Brilliant (11 page)

For all its popularity, kerosene had some drawbacks. In the first decades of its manufacture, there was little regulation of the supply, and unscrupulous traders adulterated it with benzene or naphtha, which lowered the flash point and made it more volatile. The members of the Buffalo, New York, Board of Trade noted:

The country has been flooded with all sorts of compounds and mixtures and greases that pretend to do everything and accomplish nothing. In refined oils particularly, low-test oils and fluids have been thrown on the market by unprincipled men, with perfect impunity, throughout the country.... The inspector may do his duty, and brand the oil—the legal test; but how easy it is for the refiner or the dealer to add a few gallons of death-dealing naptha
[sic],
for
profit's sake
and thereby endanger lives and property.

Responsible housewives had to be vigilant about the quality of the oil they purchased. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in their 1869 guide to domestic science,
The American Woman's Home,
advised:

Good oil poured in a teacup or on the floor does not easily take fire when a light is brought in contact with it. Poor oil will instantly ignite under the same circumstances, and hence, the breaking of a lamp filled with poor oil is always attended by great peril of a conflagration. Not only the safety but also the light-giving qualities of kerosene are greatly enhanced by the removal of these volatile and dangerous oils. Hence, while good kerosene should be clear in color and free from all matters which gum up the wick, and thus interfere with free circulation and combustion, it should also be perfectly safe.

Even with quality kerosene, the simplest lamp found in the most modest of homes required meticulous daily attention. Only a well-cleaned lamp would give off good light, and a poorly trimmed wick made for a flickering and smoky flame, which left soot on the chimney and sent soot throughout the house. Indeed, the ritual of spring-cleaning was largely a response to a winter's worth of soot from hearths and lamps. But daily cleaning was also a matter of safety. In the late nineteenth century, in the United States alone, five thousand to six thousand people a year died in lamp accidents. Although many of these were due to adulterated oil, clumsiness, and carelessness—spills and breakages, or someone leaving a lamp too near to curtains or bedclothes, failing to lower the wick before blowing out the light, or trying to extinguish a lamp by blowing down the chimney—inattentive or inexperienced housekeeping increased the danger. If the burner was dirty, the lamp might overheat the chimney and break the glass. If the oil in the reservoir was too low, the vapors could ignite when someone carelessly jarred the lamp. A Connecticut newspaper, the
Willimantic Chronicle,
often reported lamp accidents due to "exploding lamps":

Wed., September 1, 1880: The house of George Leavens in Danielsonville came near being consumed by fire by the explosion of a kerosene lamp last week.... Wed., August 29, 1883: Early Saturday morning the body of Simon B. Squires was found in the back yard of the Southport National bank, Southport, burned in a shocking manner. It is thought he rose during the night when his lamp exploded and set his clothes on fire.... Wed., April 23, 1884: Mrs. Mary McGoldrick, aged 73 years, of New Haven, Ct., and Emma O'Brien, aged 3 years, of Erie, Pa., were yesterday burned to death by the explosion of kerosene lamps.

The authors of
The Woman's Book,
a guide to household management published in 1894, went into a lengthy, precise discussion about the cleaning of lamps:

There is as much wit goes to the care of lamps as to the boiling of eggs. In the first place they should receive due attention every day.... Carry the lamps to the kitchen or pantry and set them down upon double-folded newspapers. If they have porcelain shades, wipe these.... Should they need washing, put them into a basin of hot water which you have softened with a little ammonia or borax.... This done turn up the wicks of the lamps and with a bit of stick or match scrape off the charred edges.... Remove the rims that surround the burners and wipe them off with old flannel.... Now fill the lamps and do it carefully.... Wipe the outside of the reservoirs after you have filled and closed them, that the persistently percolating oil may have not unnecessary encouragement to exude. Be very sure that no drops of oil have trickled down upon the outside of the lamps.... Give a final rub to the outside of each lamp, replace chimney, rim, and shade, and thank Fate that this, one of the least pleasant of the housekeeper's duties, is done for the day.

However much work the lamps 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.

You turn the thumbscrew and the light is there.

—
New York Times,
September 5, 1882

H
UMAN 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 around 200
B.C.
, found in the vicinity of Baghdad. The five-inch-high clay vessels each contain an iron rod encased in a copper cylinder. One, if filled with vinegar, grape juice, or lemon juice, could have delivered a few volts of power. Archaeologists found needlelike objects near some of the batteries, so perhaps the current was used in acupuncture. Or the batteries may have been connected in series to produce a greater charge for electroplating. Or perhaps statues of idols were wired to them so that small shocks might inspire awe in supplicants.

