At Home - Bill Bryson [67]
The combination of open flames and combustible materials brought an element of alarm and excitement to every aspect of daily life in the pre-electric world. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary how he bent over a candle while working at his desk, and soon afterward became aware of a horrible, pungent smell, as of burning wool; only then did he realize that his new and very expensive wig was impressively aflame. Such small fires were a common occurrence. Nearly every room of every house had open flames at least some of the time, and nearly every house was fabulously combustible, since almost everything within or on it, from straw beds to thatched roofs, was a fuel in waiting. To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew), but danger could never be entirely avoided.
Technological refinements sometimes improved the quality of light, but just as often increased the risk of fire. Because their fuel reservoirs had to be elevated to assist the flow of fuel to the wick, Argand lamps were top-heavy and therefore easily knocked over. And kerosene fires were almost impossible to put out. By the 1870s such fires were killing as many as six thousand people a year in America alone.
Fires in public places became a great worry, too, especially after the development of a now-forgotten but lively form of illumination known as the Drummond light, named for a Thomas Drummond of Britain’s Royal Engineers, who was popularly but wrongly credited with its invention in the early 1820s. It was in fact invented by a Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a fellow engineer and an inventor of considerable talent. Drummond merely popularized the light and never claimed to have invented it, but somehow the credit became attached to him and has remained there ever since. The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from. The downside was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in theater fires in Britain, according to a report published in 1899 by William Paul Gerhard, the leading fire authority of the day.
Fire was even a danger for people on the move—indeed, often more so since means of escape were constrained or impossible on various modes of transportation. In 1858, when the immigrant ship Austria caught fire at sea en route to the United States, nearly five hundred people perished horribly as the vessel was consumed beneath them. Trains were dangerous, too. From about 1840, passenger carriages came with wood- or coal-burning stoves in the winter and oil lamps to read by, and the scope for catastrophes on a lurching train is easily imagined. As late as 1921, twenty-seven people perished in a stove fire on a train near Philadelphia.
On solid land, the greatest fear with fires was that they would get out of control and spread, destroying whole districts.