crew.... Older folk will tell you of the
Jason
, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic
Castagna
and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.
Any mariner of the eighteenth century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles, or that such a light would not be essential to seeing a ship safely past the rocks; that there would come a time when navigators hardly needed to scan the horizon, for they would get their bearings from a prism of informationâradar, GPS, and electronic charts. Data would become the new lamp.
4. Gaslight
A T THE TURN OF the nineteenth century, most people still saw by the same ancient light as always, though that would change in the decades to come. Not only would brighter, cleaner mineral fuels replace tallow and whale oil, but the story of human light would cease to be that of candles and lamps alone. It would become a story that defied linearity, one composed of inseparable strands of invention and improvementâgaslight, the safety match, electric arc lamps, kerosene, Edison's incandescent bulb, Tesla's alternating currentâand as new forms of illumination overtook the old, they competed with one another in ways that stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, gaslight led this transformation, at least for city dwellers and factory workers in England. The gas fuel of the time was a by-product of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke (the "charcoal of coal"), and coke production was well established in England, whose economy had been based on coal for more than a century. The English preferred burning hard, light, porous coke in both their home hearths and industrial furnaces. Unlike bituminous coal, which in its raw state burns with a smoky yellow flame, coke burns with a uniform and intense heat that produces no sparks and little soot or smoke. "It seldom needs the application of the pokerâthat specific for the
ennui
of Englishmen," noted one writer of the time.
Coke manufacture involved shoveling coal into vessels called retorts, which were set in large ovens and heatedâa process that dissipated the tar and gases present in the coal. During the eighteenth century, coke manufacturers captured and sold the tar, which was used for caulking ships, but they released the coal gas into the air and let it go to waste. Although it had long been known that such gas would burn with a luminous flame and scientists had experimented with igniting bladders filled with coal gas and other flammable substances, until the turn of the nineteenth century, no one had developed a practical application for it.
In 1801 French engineer Philippe Lebon gave the first public demonstration of functional gaslight when he displayed, in Paris, what he called the
thermolampe.
This furnace housed a retort that fed distilled flammable gasâlikely wood gasâto a condenser, then through a series of pipes to an outlet. Lebon imagined that his thermolampe would be used for both lighting and heating a household: "The inflammable gas is ready to extend everywhere the most sensible heat and softest lights, either joined or separated at our pleasure. In a moment we can make our lights pass from one chamber to another.... No sparks, coals or soot will incommode us any longer. Neither can cinders ashes coals or wood, render our apartments black or dirty or require the least care." He outfitted his own home with a thermolampe and sold admission for viewing it in an effort to
Jason
, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic
Castagna
and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.
Any mariner of the eighteenth century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles, or that such a light would not be essential to seeing a ship safely past the rocks; that there would come a time when navigators hardly needed to scan the horizon, for they would get their bearings from a prism of informationâradar, GPS, and electronic charts. Data would become the new lamp.
4. Gaslight
A T THE TURN OF the nineteenth century, most people still saw by the same ancient light as always, though that would change in the decades to come. Not only would brighter, cleaner mineral fuels replace tallow and whale oil, but the story of human light would cease to be that of candles and lamps alone. It would become a story that defied linearity, one composed of inseparable strands of invention and improvementâgaslight, the safety match, electric arc lamps, kerosene, Edison's incandescent bulb, Tesla's alternating currentâand as new forms of illumination overtook the old, they competed with one another in ways that stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, gaslight led this transformation, at least for city dwellers and factory workers in England. The gas fuel of the time was a by-product of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke (the "charcoal of coal"), and coke production was well established in England, whose economy had been based on coal for more than a century. The English preferred burning hard, light, porous coke in both their home hearths and industrial furnaces. Unlike bituminous coal, which in its raw state burns with a smoky yellow flame, coke burns with a uniform and intense heat that produces no sparks and little soot or smoke. "It seldom needs the application of the pokerâthat specific for the
ennui
of Englishmen," noted one writer of the time.
Coke manufacture involved shoveling coal into vessels called retorts, which were set in large ovens and heatedâa process that dissipated the tar and gases present in the coal. During the eighteenth century, coke manufacturers captured and sold the tar, which was used for caulking ships, but they released the coal gas into the air and let it go to waste. Although it had long been known that such gas would burn with a luminous flame and scientists had experimented with igniting bladders filled with coal gas and other flammable substances, until the turn of the nineteenth century, no one had developed a practical application for it.
In 1801 French engineer Philippe Lebon gave the first public demonstration of functional gaslight when he displayed, in Paris, what he called the
thermolampe.
This furnace housed a retort that fed distilled flammable gasâlikely wood gasâto a condenser, then through a series of pipes to an outlet. Lebon imagined that his thermolampe would be used for both lighting and heating a household: "The inflammable gas is ready to extend everywhere the most sensible heat and softest lights, either joined or separated at our pleasure. In a moment we can make our lights pass from one chamber to another.... No sparks, coals or soot will incommode us any longer. Neither can cinders ashes coals or wood, render our apartments black or dirty or require the least care." He outfitted his own home with a thermolampe and sold admission for viewing it in an effort to
Similar Books