Electricity's modern path can be traced back to 1600 in London, where Dr. William Gilbert, surgeon to Queen Elizabeth I, noted in his
De magnete
that sparks flew not only from amber but also from glass and precious stones, resin, sulfur, sealing wax, and more than a dozen other substances. He called these substances "electrics," from the Latin word
electrum,
in turn derived from the Greek word for amber,
elektron.
Gilbert died only a few years after the publication of his work, though in succeeding years other scientists, knowing of his findings, extended the list of electrics—among them diamonds, white wax, and gypsum—which remained just a list until Otto von Guericke, mayor of Magdeburg (now in Germany) created an electrostatic machine: a small, solid sulfur globe about six inches in diameter, set in a wooden frame, which he turned with an attached handle. When he both rotated and quickly rubbed his machine, it not only glowed and sent sparks flying; it also attracted light objects.

Guericke noted that electricity could repel things as well as attract them, and to the amusement of friends and visitors, he used his whirling globe to drive feathers across his drawing room, guiding them along until they rested on his guests' noses. For decades afterward, electricity—understood as a "virtue"—would remain largely an enigma that thrived as entertainment. An increased understanding of its properties only inched forward as a result of occasional observation of phenomena between amusements.

In the early eighteenth century, Englishman Stephen Gray established the conductive properties of electricity, having found, after rubbing the bottom of a glass tube, that its cork stopper had become charged. Through his experiments, Gray also discovered the insulating properties of some substances:

He suspended a long hempen line horizontally by loops of pack-thread, but failed to transmit through it the electric power. He then suspended it by loops of silk, and succeeded in sending the "attractive virtue" through seven hundred and sixty-five feet of thread. He at first thought that the silk was effectual because it was thin; but on replacing a broken silk loop by a still thinner wire, he obtained no action. Finally he came to the conclusion that his loops were effectual, not because they were thin, but because they were
silk.

With this knowledge, Gray developed his "dangling boy" experiment, which in succeeding years became popular in drawing rooms across England. He suspended a young boy—swathed in nonconducting clothes except for his head, hands, and a few toes—by thick silk ropes. The boy held a wand with a dangling ivory ball in one hand and stretched out his other hand freely. When Gray set an electrified glass tube against the child's bare toes, the boy's hair stood on end, and brass leaf that had been piled on the floor beneath him rose toward the ivory ball, his extended hand, and his face. Gray might then invite members of the audience to stand on some conductive material and touch the boy, whereupon they would receive shocks.

The sulfur globes, and the glass ones that succeeded them, could only produce electricity; the first record of its successful storage dates from 1745. In Camin, Germany, Ewald von Kleist wrote of an experiment in a letter to a friend:

When a nail or piece of brass wire is put into a small apothecaries' phial and electrified, remarkable effects follow; but the phial must be very dry and warm. I commonly rub it over beforehand with a finger on which I put some powdered chalk. If a little mercury or a few drops of spirits of wine be put into it, the experiment succeeds the better. As soon as the phial and nail are removed from the electrifying glass, or the prime conductor to which it hath been exposed is taken away, it throws out a pencil of flame so long that with this burning machine in my hand I have taken about sixty steps.... I can take it into another room, and then fire spirits of wine with it. If while it is electrifying I put my finger or a piece of gold which I hold in my hand to the nail, I receive a shock which stuns my arms and shoulders.

Scientists in Leiden (or Leyden), Holland, refined von Kleist's machine, and thereafter it was known as a Leyden jar. The most elaborate of the jars consisted of a water-filled glass container with an outer and inner coating of metal foil and metal filings at the bottom of the jar. It was capped with a cork or a wooden lid, from which a conductor—a metal rod, usually brass, topped with a metal ball—protruded. A metal chain hung into the jar from the lid. Experimenters could transfer the electric charge from a whirling globe to the protruding ball; the charge traveled down the rod and chain to the water and foil. A Leyden jar could retain its charge for several days, which, as historian Philip Dray notes, allowed experimenters "to move electricity about as part of a graduated process, not merely to see it as the sudden flash that occurred between objects in a friction experiment."