At Home

• CHAPTER VI •

THE FUSE BOX

In the autumn of 1939, during the slightly hysterical confusion that comes with the outbreak of war, Great Britain introduced stringent blackout regulations to thwart any murderous ambitions by the Luftwaffe. For three months it was essentially illegal to show any light at night, however faint. Rule breakers could be arrested for lighting a cigarette in a doorway or holding a match up to read a road sign. One man was fined for not covering the glow of the heater light from his tropical fish tank. Hotels and offices spent hours every day putting up and taking down special blackout covers. Drivers had to drive around in almost perfect invisibility—even dashboard lights were not allowed—so they had to guess not only where the road was but at what speed they were moving.

Not since the Middle Ages had Britain been so dark, and the consequences were noisy and profound. To avoid striking the curb or anything parked along it, cars took to straddling the middle white lines, which was fine until they encountered another vehicle doing likewise from the opposite direction. Pedestrians found themselves in constant peril as every sidewalk became an obstacle course of unseen lampposts, trees, and street furniture. Trams, known with respect as “the silent peril,” were especially unnerving. “During the first four months of the war,” Juliet Gardiner relates in Wartime, “a total of 4,133 people were killed on Britain’s roads”—a 100 percent increase over the year before. Nearly three-quarters of the victims were pedestrians. Without dropping a single bomb, the Luftwaffe was already killing six hundred people a month, as the British Medical Journal drily observed.

Fortunately, matters soon calmed down and a little illumination was allowed into people’s lives—just enough to stop most of the carnage—but it was a salutary reminder of how used to abundant illumination the world had grown.

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 100-watt lightbulb.* Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.

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, marveled 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 or reading 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. A Rembrandt drawing, Student at a Table by Candlelight, is actually much closer to the reality. It shows a youth sitting at a table, all but lost in a depth of shadow and gloom that a single candle on the wall beside him cannot begin to penetrate. Yet he has a newspaper. The fact is that people put up with dim evenings because they knew no other kind.

Reading by candlelight, by John Harden (photo credit 6.1)

The widespread belief that people in the pre-electric world went to bed at nightfall seems to be based entirely on the presumption that anyone deprived of robust illumination would be driven by frustration to retire. In fact, it appears that most people didn’t retire terribly early—nine or ten o’clock seems to have been standard for most people in the days before electricity, and for some, particularly in cities, it was even later. For those who could control their working hours, bedtimes and rising times were at least as variable then as now and appear to have had little to do with the amount of light available. In one of his diary entries, Samuel Pepys records rising at four in the morning, but in another he records going to bed at four in the morning. The writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson famously stayed abed till noon if he could; generally he could. The writer Joseph Addison routinely rose at three on summer mornings (and sometimes even earlier), but not till eleven in winter. There certainly seems to have been no rush to bring the day to a close. Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers. When guests were present, it was usual to serve supper at ten and for company to stay till midnight or so. Including conversation beforehand and music after, a dinner gathering could last for seven hours or more. Balls often went on until two or three in the morning, at which time a supper would be served. People were so keen to go out and stay up that they didn’t let much get in their way. In 1785 a Louisa Stewart wrote to her sister that the French ambassador suffered “a stroke of the palsy yesterday,” yet guests turned up at his house that night anyway “and played at faro, etc., as if he had not been dying in the next room. We are a curious people.”

Getting around outside after dark was hard. On the darkest nights it was not uncommon for the stumbling pedestrian to “run his Head against a Post” or suffer some other painful surprise. People had to grope their way through the darkness, although in some cases they simply groped: lighting in London was still so poor in 1763 that James Boswell was able to have sex with a prostitute on Westminster Bridge—hardly the most private of trysting places. Darkness also meant danger. Thieves were at large everywhere, and as one London authority noted in 1718, people were often reluctant to go out at night for fear that “they may be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed.” To avoid smacking into the unyielding, or being waylaid by brigands, people often secured the services of linkboys—so called because they carried torches known as links made from stout lengths of rope soaked in resin or some other combustible material—to see them home. Unfortunately, the linkboys themselves couldn’t always be trusted and sometimes led their customers into back alleys where they or their confederates relieved the hapless customers of money and silken items.

