with more tinder, and fanned to a flame, was an ordinary task that could be accomplished quickly on a dry day in broad light, though on "a cold dark frosty morning when the hands are chapped, frozen and insensible," wrote one sufferer, "you may chance to strike the flint against the knuckles for some considerable time without discovering your mistake."

  Once gotten, fire was carefully guarded, and many households maintained some glowing embers in the hearth. If the fire went cold, a child would be sent to a neighbor's with a pail or shovel to fill with live coals. James Boswell, author of The Life of Samuel Johnson, wrote of the consequences of losing one's light:

  About two o'clock in the morning I inadvertently snuffed out my candle, and as my fire was long before black and cold, I was in a great dilemma how to proceed. Downstairs did I softly and silently step into the kitchen. But, alas, there was as little fire there as upon the icy mountains of Greenland. With a tinder box is a light struck every morning to kindle the fire, which is put out at night. But this tinder box I could not see, nor knew where to find. I was now filled with gloomy ideas of the terrors of the night.... I went up to my room, sat quietly until I heard the watchman calling 'past three o'clock'. I then called to him to knock at the door of the house where I lodged. He did so, and I opened to him and got my candle re-lumed without danger.

  Sometimes the lack of a candle could be deadly. Historian Jane Nylander uncovered the record of an "unfortunate man staying at a tavern in New Haven in June 1796 [who] 'was going to bed without a light...[and] opened the cellar door instead of a chamber door, and falling down the cellar steps fractured his Scull, of which he expired the next morning.'" But also the danger of fire from an open flame never ceased. In truth, as cities grew larger, entire districts of tightly packed wooden houses were at the mercy of an overturned lamp, a stray cinder, a child careless with a candle. One eighteenth-century writer noted, "The English dwell and sleep, as it were, surrounded with their funeral piles."

  Such danger might be reason enough to send the children to bed in the dark, but more likely it was done for economy's sake. Before the advent of mineral oils in the nineteenth century, all fuel could also be used for food. John Smeaton, in his account of building the Eddystone Lighthouse off the coast of Plymouth, England, said that he "found it a matter of complaint through the country—that the light keepers had at various times been reduced to the necessity of eating the candles."

  In the worst of times, many saw only by the light of their cooking fires, or by dint of one candle or lamp at the center of a table, which they rarely lit before darkness fell. The poorest people might have no light at all. So a glimmer for a task, for an hour, for supper in winter. Farmers might repair their tools or carve new ax handles by lamplight. Women mended and stitched. It was hardly enough for precise work: "A French Book of Trades in the thirteenth century forbade gold and silversmiths to work [after dark], for 'light at night is insufficient for them to ply their trade well and truly,'" notes historian A. Roger Ekirch. But what constituted "dark" wasn't often clear: "From Easter to Saint-Rémi, tannery workers set the rising and the setting of the sun as the limits of the working day for summer, and for winter, the moment when there was not enough light to distinguish a denier [a small coin] of Tours from a denier of Paris."

  In a time when labor was often ceaseless during the day, the constrictions of the night could be welcome. Accordin
g to Cyril of Jerusalem, "A servant would have had no rest from his masters, had not the darkness necessarily brought a respite. And often after wearying ourselves in the day, how are we refreshed in the night." The church, however, deemed night not only as a time of rest but also as a time for prayer and for the soul's reckoning: "And what [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?" asked Cyril. "And when is our mind most attuned to Psalmody and Prayer? Is it not at night? And when have we often called our own sins to remembrance? Is it not at night?" Beyond rest and prayer, in the dimly lit interiors, in the close and crowded quarters of earlier times, people may have even found a little freedom within the confines of their homes, for the dark affords its own kind of privacy: no one and no thing can be fully seen.

  Still, people devised ways to increase what little light they had. Sometimes they would focus and magnify their lights by setting a water bottle in front of a flame. In European villages, women would gather at one cottage in the evening and position themselves around a raised lamp that had been surrounded with globes of tinted blue water. (Women in cold countries used snow water.) The color, it was said, tempered the glare. Though all kinds of close work was done by such light, this was called a lacemaker's lamp. The workers gathered "in orderly rows," Gertrude Whiting explained, "the best lacemakers on the highest stools nearest the lamp or candle-stand. Thus, we are told, some eighteen workers can be accommodated, the outer row of stools or chairs being lower to catch the falling rays of light shed from the pole-board. This graded arrangement is spoken of as first, second and third lights." Third light would have been particularly ghostly: the women facing the inky backs of their companions, gleaning light from the diffuse rays that fell from above or between those in front of them. It illuminated little more than their hands and work.

  Is it any wonder that in good weather women sat at the door of their homes and sewed, mended, or made lace in broad daylight? Although in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, large windows lightened the interiors of homes and showed up the dirt in the corners as never before—spurring housewives to sweep and scrub all that much harder—rooms were still consumed by shadows. In Vermeer's The Little Street, the inside of a home glimpsed through glass windows appears dark in day, as it does through the open door where a woman in a white cap sits, intent on the white work in her lap. She's framed in whitewash, then in sturdy, centuries-old brickwork, which has settled and cracked and been patched. The high façade makes the Dutch street seem akin to the shallow rock shelters of the last Ice Age, where women—bent over sinew, stone, and bone—also sat in the open, patiently tending to fleeting life.

