At Home - Bill Bryson [62]
Where conventional fuels were scarce, people used whatever would burn—gorse, ferns, seaweed, dried dung. In the Shetland Islands, according to James Boswell, stormy petrels were so naturally oily that people sometimes just stuck a wick down their throats and lit it, but I suspect Boswell was being a touch credulous. Elsewhere in Scotland dung was gathered and dried out to be used as an illuminant and fuel. The loss of fertilizing dung from fields left a lot of land impoverished and is said to have accelerated the agricultural decline there. Some people were luckier than others. In Dorset, around Kimmeridge Bay, the oil-rich shales on the beach burned like coal, could be gathered for free, and actually provided a better light. For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient option, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Even over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy. In At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett records how one girl who had attended a party in New England where the lamps smoked reported afterward, “Our noses were all black, & our clothes were perfectly gray and … quite ruined.” For that reason, many people stuck with candles even after other options became available. Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in The American Woman’s Home, a sort of American answer to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, continued providing instructions for making candles at home until 1869.
Until the late eighteenth century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some three thousand years. But in 1783 a Swiss physicist named Ami Argand invented a lamp that increased lighting levels dramatically by the simple expedient of getting more oxygen to the flame. Argand’s lamps also came with a knob that allowed the user to adjust the flame’s level of brightness—a novelty that left many users almost speechless with gratitude. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast and remarked in frank admiration how a single Argand lamp could provide illumination equal to half a dozen candles. He was so impressed that he brought back several Argand lamps from Paris in 1790.
Argand himself never got the riches he deserved. His patents were not respected in France, so he relocated to England, but they weren’t respected there either or indeed anywhere else, and Argand made almost nothing from his devoted ingenuity.
The best light of all came from whale oil, and the best type of whale oil was spermaceti from the head of the sperm whale. Sperm whales are mysterious and elusive animals that are even now little understood. They produce and store great reserves of spermaceti—up to three tons of it—in a cavernous chamber in their skulls. Despite its name, spermaceti is not sperm and has no reproductive function, but when exposed to air it turns from a translucent watery liquid to a milky white cream—and it is obvious at once why sailors gave the sperm whale its name. No one has ever worked out what spermaceti is for. It may somehow assist with buoyancy, or it may help with the processing of nitrogen in the whale’s blood. Sperm whales dive with great speed to an enormous depth—up to a mile—without evident ill effects, and it is thought that the spermaceti may in some unfathomed way explain why they don’t get the bends. Another theory is that the spermaceti provides shock absorption for males when they fight for mating rights. This would help explain the sperm whale’s infamous predilection for headbutting whaling ships, often lethally, when angered. But it isn’t actually known whether sperm whales headbutt one another. No less mysterious is the very valuable commodity they produce known as ambergris (from French words meaning “gray amber,” though