Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [32]
For those hours, the well-heeled were more exposed and helpless than those living by oil and candles. No longer privileged in the night, anxious for some power beyond them to restore the lamps so that life could fold back into its hurry, they could only wait in the midst of the old quiet, where light had circumference again.
5. Toward a More Perfect Flame
THE FIRST DECADES OF the nineteenth century brought marked changes not only for those living within the sphere of gaslight but also for households that continued to rely on oil lamps and candles alone. Manufactured candles became cheaper and improved so much in quality that even the smallest flame in an ordinary home possessed some of the properties of beeswax and spermaceti. Part of the improvement could be attributed to plaited wicks and wicks impregnated with boric acid, which helped to diminish guttering, but much of it had to do with the substance of the candles themselves. Commercial tallow manufacturers developed a way to refine animal fat so that it no longer smoked or stank as it burned. The famed scientist Michael Faraday explained the process in The Chemical History of a Candle:
A candle, you know, is not now a greasy thing like an ordinary tallow candle, but a clean thing. The fat or tallow is first boiled with quick-lime, and made into a soap, and then the soap is decomposed by sulphuric acid, which takes away the lime, and leaves the fat rearranged as stearic acid, while a quantity of glycerin is produced at the same time.... The oil is then pressed out of it;...how beautifully the impurities are carried out by the oily part ... and at last you have left that substance, which is melted, and cast into candles.
By mid-century, candles were also manufactured from paraffin, which was derived from the distillation of bituminous shale. An account of the time describes paraffin as "brilliantly white, inodorous, and tasteless. It resembles spermaceti in its silky feeling and physical structure...[and] derives its name from two Latin words, parum, little or none, and affinis, affinity, because of its complete neutrality and great stability.... It gives a powerful, clear flame, without soot." The name seems to have said it all—here was light unencumbered by noxious smells and smoke, light in little need of tending, that could simply shine constant, clear, and bright. These developments seemed to signal the end of earthbound light, for at last the common candle had distanced itself from the barnyard and slaughterhouse, from blood and sinew and bone, and there would be no going back. Herman Melville, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, proclaimed that even in the bowels of a whaling ship, it seemed an outlandish thing that "mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp."
Common lamp fuel, too, underwent changes. In the 1830s, "burning fluid," a mixture of camphene (distilled from turpentine) and alcohol, often called simply "camphene," arrived on the American market. Although it was thin and light, and so traveled quickly up a wick, it had a low flash point—the temperature at which oil gives off enough vapors to spontaneously ignite—which made it volatile. Because any spark or excessive heat could lead to an explosion, the flame of a camphene lamp needed to be kept at a distance from its fuel reservoir. Whale oil and grease lamps