Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [64]
—EDWIN J. HOUSTON,
Electricity in Every-Day Life (1905)
THE TALK IN HOUSEHOLDS may have included all manner of things electric, but when H. G. Wells stood at Niagara in 1906, electricity was still confined to dense urban areas, and within those areas it was available almost solely to businesses, manufacturers, and wealthy homeowners. Even so, city dwellers had grown accustomed to electric light in public, and although most still used non-incandescent lamps at home, almost all light was measurably cheaper and more efficient than it had been in the past. Gas, for instance, sold for $2.50 per thousand cubic feet in 1865. By the end of the nineteenth century, it cost about $1.50 per thousand cubic feet. And kerosene, which sold for about 55 cents a gallon in 1865, dropped to as low as 13 cents a gallon by 1895. Only commercially produced tallow candles—rarely used in the late nineteenth century—had become more dear. Whereas in the early nineteenth century, they could be purchased for 20 cents a pound, in 1875 they cost 25 cents a pound.
Consequently, most American households at the turn of the twentieth century were much brighter than those of the past. In 1800, in the United States, $20 a year would light a house for three hours in the evening with a luminosity equivalent to 5 candles, or 5,500 candle hours per year—and many householders would have considered that much light an extravagance. By mid-century, $20 would purchase 8,700 candle hours per year; in 1890, 73,000 candle hours. By 1900, for $20 a year, on average people lit their homes (exclusive of electricity) for five hours a night with a luminosity equivalent to 154 candles, or 280,000 candle hours. That miners once worked by the phosphorescence of putrescent fish and lacemakers produced intricate designs by the light of a flame magnified through water must have seemed incomprehensible to them.
It's worth remembering that this rapid increase in the ease and brilliance of light was limited to industrialized countries. Millions throughout the world knew nothing of electricity, gaslight, or even kerosene. Their illumination, both in substance and meaning, had changed little since ancient times. Perhaps nowhere did traditional lighting hold more meaning than in the high latitudes where the Eskimo, Inuit, and other northern peoples—their villages dispersed across the snow and ice, and they themselves outnumbered by the animals—lived for months at a time with scarce daylight. Richard Nelson describes the Koyukon people of the Alaskan interior:
Houses were lit by burning bear grease in a shallow bowl with a wick, or by burning long wands of split wood, one after another. Bear grease was scarce, and the hand-held wands were inconvenient, so in midwinter the dwellings were often dark after twilight faded. Faced with long wakeful hours in the blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories.... The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: "I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it."
For those in the northernmost coastal villages of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska—where in the heart of winter, the only natural light comes from the stars, the moon, and the aurora borealis and the only source of fresh water is locked in snow and ice—stone lamps were utterly essential for survival: among the Inuit of Greenland, "the constellation of the Great Bear is called... pisildlat, lamp foot or stool upon which the lamp is placed."
Above the tree line, where only occasional driftwood might be available for fires, people relied almost entirely on seal oil, a more efficient fuel than reindeer fat or the fat of other land animals. Women carefully gathered