Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [1]
The story is in the light—in its utility and beauty—and also in the way its increase has altered life by granting more working hours in the day and creating a night that is no longer impenetrable, no longer a void, a night easily traveled through and expansive with free time. What does it mean to have new hours for the human spirit? How have wealth and privilege shaped those hours? And what are the consequences for those who continue to live without modern light? Have our bodies and minds adapted to a world in which the tides of the day are lost and the stars appear to have vanished? What of pumas, loggerhead turtles, and cockleburs? How has the way we think about light changed now that we've left the solitary lamp behind, now that we've bound ourselves to the grid? And can an understanding of the way those in the past adapted to their own new sources of light help us to better illuminate our future?
PART I
Of time that passes by burning...
—GASTON BACHELARD,
The Flame of a Candle
1. Lascaux: The First Lamp
ALTHOUGH FIRE HAS BLAZED in hearths and flared from pine torches for half a million years, the earliest known stone lamps—fashioned by Ice Age humans during the Pleistocene—are no more than forty thousand years old. Their quiet flames shone more weakly than those of our candles, but they were cleaner than torchwood and easier to guard and tend. Often the lamps were merely unworked flat slabs of limestone, or limestone with natural cavities for the nubs of tallow—animal fat—that had to be replenished every hour. Some were roughly carved and their reservoirs carefully shaped with sloping sides so that the melted fat could be poured off without drowning the lichen, moss, or juniper wicks. Since limestone is a poor conductor of heat, there'd have been no need to carve a handle: people could hold the lamp in the palm of their hands. Except that the cups are charred, they could be mistaken for small mortars or grinding stones.
Archaeologists have discovered such stone lamps overturned near open hearths and among cooking tools and spear-points in shallow rock shelters. They've also unearthed them far from settlements, deep in the caves of what is currently southern France, caves that are now famous—La Mouthe, Lascaux—for there isn't anything more beautiful than what Ice Age humans made by such light. Eighteen thousand years ago, while above them herds funneled through valleys on their way to the plains near the coast, people ventured far beyond the reach of day—working their way down stone corridors and twisting through narrows—to draw from memory on the limestone walls and ceilings. Sometimes their works extend higher than human reach: a man would have had to stand on scaffolding or upon a rock protruding from a wall to make marks with his hands and with bristles dipped in manganese and iron oxide. More often, the artist held the pigment in his mouth and blew it onto the cave wall to make a mark. He also blew through hollowed-out bones. Concentrated marks one after another produced the sturdy outline of an animal, while a more diffuse spray colored a flank or back. In places details are certain and fine. Elsewhere the marks are suggestive: four streaks make a cat's head. At times the contours of the wall stand for the back of a horse, a small protuberance for an eye. The artists understood how to place a leg or draw the turn of a head to create a sense of visual depth in their work.
In the chambers of Lascaux,