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By Root 937 0

proved to be, for those living in towns, villages, and farms beyond the reach of gaslight, kerosene brought significantly more light into homes. Not only was each lamp brighter, but the low cost of fuel also encouraged people to use lamps more frequently and to purchase more lamps. Kerosene goods, such as reservoirs, wicks, and chimneys, became an advertised standard in catalogs and general stores. With the kerosene lamp's ease came a certain thoughtlessness, and perhaps an appreciation for the beauty of the flame itself. Certainly, people could read or knit with far less strain, and work more steadily by its light. Since by the second half of the nineteenth century, enclosed wood and coal stoves had begun to replace open hearths, the kerosene lamp—the last open fire in the home—often became a gathering place for the family in the evening.

Even some city people connected to gas lines reserved gas for the utilitarian spaces of their homes, such as hallways and kitchens; they continued to use oil lamps in more intimate drawing rooms and bedrooms. Historian Wolfgang Schivelbush argues that it wasn't gaslight's palpable drawbacks—the soot and the bad air—that made most people hesitant to fully give in to gas. Rather, it had to do with the industrial source of its flame and all that implied of a connection with, and a dependence on, the brick and gray life looming beyond, the cinders and ash settling over cities and towns. And more: "By keeping their independent lights, people symbolically distanced themselves from a centralised supply," Schivelbush notes. "The traditional oil-lamp or candle in a living-room expressed both a reluctance to be connected to the gas mains and the need for a light that fed on some visible fuel."

Some simply preferred the modest flame of the old light: "I boldly declare myself the friend of Argand lamps," stated one Parisian in comparing them to gas lamps; "these to tell the truth are content with shedding light and do not dazzle the eyes." Perhaps, for city dwellers, as the oil lamp began to take its place as part of the past—its notes diminishing as others sounded and strengthened—its intimacies seemed all the more desirable, and people instinctively clung to its lingering form, the ghost in the mist. "It seems there are dark corners in us that tolerate only a flickering light," wrote Gaston Bachelard. That flickering was a link to the light at the beginning of human time: the kerosene lamp was the apotheosis of the tallow cupped in limestone at Lascaux, the last self-tended flame.

PART II

You turn the thumbscrew and the light is there.

—New York Times, September 5, 1882

6. Life Electric

HUMAN LIGHT HAS ITS SOUNDS—of a match struck and a candle flame muttering in a draft, of a stopcock turning and a gas jet hissing to life or hoarsely damping itself out. Now: the crackle and snap of electricity—for thousands of years a mystery and arriving as light only after ages of isolated experiments, speculation, observations, and discoveries. Light that required a new vocabulary—amps, volts, watts, joules, the galvanic cell. Light without fire, incandescently silent, its switch a "little click [that] says yes and no with the same voice." It was the harnessing of what has been marvelous at least since the ancient Greeks saw the way amber, when rubbed with a piece of wool, created sparks, so they could only conclude that it, too, had a soul, for "it seemed to live, and to exercise an attraction upon other things distant from it." Amber, which the Greeks believed were the tears of the Heliades, Phaëthon's sisters, who wept so long beside the river where he'd drowned that the gods in their pity turned them into poplars.

The philosopher Thales, who lived around 600 B.C., was the first to mention the sparking of amber in his writings, though its electrostatic qualities were likely already well-known. The Greeks, it was said, treated gout by standing on electric eels, but whether they used amber for any practical or religious ends is only conjecture, as is the use of ancient batteries, dating to