Even after gaslights became widely available for city streets in the mid-nineteenth century, by modern standards it was still a pretty murky world after nightfall. The very brightest gas streetlamps provided less light than a modern 25-watt bulb. Moreover they were distantly spaced. Generally, at least thirty yards of darkness lay between each, but on some roads—the King’s Road through London’s Chelsea, for instance—they were seventy yards apart; thus, they didn’t so much light the way as provide distant points of brightness to aim for. Yet gas lamps held out for a surprisingly long time in some quarters. As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.

If anything drove people to bed early in the pre-electric world, it was not boredom but exhaustion. Many people worked immensely long hours. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers “must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night”—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek. At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind that a typical London theater like Shakespeare’s Globe could hold two thousand people (about 1 percent of London’s population), of whom a great part were working people, and that there were, moreover, several theaters in operation at any time, as well as alternative entertainments like bearbaiting and cockfighting. So, whatever the statutes may have decreed, it is apparent that on any given day several thousand working Londoners patently were not at their workbenches but were out having a good time.

What unquestionably consolidated long working hours was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the factory system. In factories, workers were expected to be at their places from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays, but during the busiest periods of the year—what were known as “brisk times”—they could be kept at their machines from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.—a nineteen-hour day. Until the Factory Act of 1833, children as young as seven were required to work as long as adults. In such circumstances, not surprisingly, people ate and slept when they could.

The rich kept gentler hours. Writing of country life in 1768, Fanny Burney noted: “We breakfast always at ten, and rise as much before as we please; we dine precisely at two, drink tea about six and sup exactly at nine.” Her routine is echoed in countless diaries and letters from others of her class. “I will give an account of one day and then you will see every day,” a young correspondent wrote to Edward Gibbon in about 1780. Her day, she wrote, began at nine, and breakfast was at ten. “And then about 11 I play on the harpsichord, or I draw; at 1 I translate and 2 walk out again, 3 I generally read, and 4 we go to dine, after dinner we play at backgammon, we drink tea at 7, and I work or play on the piano till 10, when we have our little bit of supper and 11, we go to bed.”

Lighting was of many types, all pretty unsatisfactory by modern standards. The most basic form was rushlights, which were made by cutting meadow rushes into strips about a foot and a half in length and coating them in animal fat, usually mutton. These were then placed in a metal holder and burned like a taper. A rushlight typically lasted fifteen to twenty minutes, so a good supply of rushes and patience was required to get through a long evening. Rushes were gathered once a year, in spring, so it was necessary to work out with some care how much illumination was needed over the coming twelve months.

For the better off, the usual form of lighting was candles. These 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—or at least it was until 1709, when Parliament, under pressure from the chandlers’ guilds, enacted a law making it illegal to make candles at home. This became a source of great resentment in the countryside and probably was widely flouted, but at some risk. People were still permitted to make rushlights, though this was sometimes a largely notional freedom. Because rushlights required a supply of animal fat, and during times of hardship peasants generally didn’t have animals to slaughter, they often had to pass their evenings not only hungry but in the dark.

Tallow was an exasperating material. Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to forty 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 to be used only 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, a 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.

Where conventional fuels were scarce, people used whatever would burn—gorse, ferns, seaweed, dried dung. In the Shetland Islands, according to James Boswell, stormy petrels were so naturally oily that people sometimes just stuck a wick down their throats and lit it, but I suspect Boswell was being a touch credulous. Elsewhere in Scotland dung was gathered and dried out to be used as an illuminant and fuel. The loss of fertilizing dung from fields left a lot of land impoverished and is said to have accelerated the agricultural decline there. Some people were luckier than others. In Dorset, around Kimmeridge Bay, the oil-rich shales on the beach burned like coal, could be gathered for free, and actually provided a better light. 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 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy. In At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett records how one girl who had attended a party in New England where the lamps smoked reported afterward, “Our noses were all black, & our clothes were perfectly gray and … quite ruined.” For that reason, many people stuck with candles even after other options became available. Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in The American Woman’s Home, a sort of American answer to Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, continued providing instructions for making candles at home until 1869.

