Chapter 36: Let There Be Light!
Without advancements in artificial light, much of the economic development and material improvement of the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been possible. So, in the days before electric lighting was possible, the people of the time needed to come up with alternatives. And innovators from Germany, France, the UK, and the modern-day US and Canada figured out other ways to illuminate the world around them.
Sources for this episode include:
Beard, Mary. “The dangerous streets of ancient Rome.” BBC History Magazine. April 2015. https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/the-dangerous-streets-of-ancient-rome/
Irwin, Emily. “The Spermaceti Candle and the American Whaling Industry.” https://www.eiu.edu/historia/2012Irwin.pdf
Johnson, Steve. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Penguin Random House. 2014.
Leahy, Richard. Literary Illumination: The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth Century. University of Wales Press. 2018.
Luckiesh, Matthew. Artificial Light: Its Influence upon Civilization. The Century Co. 1920.
“Philippe Lebon. French Scientist.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 1998. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philippe-Lebon
Tomory, Leslie. “Gaslight, Distillation, and the Industrial Revolution.” History of Science; an annual review of literature, research and teaching. 49(165):395–424. December 2011.
“William Murdoch.” Undiscovered Scotland. https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usbiography/m/williammurdoch.html
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes for the transcript are available to Patreon supporters. To become one, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to sign up.
Here’s a little something from Steven Johnson’s 2014 book, How We Got to Now:
“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 the 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.”
Fans of ancient Roman history are probably aware that, in those days in the eternal city, you did not want to be outdoors at night. If you were going out for dinner, you needed to eat early and get home before the sun set. Otherwise you might easily get lost in the near-pitch-black, winding hodgepodge of city streets. Muggers would lurch in the shadows.
As the satirist Juvenal noted around 100 AD:
“There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night; you may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner without having made your will… Yet however reckless the fellow may be, however hot with wine and young blood, he gives a wide berth to one whose scarlet cloak and long retinue of attendants, with torches and brass lamps in their hands, bid him keep his distance. But to me, who am wont to be escorted home by the moon, or by the scant light of a candle he pays no respect.”
And night would get darker still! You see, the Romans (in their wisdom), used oil lamps – a concept that had come out of the Fertile Crescent with olive oil, thanks to the domestication of olive trees. (Shout out Chapter 1!)
But then, in the appropriately named “Dark Ages”, oil lamps fell out of use, at least in Europe. Besides good ole’ fires, the only source of artificial lighting came from candles. And these were not the mass-produced or artisanal scented candles we have today. Aristocrats could afford beeswax candles, but most people had to rely on tallow candles.
Made from animal fats, tallow candles could produce an acceptable amount of light for Medieval needs, but they created a thick smoke and smelled absolutely horrible. And while some people could afford to buy their candles from specialist candle makers, most folks made their own candles at home as part of the normal chores.
But it was a time-intensive chore, without much pay-off. In 1743, the president of Harvard University wrote in his diary that he’d spent the previous two days producing 78 pounds worth of tallow candles. They lasted him all of two months. Today we think of reading by candlelight as a quaint activity. But before the Industrial Revolution, it was a luxury which most people couldn’t afford.
And the limited light would really limit your workday, wouldn’t it? Especially in the winter months. Daylight would have been cherished. And it’s difficult to imagine modern, industrial capitalism taking root without a solution to the light problem. Remember how in Chapter 5 I talked about the early textile mills running two 12-hour shifts?
The fact is, the advance of industrialization required people to figure out how illuminate the world around them.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 36: Let There Be Light!
---
Before we get started, I have a couple of notes to share with you.
First of all, if you are a new listener – perhaps a listener who discovered this podcast via Pax Britannica – welcome! I hope you find the Industrial Revolutions informative and entertaining. Now, I do recommend that you listen in chronological order. That means going back to Chapter 1 from earlier in 2019. Most podcast apps allow you to change the settings to listen to episodes in order from old to new.
If you want to find out more about this podcast, please visit at www.IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com. You can also follow along on social media. We’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram under the handle @IndRevPod. That’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D.
Second, today is #ThankYouPatrons Day – the special Patreon holiday in which content creators like me thank their Patreon supporters. And to celebrate, I want to take a moment to recognize each and every person who supports the Industrial Revolutions on Patreon.
Brian Long, David Zilberberg, Ephemeral vonHinterland, John Bartlett, Kara DiDomizio, Leonard Buckner, Peg Broker, Rasmus, Tara Carlson, and Walter Torres: Thank you. Your monthly contributions make this podcast possible.
