Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [14]
The cities began to develop their own seasonal rhythms as well. In the countryside, as the days grew shorter and colder, everything began to draw in: the birds scratched at bark and scraped at snow, the sheep huddled in their folds, and people lived confined to the one or two rooms warmed by their fires. Meanwhile, in the city the streetscape seemed to grow livelier, as the wealthy returned from their summer refuges, and the night seasons of the opera, theater, and ballet began. In winter, the light and warmth of cafés and taverns seemed particularly inviting. By the twentieth century, one observer would claim: "The city lives at cross-purposes with nature: cold not heat brings it to life.... It is during the fall and winter that the sense of renewal is at its height, for as one place dies another comes to life."
The greater the hours of illumination, the more the city at night worked its way into the human imagination, until the illuminated city and the glamour and liveliness of its night came to define almost completely what it meant to be urban and urbane, and any metropolis possessing less than a brilliant, vibrant night was deemed provincial. Later, in the twentieth century, Elizabeth Hardwick would write that Boston was
not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature.... In Boston there is an utter absence of the wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark.
3. Lanterns at Sea
ALTHOUGH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CITIES had begun to emerge from their ancestral night, the world's oceans remained couched in it. Ships under sail or at anchor might display a lantern on deck, but lamps carried the old danger of fire to the cramped holds of wooden sailing vessels. To avoid disaster at sea, merchantmen often dressed and ate in the dark—for them, wrote Herman Melville, oil was "more scarce than the milk of queens." Emigrant ships prohibited lamps below deck, although some travelers were allowed to carry enclosed lanterns. Slaves were denied any light at all.
If something blazed on the seas, it was likely a whaling ship in the hours after a catch—its try-pots boiling and smoke fogging the rigging, while almost all hands flensed the blubber from the whale and minced it into portions to feed the vats. "The oil is hissing in the trypots," wrote J. Ross Browne.
Half a dozen of the crew are sitting on the windlass, their rough weather-beaten faces shining in the red glare of the fires, all clothed in greasy duck.... The cooper and one of the mates are raking up the fires with long bars of wood or iron. The decks, bulwarks, railing, try-works, and windlass are covered with oil and slime of black-skin, glistering with the red glare of the try-works. Slowly and doggedly the vessel is pitching her way through the rough seas, looking as if enveloped in flames.
During the eighteenth century, hundreds of whaling vessels sailed the seas in search of their quarry, for though many people still made or bought tallow candles, and those in continental Europe often fed their lamps with colza (rapeseed) oil, whale oil—cheap and abundant—fueled much of the growing brilliance of the domestic and municipal night. Common whale oil was also called "train oil," from the Old High German word trahan, meaning "drop" or "tear," because, it's said, the