Until the late eighteenth century the quality of lighting had remained unchanged for some three thousand 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. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast and remarked in frank admiration how a single Argand lamp could provide illumination equal to half a dozen candles. He was so impressed that he brought back several Argand lamps from Paris in 1790.

Argand himself never got the riches he deserved. His patents were not respected in France, so he relocated to England, but they weren’t respected there either or indeed anywhere else, and Argand made almost nothing from his devoted ingenuity.

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. Sperm whales are mysterious and elusive animals that are even now little understood. They produce and store great reserves of spermaceti—up to three tons of it—in a cavernous chamber in their skulls. 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 sperm whale its name. No one has ever worked out what spermaceti is for. It may somehow assist with buoyancy, or it may help with the processing of nitrogen in the whale’s blood. Sperm whales dive with great speed to an enormous depth—up to a mile—without evident ill effects, and it is thought that the spermaceti may in some unfathomed way explain why they don’t get the bends. Another theory is that the spermaceti provides shock absorption for males when they fight for mating rights. This would help explain the sperm whale’s infamous predilection for headbutting whaling ships, often lethally, when angered. But it isn’t actually known whether sperm whales headbutt one another. No less mysterious is the very valuable commodity they produce known as ambergris (from French words meaning “gray amber,” though in fact ambergris is as likely to be black as gray). Ambergris is formed in the digestive system of sperm whales—only recently has it been determined that it is made from the beaks of squid, the one part of that animal that they cannot digest—and excreted at irregular intervals. For centuries it was found floating in the sea or washed up on beaches, so no one knew where it came from. It made a peerless fixative for perfumes, which gave it great value, although people who could afford it ate it as well. Charles II of England thought ambergris and eggs the finest dish in existence. (The taste of ambergris is said to recall vanilla.) In any case, the presence of ambergris alongside all that precious spermaceti made sperm whales hugely attractive as prey.

In common with other types of whales, the oil of sperm whales was also craved by industry as an emollient in the manufacture of soaps and paints and as lubrication for machinery. Whales also yielded gratifying quantities of baleen, a bonelike substance taken from the upper jaw, which provided a sturdy but flexible material for corset stays, buggy whips, and other items that needed a measure of natural springiness.

Whale oil was an American speciality, both to produce and to consume. It was whaling that brought so much early wealth to New England ports like Nantucket and Salem. In 1846, America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together. Whale oil was taxed heavily throughout Europe, so people there tended to use colza (a type of oil made from cole seeds) or camphene (a derivative of turpentine), which made an excellent light, though it was highly unstable and tended, unnervingly, to explode.

Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about three hundred thousand were slaughtered in the four decades or so leading to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer—up to four years became common and five years not unknown—and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50—half an average worker’s weekly wage—yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale—possibly all—would have vanished forever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on Earth.

Gesner was a physician by profession, but he had an odd passion for coal geology. While experimenting with coal tar—a useless, sticky residue left over from the processing of coal into gas—he devised a way to distill it into a combustible liquid that he called (for uncertain reasons) kerosene. Kerosene burned beautifully and gave a light as strong and steady as that of whale oil, but with the potential to be produced much more cheaply. The problem was that production in volume seemed impossible. Gesner made enough to light the streets of Halifax and eventually started a plant in New York City, which ensured his personal prosperity, but kerosene squeezed from coal was never going to be more than a marginal product in the world at large. By the late 1850s, total American output was just six hundred barrels a day. (Coal tar itself, on the other hand, soon found applications in a vast range of products—paints, dyes, pesticides, medicines, and more. Coal tar became the basis of the modern chemical industry.)

Into this quandary strode another unexpected hero—a bright young man named George Bissell, who had just stepped down as superintendent of schools in New Orleans after a brief but distinguished career in public education. In 1853, on a visit to his hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire, Bissell called on a professor at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, and there he noticed a bottle of rock oil on the professor’s shelf. The professor told him that rock oil—what we would now call petroleum—seeped to the surface in western Pennsylvania. If you soaked a rag in it, the rag would burn, but nobody had found any use for rock oil other than as a constituent of patent medicines. Bissell conducted some experiments with rock oil and saw that it would make an outstanding illuminant if only it could be extracted on an industrial scale.

