Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  Throughout the nineteenth century, in addition to installing Fresnel lenses and replacing old oil lamps with more dependable electric lights or gaslights, lighthouses would begin to adopt a system of flashing lights to distinguish one seamark from the next. Mariners unfamiliar with the coast could get their bearings even when daymarks—the painted patterns on lighthouse towers—disappeared with the sun. And lightships, light buoys, and sound signals such as whistles, bells, and foghorns frequently marked the more treacherous shoals.

  Still, shipwrecks were a given well into the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, there were twelve working Coast Guard stations along fifty miles of the south shore of Cape Cod, and lantern-carrying surfmen patrolled the shores, scanning the waters for ships in distress. "Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see the coming and going of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a great northeaster, now through August quiet ... the beach traced and retraced with footprints that vanish in the distances," observed Henry Beston, who chronicled life on "the Great Beach of Cape Cod."

  There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the worst.... The big three-masted schooner Montclair stranded at Orleans and went to pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.... Older folk will tell you of the Jason, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic Castagna and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.

  Any mariner of the eighteenth century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles, or that such a light would not be essential to seeing a ship safely past the rocks; that there would come a time when navigators hardly needed to scan the horizon, for they would get their bearings from a prism of information—radar, GPS, and electronic charts. Data would become the new lamp.

  4. Gaslight

  AT THE TURN OF the nineteenth century, most people still saw by the same ancient light as always, though that would change in the decades to come. Not only would brighter, cleaner mineral fuels replace tallow and whale oil, but the story of human light would cease to be that of candles and lamps alone. It would become a story that defied linearity, one composed of inseparable strands of invention and improvement—gaslight, the safety match, electric arc lamps, kerosene, Edison's incandescent bulb, Tesla's alternating current—and as new forms of illumination overtook the old, they competed with one another in ways that stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry.

  In the first decades of the nineteenth century, gaslight led this transformation, at least for city dwellers and factory workers in England. The gas fuel of the time was a by-product of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke (the "charcoal of coal"), and coke production was well established in England, whose economy had been based on coal for more than a century. The English preferred burning hard, light, porous coke in both their home hearths and industrial furnaces. Unlike bituminous coal, which in its raw state burns with a smoky yellow flame, coke burns with a uniform and intense heat that produces no sparks and little soot or smoke. "It seldom needs the application of the poker—that specific for the ennui of Englishmen," noted one writer of the time.

  Coke manufacture involved shoveling coal into vessels called retorts, which were set in large ovens and heated—a process that dissipated the tar and gases present in the coal. During the eighteenth century, coke manufacturers captured and sold the tar, which was used for caulking ships, but they released the coal gas into the air and let it go to waste. Although it had long been known that such gas would burn with a luminous flame and scientists had experimented with igniting bladders filled with coal gas and other flammable substances, until the turn of the nineteenth century, no one had developed a practical application for it.

  In 1801 French engineer Philippe Lebon gave the first public demonstration of functional gaslight when he displayed, in Paris, what he called the thermolampe. This furnace housed a retort that fed distilled flammable gas—likely wood gas—to a condenser, then through a series of pipes to an outlet. Lebon imagined that his thermolampe would be used for both lighting and heating a household: "The inflammable gas is ready to extend everywhere the most sensible heat and softest lights, either joined or separated at our pleasure. In a moment we can make our lights pass from one chamber to another.... No sparks, coals or soot will incommode us any longer. Neither can cinders ashes coals or wood, render our apartments black or dirty or require the least care." He outfitted his own home with a thermolampe and sold admission for viewing it in an effort to arouse public interest. Many were curious, few were persuaded, and the thermolampe went no further.

  Gaslight found its first sustained application as light alone in British machine shops and cloth factories, where the limits of tallow and whale oil were keenly felt. This was especially true in the winter, when the working day continued long after darkness fell, and the wavering light cast by such illuminants made precision work difficult. To light their workrooms, some large factories needed hundreds, even thousands, of tallow candles or whale oil lamps. Each required individual attention—lighting, snuffing, replacing, filling, cleaning—never mind the stink, the irritating smoke, and the heat. In addition, any simple accident could mean disaster. Some owners of large factories so feared a conflagration that they kept their own fire engines on hand. Such light was costly, too. According to historian M. E. Falkus,

  All factories ... used considerable quantities of oil and tallow in winter months. In 1806, one of the largest of Manchester's spinning factories, McConnel & Kennedy, burned candles for at least eight hours on the shortest days and averaged four hours lighting a day for six months of the year.... The annual cost of lighting McConnel & Kennedy's factory in 1806 was about £750. This firm burned an average 1,500 candles each night for 25 weeks in the year and consumed more than 15,000 lbs. of tallow.

