by Jane Brox
The desire and demand for spermaceti and sperm oil would drive the whaling trade well into the nineteenth century. The size of the fleet reached its peak around 1846, when more than seven hundred vessels sailed out of twenty major American ports and a host of smaller ones, and several hundred vessels from other countries also roamed the whaling grounds. The oil and spermaceti brought to port that year were valued at $8 million. Melville himself posed the question as to "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff." There had been an estimated 1.1 million sperm whales in the world's oceans before the hunt for them began in earnest. How many remained in the mid-nineteenth century isn't known, but it's thought that today the somewhat recovered population stands at about 360,000.
Although sperm whales may have been the prized catch, whaling ships continued to take whatever whales they could find. In 1851 more than 10 million gallons of common whale oil—bringing about 45 cents per gallon—also arrived in American ports. The millions of gallons of whale oil and sperm oil circulating the globe meant that light was more readily available to many people—especially those in cities—than it had been in the past. People began to light more household lamps in the evening and leave them lit for a longer time. More light, yes, and unlike the old local oils and tallows, light at a far remove from its grimy source, so people for the first time could distance themselves from the whole endeavor of light's production. Melville's Ishmael said of himself and his companions, "They think that at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers, we are, that is true.... But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage, yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!"
Eighteenth-century whalers suffered their own particular perils, but the seas were dangerous for all sailors. Most navigation tools were rudimentary and the charts imprecise. Once night fell or weather closed in the coast, mariners had few lights to help them steer clear of sandbars, stone reefs, or the debris of old wrecks. What lights there were—often no more than open coal or wood fires on the headlands and burning baskets of pitch or oakum atop long poles—were of limited help, for they barely penetrated the fog and the dark and didn't always stand up to the prevailing winds and storms that battered them. The work of keeping the light alive could be unceasing: on a windy night, an open fire could consume a ton of coal or countless logs. The endless demand for fuel for coastal fires was one of the primary reasons for the deforestation of the island of Anholt off the coast of Denmark.
The smoke-clouded lanterns of the few lighthouses were no better. Their flames—sometimes open to the elements, at best enclosed in glass or horn and magnified with reflectors or convex lenses—were small and unsteady. The lamps, often possessing multiple wicks, had to be constantly snuffed, guarded, fanned, and fed. They were hard to light in the cold, and the keepers—ill supplied, isolated, and miserably paid, themselves barely protected from the wind and rain—might need to place hot coals near the lanterns to prevent the oil from congealing. Despite the best efforts of the keepers, along the British coast alone—the best-lit coast in the world in the early eighteenth century—more than five hundred ships foundered every year.
At times it was lights themselves that sunk ships, for well-intentioned beacons could be deceiving. Almost all of them in the eighteenth century were fixed—there was no system of flashing lights to help distinguish one lighthouse from another as there would be in later times—and although a fixed light could help orient those who knew the waters, it was of little help to someone unsure of his bearings. A ship approaching land after a long, wind-tossed voyage could be far enough off course that the navigator might mistake the light he encountered for a different one farther along the coast. Or a light, being precarious, would go out, and the navigator might find no light where he expected one to be. It was also true that a terrestrial light might appear to be celestial. Pliny the Elder, speaking of seamarks in Roman times, wrote, "The only danger is, that when these fires are thus kept burning without intermission, they may be mistaken for stars, the flames having very much that appearance at a distance."
Lights could also be intentionally deceiving: wreckers intent on stealing washed-up cargo sometimes set a lantern on a dark headland hoping it would be taken for a true seamark, though their usual method, wrote lighthouse historian D. Alan Stevenson, "was to drive an ass bearing 2 lanterns along the shore, to represent a vessel in motion and so lure a ship to destruction among the near rocks and shoals." Wreckers weren't the occasional wayward souls. Historian Bella Bathurst notes, "Many coastal villages staked their livelihoods on the exotic plunder to be found in dead and dying ships; the wreckers saw their lootings as a perk of nautical life, and bitterly resented any attempt to interfere.... The wreckers were furious at the prospect of a safer sea."
It was said that the open flame of the first known lighthouse, the Pharos, could be seen a hundred miles away. Although that is certainly an exaggeration, the Pharos was an impressive structure. Built for the port of Alexandria in the third century B.C., its light—which was intensified and projected by a curved mirror or polished metal disk—was housed in the cupola of a rectangular marble structure that rose about four hundred feet above the low-lying Egyptian shore. At the time, only the pyramids stood taller. By comparison, eighteenth-century shore lights were far more modest, and on a clear night a well-maintained beacon might be seen five, six, maybe seven miles away, which was far short of some of the worst ocean perils. For instance, the rocks of the Eddystone reef, which lie nine miles off the south coast of England, extend for half a mile, and nearly all of them are submerged, the most prominent rising only three feet above water during the highest tides. According to Bathurst,
The rust-colored gneiss is as resilient as diamonds, and the currents that surround it send up abrupt spouts of water even on the calmest days. It is thought of as a bad-tempered place, full of sulks and strange moods, and by the sixteenth century its reputation for destruction had already spread well beyond Cornwall.... Merchant captains were so alarmed by the prospect of being wrecked on the Eddystone that they often ran themselves aground on the Channel Islands or the northern French coast trying to avoid it.