If you weren’t mentioned, but would like to become a Patreon supporter, please go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to join. That link is also in the episode notes for this episode. Thanks again.
---
The year is 1712. The place? The island of Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod in the British-American colony of Massachusetts Bay. A powerful storm – a nor’easter – has blown a ship far out to sea. That’s when the ship’s captain, Christopher Hussey, saw the great beast of the North Atlantic – the sperm whale. Somehow, he managed to harpoon the creature, bring it to shore, and change the world.
At least that’s the legend. It’s probably the story he told people. It’s more likely the whale simply washed ashore during the storm and Hussey later took credit for it.
Either way, the locals came out the next day to look at the giant ocean mammal. They dissected it, including its massive head. Inside, they found a cavity above the brain, filled with a white, oily substance – spermaceti.
Important to the whales either for buoyancy or echolocation – or perhaps both – spermaceti also has many human uses. And in the 30-plus years after the dissection at Nantucket, people started figuring out some of those uses. It could be used in soaps, water-proofing substances, paints, and more.
But the two most important applications were in machine lubricants – particularly for small mechanical clocks, making the first practical pocket watches possible – and for artificial lighting.
It’s super unclear who invented the spermaceti candle. (Well, more like re-invented it – the Romans actually invented it first.) It may have been one Jacob Rodriques Rivera, a Jewish Portuguese immigrant to Rhode Island in the early 18th Century. Or it may have been one Benjamin Crabb, a resident of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, who tried getting an early version of a patent for it in 1748. It’s more likely these two guys were simply manufacturing spermaceti candles and neither invented it.
Whoever the mystery man or woman was, the spermaceti candle was on the scene in New England by 1743. It was more difficult to produce than a tallow candle – you couldn’t make one at home very easily – but it was so much better. Candles made from spermaceti lasted longer, burned a much stronger, whiter light, and didn’t produce the same kind of disgusting smoke.
After the spermaceti was retrieved from the whale’s head, the whalers would send it to a candle manufacturer. The manufacturer would boil it to remove any impurities. Then the spermaceti would be placed in barrels and stored in an unheated shed during the winter months to allow it to fully harden. From there it would be removed, put in bags, and pressed to get some more of the oil out. After a few more months of storage, this process would be repeated, over and over. After several years following the whale’s killing, the manufacturer would have a hard, waxy substance – brown, yellow, or grey in color – ready to shape into candles.
The process was long and cumbersome, which meant the final product would be fairly expensive. Not everyone would be able to afford spermaceti candles. As the late historian, Marshall B. Davidson, put it:
“To the ordinary American colonist, bright lighting simply was not worth the candle. The need of more light, that is, was secondary to the cost and inconvenience of providing it. Enough light for the page of a book or a section of needlework was all that was asked. Anything further, such as lighting an entire room, was an enterprise that provoked comment.”
But those who could afford spermaceti candles absolutely loved them, including a few of America’s founding fathers. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin bought some and wrote how they “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.” George Washington, meanwhile, estimated he spent about $15,000 (in modern terms) on spermaceti candles in one year.
By the 1780s, more efficient means of lighting with spermaceti were being developed. In 1784, a Genevan scientist named Ami Argand invented a new lamp with a tubular wick, a double-tubed burner, and a glass chimney – the Argand lamp. This design was an enormous improvement over traditional oil lamps because of the glass chimney. It both protected the flame from drafts while increasing the supply of air, improving combustion. Additional improvements came with the Carcel lamp in 1800 and the moderator lamp in 1836.
Demand for spermaceti was rising, and it was inevitable that more people were going to go whale hunting. And from the mid-18th Century to the mid-19th Century, that’s exactly what happened.
Sperm whaling soon spread from New England up to Canada, to West Africa, to the South Atlantic, and to the South Pacific. Whalers came from every corner of the globe, willing to do the absurdly dangerous and grueling job during this age of economic expansion. They’d sail out to a good whaling spot and get in smaller whale boats – usually about 10 men to a boat – to do the bloody deed.
Harpooning a whale was a difficult process that took hours. In fact, that difficulty forced harpoon makers to improve their products, with new materials and designs to more efficiently kill the whales.
After the whale was killed, the men would need to carve a hole in its head – while it was floating – and climb inside the cavity above its brain. There they would spend days crawling around inside the rotting carcass, scraping out the spermaceti.