  2. Time of Dark Streets

  LIGHT—SO PRECIOUS WITHIN—was even rarer on the streets of the cities, towns, and villages of the past, for before the seventeenth century, street lighting was almost nonexistent everywhere in the world. A fourth-century inhabitant of the Syrian city of Antioch claimed, "The light of the sun is succeeded by other lights.... The night with us differs from the day only in the appearance of the light." And geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes that in China, "Hang-chou boasted a vigorous night life along the crowded Imperial way before the Mongols invaded the Sung capital in A.D. 1276." But other Chinese cities were dark except during the New Year and on the emperor's birthday, when torches lined the roads and the skies flared with fireworks. Renaissance Florence had no streetlights, nor did imperial Rome, of which Jérôme Carcopino wrote:

  No oil lamps lighted [the streets], no candles were affixed to the walls; no lanterns were hung over the lintel of the doors, save on festive occasions when Rome was resplendent with exceptional illumination to demonstrate her collective joy, as when Cicero rid her of the Catilinarian plague. In normal times night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger.... Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were drawn across behind the leaves of the doors; the shutters of the flats were closed and the pots of flowers withdrawn from the windows they had adorned.

  In Europe during the Middle Ages, the close of day was unmistakably announced with the clanging and groaning of bells. Bells were always ringing from ramparts and cathedral towers, from the belfries of convents, monasteries, and country churches—to warn of invasions, fires, and thunderstorms; to announce the celebration of marriage, the arrival of royalty, and the impending death of a parishioner; and after death, to solicit prayers for the departed soul. Their sounding shaped time into holy hours—matins, lauds, prime—and marked the ordinary—the start of work, the opening of markets, the respite of noon. Come dusk, the vespers bells rang, calling for the holy office of the lights, when the candles and torches of the churches were lit. Vespers, meaning "evening star," the word itself dying on a silky whisper: hour for prayers of thanksgiving, and for prayers to the Virgin Mary, since people believed that the Annunciation took place in the evening.

  Soon after, the curfew bell tolled, often more than a hundred times. In the early Middle Ages, it sounded just after dusk; in later centuries, especially in winter, it rang several hours after sunset. But always it held an unwavering meaning: in a time before street lighting or organized police forces, the only way to maintain order was to strictly control people's comings and goings, so at curfew all the day's labor stopped. Blacksmiths lay down their bellows, and goldsmiths ceased beating out metal. Trading halted in the markets, and the cries of butchers and fishwives subsided. The sounds of clinking harnesses, creaking wagons, and the plodding tread of oxen decayed into silence as almost everyone—per order of the authorities—returned to their dwellings, locked their doors, and shuttered their windows.

  If inhabitants of fortified cities and towns found themselves beyond the gates at the sound of curfew, they made true haste, since officials, to prevent intruders from entering under the cover of dark, locked the perimeter gates. Anyone caught beyond them risked being fined or shut out for the night. Such a practice persisted in some places even into the eighteenth century: "About half a league from the city [of Geneva]," Jean-Jacques Rousseau attests, "I hear the retreat sounding; I hurry up; I hear the drum being beaten, so I run at full speed: I get there all out of breath, and perspiring; my heart is beating; from far away, I see the soldiers from their lookouts; I run, I scream with a choked voice. It was too late."

  Not only were gates closed; in order to prevent vandals from running freely through the streets, officials laid chains across the roads, "as if it were in tyme of warr." The city of Nuremberg, notes A. Roger Ekirch, "maintained more than four hundred sets [of chains]. Unwound each evening from large drums, they were strung at waist height, sometimes in two or three bands, from one side of a street to the other...[and] Paris officials in 1405 set all the city's farriers to forging chains to cordon off not just streets but also the Seine." In some cities, residents, once home, were required to give their keys over to the authorities: "At night all houses ... are to be locked and the keyes deposited with a magistrate," a Paris decree of 1380 charged. "Nobody may then enter or leave a house unless he can give the magistrate a good reason for doing so." Cooking fires, often the only interior light many could afford, were ordered extinguished soon after the evening meal, since among the innumerable night fears in the huddled wooden-and-thatch world of the Middle Ages was that of conflagration. "Curfew" comes from the Old French covre-feu, meaning "cover fire."

  Yet even with such strict regulations, and in spite of all the tolling bells and clanking chains, the close of day was not always an iron hour. The absolute enforcement of curfew would have been impossible, since the night watch was often all that stood between order and disorder in the dark, and watchmen weren't at their posts voluntarily. In many European cities and large towns, all households were required to contribute a man between the age of eighteen and sixty to the watch, and neither widows nor clergy were excepted from the ordinance: they had to sponsor an eligible man from another household. Unpaid, unarmed (save for a trumpet and banner), and having worked all day as laborers, goldsmiths, or cloth m
akers, the standing watch kept a lookout for fire or invasion at the towers and gates, having climbed to their posts on ladders, "whose feet in many towns were protected by a locked barrier. Thus, the watchers ... would not be tempted—or more precisely would not be able—to abandon their post under cover of darkness. Installed in sentry boxes, suffering in winter from cold and bad weather, they waited more or less patiently for night to pass." A rear watch spent the night patrolling the streets, listening for trouble and questioning anyone found abroad. They had the additional duty of checking on the standing watch to make sure one or more of them hadn't dozed off or returned home.

  All watchmen had the authority to arrest and imprison those out in the night without just cause, though they might be a little lax in the first few hours after curfew, especially in times and places that were relatively free from strife. The taverns, though ordered closed, might have stayed open so workmen could stop in for a drink or two before returning home. In small towns and villages, people visited other households to talk by the light of the hearth. Bakers worked their ovens so they could have bread ready for the break of day. And the night had its own tradesmen who were about then—ragpickers, manure and night soil collectors—with their furtive scrapings and footsteps. But as night deepened, the streets mostly belonged to vandals, footpads, and other thieves, and anyone abroad in the later hours except those with a legitimate purpose—midwives, priests, or doctors called out to emergencies—was regarded as a "nightwalker" and subject to interrogation.