It was at Eddystone, on rock fully exposed to the sea, that the first offshore light, engineered and built by Henry Winstanley, was completed in 1698. Winstanley secured the structure by driving twelve iron rods into the highest rock on the reef. He then surrounded the rods with stone. Glaziers, smiths, masons, and carpenters made trips from Plymouth almost daily when the weather held. They moved tons of material from their boats to the rock even in rough seas and accomplished their work as the tides rose and fell around them. D. Alan Stevenson wrote:
At midsummer the party decided to lodge in the tower, hoping to save the time and labour spent in passage between Plymouth and the reef. But during the first night a storm of exceptional severity for the season arose unexpectedly and no boat could approach to take them off. With little shelter ... they were marooned in the roofless tower for 11 days [and finally] got ashore in a half-drowned condition. When the weather improved, undeterred by the unhappy experience, they returned to complete the lighthouse and lighted it on the 14th November.... In the following months the waves over-topped the lantern and Winstanley saw that he must raise it.
The next year, Winstanley built an almost entirely new structure, forty feet taller than the first. His second light lasted three years before severe winter weather damaged it. When Winstanley returned to the rock again to oversee repairs, he, his workmen, and the keeper were caught on the reef during one of the fiercest storms ever recorded along that coast. After the
weather cleared, there was no sign of any man, and all that was left of the light were a few twisted pieces of metal—remnants of the rods that had tied the tower to the rock.
The third tower at Eddystone—a timber sheath packed with stone, built by John Rudyard—stood for fifty years until the wooden lantern that housed the flame caught fire. The light from the conflagration, seen from the English shore, reached farther than the beacon ever had. According to Stevenson,
Quickly the fire got a grip of the tower, the flames extended downwards over their heads and drove the men from room to room until they found shelter in a cleft in the Rock ... while burning embers and red-hot bolts rained down.... One of the lightkeepers ... declared that when looking upward during their descent of the burning tower, a quantity of molten lead had fallen into his mouth and down his throat. He experienced no pain and a physician who examined him did not believe his tale, but he died twelve days later.... The dreadful experience at the Eddystone so terrified another of the lightkeepers that on reaching land he ran off and was not heard of again.
Yet a fourth tower was planned for the reef, this time designed by engineer John Smeaton, who based his plans for it on the shape of an English oak tree, believing that a flared base would give the tower greater stability. The innovative design would be the model for lighthouse construction for more than a century. Smeaton built his light entirely of stone, using granite for the foundation and exterior and softer Portland stone for the interior. Masons in the coastal city of Plymouth began cutting one-ton stones in August 1756, and the following summer they began to build the light. Stevenson wrote:
Fenders fixed on the east side of the Rock prevented boats from fretting against it. Shears and a windlass were fixed for raising the stones directly from a boat and tested by hoisting above the Rock a heavy longboat complete with crew.... Sunday 12 th June saw the first stone, weighing 2 tons fitted in position and bedded with mortar.... Next day the masons set the other 3 stones of the 1st course. On the 15th a heavy swell carried away 5 of the 13 stones ... but the masons at Plymouth working day and night, cut duplicates in 2 days.
They sometimes worked into the summer nights, seeing only by the flickerings of lighted links, or torches, and still it took more than three years to finish the tower, which weighed more than a thousand tons and stood eighty feet above the rocks. First lit in October 1759, the light shining from Smeaton's tower was no different, or stronger, than that in the previous Eddystone lights: a chandelier of twenty-four candles (each about the size of a contemporary dinner-table candle), which the keeper lowered every half-hour for snuffing, then raised again into place. If the glass was clean and the light well snuffed, it could be seen for seven miles: "very strong and bright to the naked eye, much like a star of the fourth magnitude." It stood on the reef for 120 years.
Traffic on the seas increased markedly during the eighteenth century, and the story of the Eddystone light illustrates the lengths to which people would go to achieve even a small glimmer of illumination. They had no hope for more than that, really. In spite of the widespread slaughter of whales, the stink of try-pots, and the complex process of making spermaceti candles, eighteenth-century light wasn't appreciably brighter than what could be had in Roman times, for lamp technology had hardly changed, in part because not even the scientists of the time understood the nature of the flame they were gazing into at night. What would eventually bring about the first measurable increase in the brightness of lamps occurred a world away from the oil-slicked decks of whaling ships, in the laboratories of Europe.