  William Murdoch, chief engineer at Boulton and Watt—one of most prominent firms in England and builder of the first steam locomotive—experimented with coal gas at the same time Lebon was developing his thermolampe. Although others were also considering how to use coal gas, Murdoch achieved the first real success. His system differed from Lebon's only in its scale: he fitted retorts with pipes that carried distilled gas to huge reservoirs or storage tanks, called gasometers, and fitted the gasometers with outflow pipes, which could send gas, when needed, through mains and then smaller pipes to outlets.

  Murdoch lit his own cottage for his initial experiment, and then in 1802 he built a larger system for Boulton and Watt's forge in their Soho, Birmingham, factory. Its success led him to expand the system to include the workshops in Soho. In 1805 he began construction of a gaslight system for the Phillips & Lee cotton mill in Manchester, which he completed several years later:

  It was estimated that more than 900 burners produced light equivalent to 2500 tallow candles burning on average for 2 hours on each working day. The factory contained eleven gasometers, six retorts, and more than two miles of pipes. Total expenditure on the plant was in excess of £5000, the cost of gas was about £600, allowing for depreciation of the equipment and the sale of the coke manufactured as a by-product.... The equivalent light produced by tallow candles would have cost an estimated £2000 a year.

  These very first gaslight systems probably didn't significantly improve the quality of light in the workrooms. Most observers of the time claimed that one gas burner gave a light three to six times brighter than a common oil lamp, but they had no accurate way of measuring the difference, only a comparison of shadows, which at the time was explained this way:

  Suppose it w
ere required to know how many candles, of a given size, were equal to a patent [Argand] lamp:—place the lamp at one end of the mantle-piece [sic], and the candles at the other; hold up the snuffer-tray, a book, or any other object of which the shadow can be received on a sheet of white paper against the opposite wall; the object must be held in a line with the middle of the mantelpiece: the lamp will produce one shadow and the candles another; when the shadows are equally dark the lights are equal; the darkest shadow will be produced by the strongest light.

  To its advantage, a gas flame could be larger than an oil lamp's because it wasn't restricted by the size of the wick, and under ideal circumstances coal gas's combustion was almost complete: it burned with a whiter, clearer flame (in contrast to the reddish orange glow of most simple oil lamps and candles). Yet in the beginning, gaslight was far from perfect. There were few filters for the coal gas, which contained both hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, so a foul smell accompanied the light. (Although Murdoch's system for Phillips & Lee filtered the gas through lime, which absorbed the hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, this did not entirely purify it.) The gas itself was of uneven quality, its delivery was unreliable, and the equipment was crude. As William O'Dea notes, "The burners were simply iron tubes with holes pierced in them; and apart from the variable and often poor illuminating quality of [the] gas produced ... the burners quickly corroded and, even when new, over-cooled the flame." Still, the jets didn't require individual attention, and there was nothing to spill or tip. And although gas left a sooty residue, it was cleaner, too.

  If gaslight was cleaner, the grime of getting the coal to produce it rivaled that of the hunt for whale oil, as a descent into any British coal mine in the early 1800s would attest. According to a writer of the time,

  Clean and orderly [the miners] coolley [sic] precipitate themselves into a black, smoking, and bottomless-looking crater, where you would think it almost impossible human lungs could play, or blood dance through the heart. At nearly the same moment you see others coming up, as jetty as the object of the search, drenched and tired. I have stood in a dark night, near the mouth of a pit, lighted by a suspended grate, filled with flaring coals ... the pit emitting a smoke as dense as the chimney of a steam-engine; the men, with their sooty and grimy faces ... their sparkling eyes.

  Except for that suspended grate at the mouth of the shaft, pitmen would have had almost nothing to see by. They used their candles sparingly, since methane gas—known as firedamp and present in many mines—could be ignited by an open flame. Still, they needed some illumination, both to extract coal and to check on their surroundings in order to spot structural weaknesses in the shafts, so they risked candlelight after an overman checked the workings for gas. First, the overman lit a trimmed and clean candle on the floor and placed his palm in front of it so that he saw only the spire of the flame. Then he raised the candle slowly toward the ceiling of the mine, where firedamp—lighter than air—collected. If it was present, the tip of the flame would turn blue. "This spire increases in size and receives a deeper tinge of blue, as it rises through an increased proportion of inflammable gas, till it reaches the firing point," explained an account of the time. "But the experienced collier knows accurately enough all the varieties of shew (as it is called) upon the candle, and it is very rarely fired upon, excepting in cases of sudden discharges of inflammable gas."

  In the best circumstances, when the overman found firedamp, he left the mine and then—so as to make it safer for work—ignited the gas by lowering a lighted candle or coal-filled iron basket down the shaft. But if he detected firedamp far inside the workings, he had no choice but to send down a man to ignite it: "Clad from head to foot in rags soaked in water, [the man] would crawl along the underground way holding in front of him a long pole at the end of which was a lighted candle. When the explosion occurred he would fling himself, face downward, on the floor, and so, with good fortune, he might escape the flame which shot along the roof above him." The man was sometimes called a penitent.