Thousands of men would lose their lives whaling. The most infamous case was the 1820 sinking of the Essex – a 20-man whaling ship from Nantucket, first launched in 1799. While the ship roamed the South Pacific, the hunted sperm whale became the hunter. It attacked, ramming the hull of the ship and then destroying the bow. The crew was forced to abandon it and make their way back to land in the whale boats. They were about 2,000 miles from the shore of South America. They starved and went thirsty, and eventually resorted to cannibalism, eating their dead shipmates.
Three decades later, the story inspired Herman Melville to write the first great American novel: Moby Dick.
In just a little more than a hundred years, homo sapiens slaughtered approximately 300,000 sperm whales, extracting perhaps as much as 1 million tons of spermaceti oil. And it is very likely that the species would have soon gone extinct, had it not been for new innovations that were starting to take off in the mid-19th Century. In one of history’s great environmental twists, it was gases – derived from fossil fuels – which would save the whales, and just in the nick of time.
---
Robert Boyle, Georg Stahl, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Black, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley – we’ve heard their names before throughout the course of this podcast. Their works in the field of chemistry brought us a whole new understanding about the invisible world that surrounds us – the elements of the air: Gasses.
And just like John Roebuck and Nicolas Leblanc did with chemicals, European industrialists were beginning to make practical applications of these advancements in chemistry. They were going to use gasses to create light.
Among the first was a Frenchman named Phillipe Le Bon. He’s sort of an enigmatic character who began his career as an engineer in rural, northern France – primarily working on steam engines – before he was made professor of mechanics at the School of Bridges and Highways in Paris.
In 1797, he began working with gasses and, by 1799, he was patenting a new invention, what he called a “thermolampe.” It was a rather large lighting system. An oven would be filled with wood, adjoining a furnace. The fuel in the furnace would heat the wood and, from it, distill a gas. That gas would then move up a chamber and up a chimney. A flame would then be placed above the chimney, creating a large, steady gas flame. (He later introduced an electric spark to light the flame over the chimney.)
He exhibited the invention in Paris in 1801, renting a house and outfitting every room, and the garden, with gas lighting. He charged the public a small fee to look around. His hope was to use this exhibition to launch a citywide street lighting scheme. The government, however, concluded that such an idea would be way too expensive and passed up on the opportunity.
That being said, Napoleon seemed to like the idea, and he asked Le Bon to prepare a public lighting display for his 1804 coronation as emperor. And then this is where things get weird. The night of the coronation, with his artificial lighting on full display, Le Bon was murdered – stabbed to death.
No one really knows why. But according to legend – or rumor, perhaps – it was an assassination ordered by Napoleon. Apparently, the new emperor had a collection of wigs for his head, a collection that went up in flames thanks to one of Le Bon’s thermolampes. In a fit of rage, Napoleon directed his goons to kill the inventor.
But who knows?
The other key figure in the development of gas lighting was the so-called “third man” at the British steam engine company Boulton & Watt – the Scottish engineer William Murdoch.
Okay, Murdoch has come up quite a few times now, but we’ve never given him the full biographical treatment. Now it’s time.
Born in the parish of Old Cumnock, Ayrshire, in 1754, Murdoch was the son of a tenant and millwright at a local oatmeal mill. Between his father’s mechanical experience, the comparatively excellent 18th Century Scottish education system he benefited from, and his own exceptional skills in mathematics and the natural sciences, Murdoch was exactly the kind of person you’d expect to become a great inventor.
At the age of 23, Murdoch left home and walked all the way from Scotland to the city of Birmingham in England, 300 miles away. He made the journey to ask Matthew Boulton and James Watt – now building steam engines as a partnership at the Soho Foundry – for a job. He was hired and quickly rose in esteem at the company.
By 1779, just a couple years after he arrived in Birmingham, Boulton & Watt sent Murdoch down to Cornwall to supervise their steam engines which were draining the local tin and copper mines. He settled in the town of Redruth, where he became neighbors with our old friend, Richard Trevithick. (Shout out Chapter 30!)
Throughout the 1780s, Murdoch was responsible for many of the technological breakthroughs that made the Watt steam engine so impressive – critically, the sun-and-planet gear. He also experimented with using the steam engine in transportation, building a locomotive prototype and consulting with William Symington on his steamboats. He even experimented with steam-powered cannons and guns.
Also during these years, Murdoch began to experiment more and more with chemistry. He made a number of minor breakthroughs in the production of chemicals, including new ways of making dyes, paints, waterproofs, and iron fillings. And, like other scientists in Cornwall, he was experimenting with pneumatics – gasses.