He formed a company called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and bought mineral leases along a sluggish waterway called Oil Creek, near Titusville in western Pennsylvania. Bissell’s novel idea was to drill for oil, as you would for water. Everyone before had dug for it. To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free. To enhance his stature, Bissell and his associates sent correspondence to Drake addressed to “Colonel E. L. Drake.”

With a wad of borrowed money, Drake commissioned a team of drillers to begin the search for oil. Although the drillers thought Drake was an amiable fool, they gladly accepted the work and began to drill to his instructions. Almost at once the project ran into technical difficulties. To the astonishment of all, Drake showed an unexpected knack for solving mechanical problems and was able to keep the project moving. For more than a year and a half they drilled, but no oil came. By the summer of 1859, Bissell and his partners were out of funds. Reluctantly, they dispatched a letter to Drake instructing him to shut down operations. Before the letter got there, however, on August 27, 1859, at a depth of just under seventy feet, Drake and his men hit oil. It wasn’t the towering gusher that we traditionally associate with oil strikes—this oil had to be laboriously pumped to the surface—but it produced a steady volume of viscous blue-green liquid.

Although no one remotely appreciated it at the time, they had just changed the world completely and forever.

The first problem for the company was where to store all the oil they were producing. There weren’t barrels enough locally, so for the first few weeks they stored oil in bathtubs, washbasins, buckets, and whatever else they could find. Eventually, they started making purpose-built barrels with a capacity of forty-two gallons, and these remain today the standard measure for oil. Then there was the even more pressing question of exploiting it commercially. In its natural state, oil was really just horrible gunk. Bissell set to work distilling it into something purer. In so doing he discovered that, once purified, it not only made an excellent lubricant but also produced as a side product very considerable quantities of gasoline and kerosene.* The gasoline had no use at all—it was way too volatile—and so was poured away, but the kerosene made a brilliant light, as Bissell had hoped. Even better, kerosene cost much less than Gesner’s coal-squeezed product. At last the world had a cheap illuminant to rival whale oil.

Once others saw how easy it was to extract oil and turn it into kerosene, a land rush was on. Soon hundreds of derricks crowded the landscape around Oil Creek. “In three months,” John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, “the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other towns throughout the region sprang up—Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president.”

In the year of Drake’s discovery, America produced two thousand barrels of oil; within ten years, it produced well over four million barrels, and in forty years that figure was sixty million. Unfortunately, Bissell, Drake, and the other investors in his company (now renamed the Seneca Oil Company) didn’t prosper to quite the degree that they had hoped. Other wells produced far greater volumes—one called Pool Well pumped out three thousand barrels a day—and the sheer number of producing wells provided such a glut for the market that the price of oil plunged catastrophically, from $10 a barrel in January 1861 to just 10 cents a barrel by the end of the year. This was good news for consumers and whales, but not so good for oilmen. As the boom turned to bust, prices of land collapsed. In 1878, a plot of land in Pithole City sold for $4.37. Thirteen years earlier it had fetched $2 million.

While others were failing and desperately trying to get out of the oil business, a small firm in Cleveland called Clark and Rockefeller, which normally dealt in pork and other farm commodities, decided to move in. It began buying up failed leases. By 1877, less than twenty years after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Clark had vanished from the scene and John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business. Oil not only provided the raw material for an exceedingly lucrative form of illumination but also answered a desperate need for lubrication for all the engines and machinery of the new industrial age. Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and to grow fantastically rich in the process. By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes. No human being in modern times has been richer.

Bissell and his partners had more mixed fortunes, and at a decidedly more modest level. The Seneca Oil Company made money for a while, but in 1864, just five years after Drake’s drilling breakthrough, it could no longer compete and went out of business. Drake squandered the money he made and died soon after, penniless and crippled by neuralgia. Bissell did much better. He invested his earnings in a bank and other businesses, and accrued a small fortune—enough to build Dartmouth a handsome gymnasium, which still stands.

While kerosene was establishing itself as the illuminant of choice in millions of homes, particularly in small towns and rural areas, it was challenged in many larger communities by another wonder of the age: gas. 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 till closer to the middle of the century.

Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors, gas blackened ceilings, discolored 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 parlor 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 as the pressure was stepped up later in the day, 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 twenty 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. It made reading, card playing, and even conversing more agreeable. Diners could see the condition of their food; they could find their way around delicate fish bones and know how much salt came out the hole. One could drop a needle and find it before daylight. Book titles became discernible on their shelves. People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

Gas was particularly popular in America and Britain. By 1850 it was available in most large cities in both countries. Gas remained, however, a middle-class indulgence. The poor couldn’t afford it, and the rich tended to disdain it—partly because of the cost and disruption of installing it, partly because of the damage it did to paintings and precious fabrics, and partly because when you have servants to do everything for you already there isn’t the same urgency to invest in further conveniences. The ironic upshot is that not only middle-class homes but also institutions like lunatic asylums and prisons tended to be better lit—and, come to that, better warmed—long before England’s stateliest homes were.

Keeping warm remained a challenge for most people right through the nineteenth century. Our Mr. Marsham had a fireplace in virtually every room of his rectory, even the dressing room, in addition to a hefty kitchen stove. Cleaning, laying, and stoking such a number must have been enormous work, yet for several months of the year the house was almost certainly uncomfortably cold. (It still is.) Fireplaces just aren’t efficient enough to keep any but the smallest spaces warm. This could be overlooked in a temperate place like England, but in the frigid winters of much of North America the fireplace’s inadequacies at projecting warmth into a room became numbingly apparent. Thomas Jefferson complained that he had to stop writing one evening because the ink had frozen in his inkwell. A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn’t get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

It was Benjamin Franklin, predictably enough, who turned his attention to the matter and invented what became known as the Franklin (or Pennsylvania) stove. Franklin’s stove was an undoubted improvement, though more on paper than in practice. Essentially, it was a metal stove inserted into a fireplace, but with additional flues and vents that ingeniously redirected air flow and wafted more heat back into the room. But it was also complex and expensive and brought great—often intolerable—disruption to every room in which it was installed. The heart of the system was a second, rear flue, which proved to be impossible to sweep unless it was fully dismantled. The stove also required an under-floor cool-air vent, which in practical terms meant the stove couldn’t be installed in upstairs rooms or where there was a basement below, disqualifying it from many houses altogether. Franklin’s design was improved upon in America by David Rittenhouse and in Europe by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, but real comfort came only when people sealed off their fireplaces and brought a stove fully into the room. This kind of stove, known as a Dutch stove, smelled of hot iron and dried out the atmosphere, but at least it kept the occupants warm.

As Americans moved west into the prairies and beyond, an absence of wood for fuel caused problems. Corncobs were widely used, as were dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as “surface coal.” In wilderness areas, Americans also burned all kinds of fat—hog fat, deer fat, bear fat, even the fat of passenger pigeons—and fish oils, though all these were smoky and stank.

Stoves became something of an American obsession. By the early twentieth century more than seven thousand types had been registered with the U.S. Patent Office. The one quality all had in common was that they took quite a lot of work to keep going. A typical stove in 1899, according to a study in Boston, burned some three hundred pounds of coal in a week, produced twenty-seven pounds of ash, and required three hours and eleven minutes of attention. If one had stoves in both kitchen and living room, as well perhaps as open fires elsewhere, that represented a lot of extra work. One other significant drawback of enclosed stoves was that they robbed the room of a good deal of light.

The combination of open flames and combustible materials brought an element of alarm and excitement to every aspect of daily life in the pre-electric world. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary how he bent over a candle while working at his desk, and soon afterward became aware of a horrible, pungent smell, as of burning wool; only then did he realize that his new and very expensive wig was impressively aflame. Such small fires were a common occurrence. Nearly every room of every house had open flames at least some of the time, and nearly every house was fabulously combustible, since almost everything within or on it, from straw beds to thatched roofs, was a fuel in waiting. To reduce dangers at night, people covered fires with a kind of domed lid called a coverfeu (from which comes the word curfew), but danger could never be entirely avoided.

Technological refinements sometimes improved the quality of light, but just as often increased the risk of fire. Because their fuel reservoirs had to be elevated to assist the flow of fuel to the wick, Argand lamps were top-heavy and therefore easily knocked over. And kerosene fires were almost impossible to put out. By the 1870s such fires were killing as many as six thousand people a year in America alone.