  In spite of such efforts, miners thought of explosions, and the human injuries and deaths that accompanied them, as inevitable. The history of the mines is also the history of the dead, the burned, and the injured. As one account attests, "Everything in the way of the blast was thrown out at the mouth to the estimated height of 200 yards in the air. Most of the pitmen, having just in time discovered the danger, were drawn up, and escaped unhurt; but some boys, and one man, who were left behind, lost their lives." Another account tells of four men who

  were about three hundred yards from the shaft, when the foul air took fire. In a moment it tore the wall from end to end; and burning on till it came to the shaft, it then burst and went off like a large cannon. The men instantly fell on their faces, or they would have been burned to death in a few moments. One of them, who once knew the love of God (Andrew English), began crying aloud for mercy; but in a very short time his breath was stopped. The other three crept on their hands and knees, till two got to the shaft and were drawn up; but one of them died in a few minutes. John M'Combe was drawn up next, burned from head to foot but rejoicing and praising God. They then went down for Andrew; whom they found senseless: the very circumstance which saved his life. For losing his senses, he lay flat on the ground, and the greatest part of the fire went over him.

  Miners and mine owners were always looking for alternatives to candles. Although miners' candles were exceedingly small—up to sixty to the pound, for it was believed a small candle might prevent the ignition of firedamp—everything thought of as a substitute for them provided less light than even those slim solitary tapers. It's almost inconceivable now to imagine how slight and shifting was the illumination miners worked by so far below the earth's surface. One device, a flint mill, required boys to accompany the miners down the shafts. Each boy worked a mill, which might be strapped to his leg or hung from his neck. It was made of a steel disk set in a small steel frame and a handle attached to a spur wheel, which turned the disk. The boy held a piece of flint against the disk as he rotated it so as to produce streams of sparks for the miner to work by. The sparks were usually too cool to set off the gas, but not always.

  And if miners couldn't use even a mill, they had little else to rely on for illumination. When a flint mill at the Wallsend Colliery caused an explosion that killed nine miners, "work was continued in the shaft without it and with the greatest difficulty. For some time it was performed in total darkness, aided only by light reflected from the surface by means of a mirror during periods of sunshine." Perhaps the strangest form of light was used in the Tyne mines, known to be "gassy" or "fiery." There colliers "sometimes tried to carry on their work by the feeble light of phosphorous and putrescent fish."

  The first practical miners' safety lamps were developed around 1815, and the one devised by Sir Humphry Davy, later head of the Royal Society in London, proved to be the most popular. Davy enclosed a flame within a wire mesh cylinder, which distributed the fire's heat and prevented the air beyond the lamp from reaching the ignition temperature of firedamp. Although his lamp was quickly put into wide use, it didn't slow the number of mine deaths. Because of the mesh, the Davy lamp shed only about one-sixth the light of a common taper, so miners often continued to work by candlelight as well. The use of safety lamps also encouraged men to work deeper in the mines and open up more fiery seams. As a result, the mines became even more dangerous. The inventors of safety lamps, one mining historian suggests, "had provided the miner with a weapon of defense: armed with it he was led forward to meet fresh perils. They had sought to bring security of life: they achieved an increase in the output of coal."

  By the time Davy developed his safety lamp, an increase in the output of coal had become essential. Not only was the Industrial Revolution speeding up, but coal gas possessed an increasing value. In addition to illuminating the workrooms in factories, gas was illuminating streets and shops and homes in the city of London. Bringing gaslight beyond the factories had required th
e sustained effort of its promoters, who had to overcome opposition from whale oil and tallow interests and the skepticism of some prominent scientists. Sir Humphry Davy himself thought the idea so absurd that he asked "if it were intended to take the dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer." Five years after Murdoch successfully lit the Soho forge, gas streetlamps made their first modest appearance. In 1807 a section of Pall Mall was outfitted with lamps to celebrate the king's birthday. It would be another five years before German immigrant and entrepreneur Frederick Albert Winsor (born Friedrich Albrecht Winzer) established the world's first gas lighting company, the Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company in London.

  Winsor knew of Lebon's thermolampe and envisioned the home system writ large for an entire neighborhood. As Wolfgang Schivelbush notes, "Winsor was not the original inventor of gas lighting.... But he established the concept that allowed gas lighting to make the transition from individual to general use: the idea of supplying consumers of gas from a central production site by means of gas mains." Winsor's company, with its single gasometer, delivered gas for street lighting, commercial establishments, and wealthy homeowners in Westminster, Southwark, and the surroundings, including Westminster Bridge. Its brilliance and relative cleanliness was immediately apparent and appealing. Gaslight, it was claimed, shed "a brightness clear as summer's noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight.... Those who have been used only to the brilliancy of oil and candle-light, can have no adequate idea of the effect of an illumination by gas. It so completely penetrates the whole atmosphere, and at the same time is so genial to the eyesight, that it appears as natural and pure as daylight, and it sheds also a warmth as purifying to the air as cheering to the spirits."