In 1792, from his home in Redruth, Murdoch began a new chemistry experiment. He was distilling gas from coal and moving it through pipes. The gas would leave the open ends of the pipes and Murdoch would burn it. But this was too wasteful of gas to be an efficient, practical way to create light. So then he closed the ends of the pipes and bored three small holes in one, from which gas would diverge in a faster, more concentrated stream. It was enough to light a single room.
The next big event in this thread of his life came in 1798. At the Soho Foundry back in Birmingham, Murdoch constructed an apparatus capable of large-scale illumination by gas. His co-workers were apparently impressed by the bright lighting he could create without the foul odor or smoke of candles.
Four years later, he illuminated the Soho works again for public display. The fronts of the buildings were ornamented with several different kinds of these new gas lights. It was described by one visitor as “extraordinary splendor.” People came from far and wide “to gaze at, and to admire, this wonderful display of the combined effects of science and art.”
By this point, the Watt steam engine patent had expired and, even though the company was still making steam engines, they were now competing for sales with other manufactures, including those making strong steam engines. So, Boulton & Watt tried taking this as an opportunity to expand their product line into gas lighting.
Their first contract had come in 1801, to install gas lighting at the Phillips & Lee cotton mill in Manchester. There, Murdoch installed a loose cage of grating to hold the coal, carbonize it, and create coke. The gas would be captured and lit in, essentially, a covered bucket. Murdoch went through several design experiments before finally completing the order in 1805, installing 50 gas lights throughout the factory. Within a few years, that number had been expanded to over 900.
The night shift was about to get a lot more productive.
As Murdoch highlighted in a paper he presented to the Royal Society a few years later, coal-gas lighting was safer, more convenient, and more affordable than candles and oil lamps. Describing the installation at Phillips & Lee, he noted that the 900 burners made a little more light than 2,500 candles would by comparison. He estimated that it was saving the factory £1,400 per year. (The equivalent of over $150,000 today.)
And as he described it:
“The peculiar softness and clearness of this light with its almost unvarying intensity, have brought it into great favour with the work people. And its being free from the inconvenience and danger, resulting from sparks and frequent snuffing of candles, is a circumstance of material importance, as tending to diminish the hazard of fire, to which cotton mills are known to be exposed.”
Murdoch hoped to use this experiment as a way to launch a new venture – a gas lighting utility company. But he would be beaten to it by an unscrupulous entrepreneur named Frederick Albert Winsor.
Born in Brunswick – in modern day Germany – in 1763, Winsor had emigrated to Great Britain sometime before the turn of the 19th Century. Then, in 1799, he learned about the newly-patented Le Bon thermolampe. Three years later, during the Paris exhibition of the thermolampe, Winsor travelled to France to see it.
Convinced that gas lighting was the future, he approached Le Bon about a licensing agreement, so that he could start making and selling thermolampes in Germany. Nothing came of it but, in the process, Winsor picked up some of the technical knowledge needed for making a gas light – or, at least, for sounding like he understood it.
In reality, Winsor was in-over-his-head when it came to the scientific details of the invention. But that didn’t stop him from promoting it when he got back to Britain – and promoting himself as its inventor. He ginned up some publicity and, in 1803, publicly exhibited his plan to introduce coal-gas lighting to the Lyceum Theater in London. For it, he gave lectures with interesting gas experiments. Unfortunately for him, actual scientists were like “uh, this guy has no idea what he’s talking about” and he subsequently failed to get support from Parliament for the exclusive rights he sought for gas lighting.
Nevertheless, Winsor continued his self-promotion. In 1807, he lighted up the famous Pall Mall in London, demonstrating the viability of his system. He used the demonstration to argue priority for his gaslights, and got a bill introduced in Parliament to incorporate his National Heat and Light Company with a capital investment of £200,000. The scientific establishment continued to support Murdoch – and were getting increasingly vexed by Winsor – and they managed to get Parliament to throw it out.
But by 1812, Winsor’s concerted efforts finally succeeded. He received a modified Royal Charter for his new Gas Light and Coke Company. It capitalized at a whopping £1 million from 80,000 shares.