Fires in public places became a great worry, too, especially after the development of a now-forgotten but lively form of illumination known as the Drummond light, named for a Thomas Drummond of Britain’s Royal Engineers, who was popularly but wrongly credited with its invention in the early 1820s. It was in fact invented by a Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a fellow engineer and an inventor of considerable talent. Drummond merely popularized the light and never claimed to have invented it, but somehow the credit became attached to him and has remained there ever since. The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from. The downside was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in theater fires in Britain, according to a report published in 1899 by William Paul Gerhard, the leading fire authority of the day.

Fire was even a danger for people on the move—indeed, often more so since means of escape were constrained or impossible on various modes of transportation. In 1858, when the immigrant ship Austria caught fire at sea en route to the United States, nearly five hundred people perished horribly as the vessel was consumed beneath them. Trains were dangerous, too. From about 1840, passenger carriages came with wood- or coal-burning stoves in the winter and oil lamps to read by, and the scope for catastrophes on a lurching train is easily imagined. As late as 1921, twenty-seven people perished in a stove fire on a train near Philadelphia.

On solid land, the greatest fear with fires was that they would get out of control and spread, destroying whole districts. The most famous urban fire in history is almost certainly the Great Fire of London of 1666, which began as a small fire in a bakery near London Bridge but quickly spread until it was half a mile across. As far away as Oxford, people could see the smoke and hear the fire as a small, eerie whisper. Altogether, it consumed 13,200 houses and 140 churches. But the fire of 1666 was actually the second Great Fire of London. A fire in 1212 was far more devastating. Though smaller in extent than the one of 1666, it was swifter and more frenzied, and leaped from street to street with such dreadful rapidity that many fleeing citizens were overtaken or left without escape routes. It was also more deadly, claiming twelve thousand lives (versus five people killed in the 1666 fire, as far as is known). For 454 years, the fire of 1212 was known as the Great Fire of London. It really still ought to be.

Most cities suffered devastating fires from time to time; some had them repeatedly. Boston had them in 1653, 1676, 1679, 1711, and 1761. Then it had a lull until the winter of 1834, when a fire in the night burned down seven hundred buildings—most of the downtown—and grew so fierce that it spread to ships in the harbor. But all city fires pale when compared with the fire that swept through Chicago on a windy night in October 1871, when a cow owned by a Mrs. Patrick O’Leary reputedly kicked over a kerosene lantern in a milking shed on DeKoven Street, and all kinds of dreadful mayhem swiftly followed. The fire destroyed 18,000 buildings and made 150,000 people homeless. Damages topped $200 million and put fifty-one insurance companies out of business. The following year, Boston had another big fire, which destroyed nearly 800 buildings and left 60 acres of smoldering waste.

Where houses were packed close together, as in European cities, there wasn’t a great deal anyone could do, though housebuilders did come up with one useful remedy. Originally, the joists in English terraced houses ran from side to side and sat on the partition walls between houses. This essentially created a linear run of joists along a block, heightening the risk of fires spreading from house to house. So from the Georgian period, joists were run front to back in houses, turning the partition walls into firebreaks. However, having joists run from the front of the house to the back meant they needed supporting walls, which dictated room sizes, which in turn determined how rooms were used and houses lived in.

One natural phenomenon promised 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, the eighteenth-century Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani showed how electricity could make muscles twitch. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, realizing 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 the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy had demonstrated but not capitalized on more than forty years earlier. In Holmes’s hands the result was a blindingly bright light. Almost nothing is known about Holmes—where he came from, what his educational background was, how he learned to master electricity. All that is known is that he worked at the École Militaire in Brussels, where he developed the concept with a Professor Floris Nollet, then returned to England and brought his invention to the great Michael Faraday, who saw at once that it could provide a perfect light for lighthouses.

The first one was installed at the South Foreland Lighthouse, just outside Dover, and powered up on December 8, 1858.* It ran for thirteen 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.

