Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [33]
any common use about the house, it must be confessed after many years of costly experience, that "burning fluid" is not safe.... Nobody will stop using it on this account, however.... Better, if you are coming to your senses, reader, take your lamps at once to the lamp-store and have them all refitted for oil, or something else than "camphene" in any of its forms. If not, be consistent, and stuff your pin-cushions and mattresses with gun-powder, and buy a rattlesnake as a pet for your growing boy to play with.
Why burning fluid was so popular is something of a mystery. Though less expensive than sperm oil, it still retailed for about 25 cents per quart in the early 1850s. And while those of the day said that it produced a brilliant white flame—enough, perhaps, to risk the dangers—historian Jane Nylander claims that "a burning fluid lamp produced a dimmer light than a tallow candle or a single wick whale oil lamp." It may have been that burning fluid was simply the new thing and at a clear remove from age-old animal fuel.
Lamps and candles, whatever their fuel, were now easier to light because people no longer had to borrow fire from an existing flame or coals, or resort to a tinderbox. Even in the early nineteenth century, the few alternatives to such methods were for the wealthy alone, who might carry phosphoric tapers, or "Ethereal Matches," with them. These were short strips of paper tipped with a bit of phosphorus, and each was contained within a thin glass vial. When the user broke the glass, the phosphorus burst into flame. Such matches came with their share of injuries, since they might also burst into flames if the vial was accidentally broken.
In 1826 Englishman John Walker developed what would eventually evolve into the common match. He made his "friction-light" by dipping wooden splints into a paste of potassium chlorate, starch, antimony sulfide, gum arabic, and water. He dried the splints and then ignited them by nipping them between folded sandpaper. Early matches sparked and stank, and Lucifers—as the matches came to be called—carried a warning: "If possible avoid inhaling gas. Persons whose lungs are delicate should by no means use Lucifers." One Parisian exclaimed, "The chemical match is, without doubt, one of the vilest devices that civilization has yet produced.... It is thanks to this that each of us carries around fire in his pocket.... I ... detest the permanent plague, always primed to trigger an explosion, always ready to roast humanity individually over a low flame."
Eventually, matches were coated with white phosphorus, and they became safer for those who carried them, but not for those who made them. Match makers who were exposed to phosphorus vapor for long periods of time commonly suffered from painful, disfiguring phossy jaw, which was fatal. Deposits of phosphorus in the jawbone would eventually begin to abscess, and the bone would rot away. The sufferer would then die from organ failure. Although less toxic red phosphorus began to replace white phosphorus in the mid-nineteenth century, white phosphorus was still used in the production of "strike-anywhere" matches until early in the twentieth century.
The light of even common whale oil lamps improved in the early nineteenth century, as a wide array of new lamp designs came on the market in the wake of Ami Argand's revolutionary invention of the tubular wick in 1784. Wall lamps,