The next year, the company hired an engineer named Samuel Clegg. Born in Manchester in 1781, Clegg had been an apprentice at Boulton & Watt and had seen the Murdoch experiments there. He too believed gas lighting was the way of the future, and he brought to Winsor’s company a technical expertise to make it viable. The most important of these improvements was a new process of distilling tar after it was distilled from coal. He then purified it with “cream of lime” to reduce the gaseous odors and created a rotative gasometer. He also invented a horizontal rotating retort for the system, for which he received a patent.
From there, the company really took off. That same year, gas lights were added to Westminster Bridge and, soon enough, to the streets of the Westminster borough. From 1814 to 1816, it spread to other boroughs across London.
By 1817, over 300,000 cubic feet of coal-gas was being manufactured in London every day – enough to supply a degree of illumination equivalent to 459,000 candles. The next year they established a tar works in the Poplar neighborhood and expanded their offices on Pall Mall. By the end of the decade, they were expanding to other cities and towns, lighting the streets at night, across the UK.
By 1830, gas lighting companies had popped up in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City. And the technology that went into gas lighting got better and better throughout the 19th Century.
And while gas lights were illuminating the factories and city streets, another kind of gas was about to illuminate the homes of millions.
Abraham Gesner was born to a farming family in Nova Scotia in 1797. He studied medicine in London before returning to Canada to begin a practice as a physician. But while in London he also became interested in geology, which he started studying on the side.
Then, in 1846, he was experimenting with various minerals and such when he developed a process for distilling a new oil from coal, bitumen, and shale. The process was similar to those used by the gas lighting pioneers decades earlier. But the liquid form of this product was perfect for the Argand lamp. Gesner called it “kerosene.” Over the next 15 years, kerosene replaced spermaceti oil as the preferred fuel for home lighting, and the sperm whale was spared from extinction.
Today, we have a much better understanding of the dangers that fossil fuels pose to our health and to our environment in the long run. (Well, some of us do anyway.) But, for what it’s worth, these fuels did make possible economic development and material improvements that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Artificial lighting was among the big ones. And, with it, came enormous changes to our traditional ways of life, work, and culture.
---
In the late 1990s, the historian William D. Nordhaus published an interesting study. He looked at how much it would cost to produce an hour of artificial light at various points throughout history, and how much time in labor (using average contemporary wages) it would take to afford said hour of light.
In 1800, one hour of labor could buy you all of ten minutes of artificial light, using a tallow candle. Yikes – you better use that candle sparingly! (Can you imagine a parent with a child who liked to read back then? “What, do you think we’re made of money?!”) But with a kerosene lamp in 1880, an hour of labor could buy you three hours of light. Okay, that’s more like it.
Nowadays, thanks to electricity, a single hour of labor (with the average hourly wage) is enough to buy nearly an entire year of light.
Artificial light has totally transformed the human experience. It allowed for more industry to grow, as more workers could stay in a factory after dark, finishing (or, perhaps even beginning) their shifts. This greatly increased economic productivity.
Workers were also able to walk home after work and feel relatively safe doing so. Urban crime rates fell significantly in the first half of the 19th Century as gas-fueled streetlights were installed. It also allowed more people to more regularly take in evening entertainment – going out to restaurants, taverns, theaters, etc.
It may have even changed the way we sleep. According to a 2001 study by historian Roger Ekrich, who reviewed hundreds of pre-industrial diaries and other manuscripts, people use to have a “first sleep” and a “second sleep” most every night. After the sun went down, people would fall asleep relatively quickly. Then, about four hours later, they’d wake up in the middle of the night. This is quite likely why we use the word “midnight” to describe 12am. They’d get up, go pee, maybe have a snack, maybe have sex, maybe sit and talk by the fireplace. Then they’d head back to bed for another four hours of sleep, or so.
So, if you’ve ever woken up at 3 in the morning and not been able to fall back asleep – and you understandably got mad about it – this is why. Advanced artificial lighting has totally messed up our ancient sleeping patterns – the rhythms of nightly sleep with which we, as a species, evolved.
And playing with light gave the people of the 19th Century one more significant change I want to tell you about, a way to create a chemical reaction to capture perfect images for reproduction: Photography – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
---
As I mentioned last week, I am going on vacation for the American Thanksgiving holiday. Sarah and I will be flying to Tokyo and travelling around Japan for the next couple of weeks. So, there will not be a new episode until Tuesday, December 10th. But I do plan on sharing some photos from Japan, as they pertain to history and technology, on the podcast’s social media accounts. So, be sure to follow along @IndRevPod – that’s the @ symbol, I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Until then, Sayōnara, and have a very Happy Thanksgiving.