Bill Bryson: The story of the electric light
For centuries, we hunched over candles after dark. Then gas and electricity arrived – and the world lit up. In the latest extract from his new book, the acclaimed writer reveals the bizarre story of how artificial light came to transform our lives
Imagine a modern living room without light Photograph: Ivan Hunter/Getty Images
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle – a good candle – provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100w light bulb. Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life
- by Bill Bryson
- 544pp,
- Doubleday,
- £15.99
Occasionally we can see into the dimness, as it were, when we find descriptions of what was considered sumptuous, as when a guest at a Virginia plantation, Nomini Hall, marvelled in his diary how "luminous and splendid" the dining room was during a banquet because seven candles were burning – four on the table and three elsewhere in the room. To him this was a blaze of light. At about the same time, across the ocean in England, a gifted amateur artist named John Harden left a charming set of drawings showing family life at his home, Brathay Hall in Westmorland. What is striking is how little illumination the family expected or required.
A typical drawing shows four members sitting companionably at a table sewing, reading and conversing by the light of a single candle, and there is no sense of hardship or deprivation, and certainly no sign of the desperate postures of people trying to get a tiny bit of light to fall more productively on a page or piece of embroidery. The fact is that people put up with dim evenings because they knew no other kind. (The French, according to Roger Ekirch, had a curious expression, which I pass on without comment: "By candle-light a goat is ladylike.")
Candles were of two types – tallow and wax. Tallow, made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that it could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal and so it was cheap. But it was an exasperating material. Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering, and needed trimming up to 40 times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow candle got the more malodorous it grew. Far superior were candles made of beeswax. These gave a steadier light and needed less trimming, but they cost about four times as much and so tended only to be used for best.
The amount of illumination one gave oneself was a telling indicator of status. Elizabeth Gaskell in one of her novels had a character, Miss Jenkyns, who kept two candles out but burned only one at a time, and constantly, fussily switched between the two to keep them at exactly equal lengths. That way if guests came they wouldn't find candles of unequal sizes and deduce her embarrassing frugality.
For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient option, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Even over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40% of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot.
Until the late 18th century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some 3,000 years. But in 1783 a Swiss physicist named Ami Argand invented a lamp that increased lighting levels dramatically by the simple expedient of getting more oxygen to the flame. Argand's lamps also came with a knob that allowed the user to adjust the flame's level of brightness – a novelty that left many users almost speechless with gratitude. The best light of all came from whale oil, and the best type of whale oil was spermaceti from the head of the sperm whale. Despite its name, spermaceti is not sperm and has no reproductive function, but when exposed to air it turns from a translucent watery liquid to a milky white cream and it is obvious at once why sailors gave the whale its name. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50 – half an average worker's weekly wage.
For the well-to-do in many large cities, gas was an additional option from about 1820. Mostly, however, it was used in factories and shops and for street lighting, and didn't become common in homes until closer to the middle of the century. Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gas-lit theatres often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimise that problem, gas lights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors it blackened ceilings, discoloured fabrics, corroded metal and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlour photograph.
Gas also needed some care in use. Most gas-supply companies reduced gas flow through their pipes during the day when demand was low. So anyone lighting a gas jet during the day had to open the tap wide to get a decent light. But later in the day as the pressure was stepped up, the light could flare dangerously, scorching ceilings or even starting fires, wherever someone had forgotten to turn down the tap. So gas was dangerous as well as dirty.
Gas had one irresistible advantage, however. It was bright – at least compared with anything else the pre-electric world knew. The average room with gas was 20 times brighter than it had been before. It wasn't an intimate light – you couldn't move it nearer your book or sewing, as you could a table lamp – but it provided wonderful overall illumination. People read more and stayed up later. It is no coincidence that the mid-19th century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books and sheet music.
One natural phenomenon had the promise to eliminate all the foregoing dangers and shortcomings: electricity. Electricity was exciting stuff, but it was hard to devise practical applications for it. Using the legs of frogs and electricity from simple batteries, Luigi Galvani showed how electricity could make muscles twitch. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, realising that money could be made from this, devised a stage show in which he applied electricity to animate the bodies of recently executed murderers and the heads of guillotine victims, causing their eyes to open and their mouths to make noiseless shapes.
The logical assumption was that if electricity could stir the dead, imagine how it might help the living. In small doses (at least we may hope they were small) it was used for all kinds of maladies, from treating constipation to stopping young men having illicit erections (or at least enjoying them). Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did.
The real need was for a practical electric light. In 1846, rather out of the blue, a man named Frederick Hale Holmes patented an electric arc lamp. Holmes's light was made by generating a strong electric current and forcing it to jump between two carbon rods – a trick that Humphry Davy had demonstrated but not capitalised upon more than 40 years earlier. In Holmes's hands the result was a blindingly bright light. The first one was installed at the South Foreland Lighthouse, just outside Dover, and powered up on 8 December 1858. It ran for 13 years, and others were installed elsewhere, but arc lighting was never a huge success because it was complicated and expensive. It required an electromagnetic motor and a steam engine together weighing two tons, and needed constant attention to run smoothly.
Arc lights were way too bright for domestic use. What was needed was a practical domestic filament that would burn with a steady light for long periods. The principle of incandescent lighting had been understood, and in fact conquered, for a surprisingly long time. As early as 1840, seven years before Thomas Edison was even born, Sir William Grove, a lawyer and judge who was also a brilliant amateur scientist with a particular interest in electricity, demonstrated an incandescent lamp which worked for several hours, but nobody wanted a light bulb that cost a lot to make and only worked for a few hours, so Grove didn't pursue its development.
Then in the early 1870s Hermann Sprengel, a German chemist working in London, invented a device that came to be called the Sprengel mercury pump. This was the crucial invention that actually made household illumination possible. Sprengel's pump could reduce the amount of air in a glass chamber to one-millionth of its normal volume, which would enable a filament to glow for hundreds of hours. All that was necessary now was to find a suitable material for the filament.
The most determined and well-promoted search was undertaken by Thomas Edison, America's premier inventor. By 1877, when he started his quest to make a commercially successful light, Edison was already well on his way to becoming known as "the Wizard of Menlo Park". Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn't scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favourable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had "a vacuum where his conscience ought to be". But he was enterprising and hard-working and a peerless organiser.
Edison dispatched men to the far corners of the world to search for potential filaments, and had teams of men working on up to 250 materials at a time in the hope of finding one that had the necessary characteristics of permanence and resistance. They tried everything, including even hair from the luxuriant red beard of a family friend. Just before Thanksgiving 1879 Edison's workmen developed a piece of carbonised cardboard, twisted thin and carefully folded, that would burn for as much as 13 hours – still not nearly long enough to be practical.
When Edison's first practical installation came it was lastingly significant. Edison wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semi-derelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring and summer of 1881–2 Edison laid 15 miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realised that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle. Back at his workshops, several of his men lost teeth from mercury poisoning from over-exposure to Sprengel's mercury pump. But finally all the problems were resolved, and on the afternoon of 4 September 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier JP Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated 800 electric bulbs in the 85 businesses that had signed up to his scheme.
By modern standards those first lights were pretty feeble, but to people of the time an electric light was a blazing miracle – "a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin's lamp", as a journalist for the New York Herald breathlessly reported. It is hard to imagine now how bright and clean and eerily steady this new phenomenon was. When the lights of Fulton Street were switched on in September 1882, the awed Herald reporter described for his readers the scene as the customary "dim flicker of gas" suddenly yielded to a brilliant "steady glare . . . fixed and unwavering".
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