At the time of the French and American revolutions, scientists adhered to the belief that all matter contained phlogiston, a flammable substance that was imparted to the air during combustion. "So long as the air can receive this substance from the combustible matter so long the body will continue burning," noted Professor Samuel Williams, who lectured at Harvard at the time.
As soon as the Air is saturated and can receive no more of the Phlogiston, the combustion must cease for no more Phlogiston can escape or be thrown out from the burning body. And therefore when fresh air is admitted to receive Phlogiston, the combustion will again take place.—And hence are derived the phrases of phlogisticated and dephlogisticated air. By phlogisticated air is intended air which is charged or loaded with Phlogiston, and by dephlogisticated air is meant Air which is free from Phlogiston; or which does not contain this principle or element of inflammability.
Quite a few scientists experimented with combustion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, most notably Joseph Priestley in England and Antoine Lavoisier in France. Eventually, Priestley identified oxygen in air, although he continued to hold fast to the phlogiston theory. It was Lavoisier, working in Paris, who built on Priestley's understanding of oxygen and concluded that rather than imparting a substance to the air, burning materials were fueled by oxygen in the air.
François-Pierre Ami Argand, a Swiss scientist who worked briefly in Lavoisier's laboratory, made use of his and Priestley's findings to create the first significant improvement in the lamp. The most essential component of Argand's design was a tubular wick, which he fed between two metal cylinders. Openings at the base of the cylinders allowed air to reach the flame from both inside and outside the wick. The increased oxygen created a more robust flame than in previous lamps, and it also burned at a higher temperature, making for a cleaner fire in which the carbon particles were almost completely consumed. An Argand lamp produced very little soot and smoke, and there was little need for snuffing. Later, Argand enclosed the wick in a chimney—perforated metal, then glass—which not only protected the light but also created an updraft that increased airflow to the flame. He also designed a mechanism for raising and lowering the wick. According to some accounts, his lamp shone more brightly than six tallow candles. Others claimed that if it was fed by spermaceti oil, it produced about ten times the illumination of a customary lamp, and the flame—rather than being the usual orange—was "very white, lively and almost dazzling, far better than the light of any lamp proposed before."
This light born of experiment, of the investigations of a handful of men in private quarters, seemed so immediately bright that to some it was more than the human eye could bear. One account suggests that "as the light emitted by [these lamps] is frequently too vivid for weak or irritable eyes, we would recommend the use of a small screen, which should be proportionate to the disk of the flame, and be placed, at one side of the light, in order to shade it from the reader's eye, without excluding its effect from others, or darkening the room." And, after so many centuries of dreaming of more light, people did shield the flame, with mica, horn, and decorative glass. These were the first lampshades.
The Argand lamp had its challenges. Though efficient, the large wick and increased oxygen required much more oil than previous lamps, which not only made the lamp costly to run but also meant that Argand couldn't count on capillary action alone to feed the flame, since the viscous animal and vegetable oils of the time rose so slowly up the wick. To solve this problem, Argand designed an oil reservoir adjacent to and higher than the burner, which used gravity to feed fuel to the lamp, but the reservoir partially obscured the light and cast a shadow.
"Being 'the thing,' the Argand or Quinquet lamps [as they were known in France] were usually made up in bronze, silver, porcelain, crystal, and other expensive materials that kept them well out of reach of the ordinary purse," observes historian Marshall Davidson. And it wasn't just the cost of the lamps that kept those of meager means from buying them; the quantity of oil required stopped them as well. Brilliance still came at a price, and they knew it. "The modest versions that Yankee tinsmiths were advertising as early as 1789 did not win any broad popularity," notes Davidson. "Absurd as it sounds they gave too much light. That is to say, it was impracticable to make them so small that they had no greater flame than that of a single candle and ... anything that burned more oil, proportionately, whatever its brilliance and efficiency, was une
conomical for ordinary domestic purposes."
For mariners, the Argand lamp was invaluable. A lighthouse equipped with one magnified by a parabolic reflector not only gave many times the light of the old lighthouse lamps, but the light proved steadier and more dependable. The adoption of the Argand lamp for seamarks, along with an increase in lighthouse construction, meant, according to Stevenson, that "the single most powerful light of 1819 exceeded the combined powers of all the navigation lights of 1780." And perhaps the greatest innovation, one used even now, was still to come.
In 1822 French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel designed a hive of light. His Fresnel lens—a lamp comprising concentric wicks set in bull's-eye glass and surrounded by rings of glass prisms—bent and concentrated light into a bright, narrow beam. The largest of his lenses, meant to aid ships along the most treacherous and fogbound coasts, was built of a thousand prisms and stood more than ten feet high. When placed one hundred feet or so above sea level—high enough to compensate for the curvature of the earth—its beam could be seen for twenty miles. Fresnel produced his lens in six different sizes; the smallest, a sixth-order lens used in harbors and bays, was a mere twelve inches in diameter and stood eighteen inches high.