The one thing to be said for arc lamps was that they were amazingly bright. St. Enoch’s Railway Station in Glasgow was lit with six Crompton lamps—named for R. E. Crompton, their manufacturer—that each boasted 6,000 candlepower. In Paris, a Russian-born inventor named Paul Jablochkoff developed a form of arc lights that came to be known as Jablochkoff candles. Used to light many Parisian streets and monuments in the 1870s, they became a sensation. Unfortunately, the system was expensive and didn’t work very well. The lights operated in sequence: if one failed, they all failed, like Christmas lights. Failing was something they did a lot. After just five years, the Jablochkoff Company fell into bankruptcy.

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 that worked for several hours, but nobody wanted a lightbulb that cost a lot to make and only worked for a few hours, so Grove didn’t pursue its development. In Newcastle, a young pharmacist and keen inventor named Joseph Swan saw a demonstration of Grove’s light and made some successful experiments of his own, but the technology was lacking to get a really good vacuum in a bulb. Without that vacuum, any filament would burn out quickly, making a bulb a costly, short-lived indulgence. Besides, Swan was interested in other matters, in particular photography. He invented silver bromide photographic paper, which allowed the first high-quality photographic prints to be made; perfected the collodion process; and also made several refinements to photographic chemicals. Meanwhile, his pharmaceutical business, which involved manufacturing as well as retailing, was booming. In 1867, his business partner and brother-in-law John Mawson died in a freak accident while disposing of nitroglycerine on a moor outside the city. It was, in short, a complicated and distracted time for Swan, and his interests moved away from illumination for thirty years.

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. Unfortunately, only one person in history thought Hermann Sprengel deserved to be better known: Hermann Sprengel. 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 favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.” But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.

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 carbonized cardboard, twisted thin and carefully folded, that would burn for as long as thirteen hours—still not nearly enough to be practical. On the last day of 1879, Edison invited a select audience to come and witness a demonstration of his new incandescent lights. As they arrived at his estate at Menlo Park, New Jersey, they were wowed by the sight of two buildings warmly aglow. What they didn’t realize was that the light was mostly non-electrical. Edison’s overworked glass blowers had been able to prepare only thirty-four bulbs, so the bulk of the illumination actually came from carefully positioned oil lamps.

Swan didn’t get back into electric lighting until 1877, but working on his own, he independently came up with a more or less identical lighting system. In January or February 1879, Swan gave a public display of his new electric incandescent lamp in Newcastle. The vagueness of date is because it isn’t certain whether he demonstrated his lamp at a public lecture in January or merely talked about it, but the following month he most certainly fired it up to an appreciative audience. In either case, his demonstration was at least eight months ahead of anything Edison could manage. That same year, Swan installed lights in his own home and by 1881 had wired up the house of the great scientist Lord Kelvin in Glasgow—again well ahead of anything Edison was able to achieve.

However, when Edison’s first practical installation did come, it was far more prominent and therefore more lastingly significant. Edison wired a whole district of lower Manhattan, around Wall Street, to be powered by a plant installed in two semiderelict buildings on Pearl Street. Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1881–82, Edison laid fifteen miles of cable and fanatically tested and retested his system. Not all went smoothly. Horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle. Back at Edison’s workshops, several of his men lost teeth to mercury poisoning from overexposure to Sprengel’s mercury pump. But all the problems were finally resolved, and on the afternoon of September 4, 1882, Edison, standing in the office of the financier John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan, threw a switch that illuminated eight hundred electric bulbs in the eighty-five businesses that had signed up for his scheme.

Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The lightbulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lamp stands and switches. Within months, Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world; within a year or so, his plants were powering thirteen thousand lightbulbs. Cannily, he put his incandescent bulbs in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: the New York Stock Exchange, the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn’t, in short, have a lot of vision. Indeed, he didn’t even file for a patent. Edison took out patents everywhere, including in Britain in November 1879, and so secured his preeminence.

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 reporter 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.” It was exciting, but clearly it was also going to take some getting used to.

And of course electricity had applications way beyond simply providing lighting. As early as 1893, the Columbian Exposition in Chicago displayed a “model electric kitchen.” It was exciting, too, though not yet very practical. For one thing, since electricity distribution was not yet general, it was necessary for most owners to build their own “electric plant” on the property to provide the necessary power. Even if they were lucky enough to be wired up to the outside world, utilities couldn’t supply sufficient power to make appliances work well. It took an hour just to preheat an oven; even then the oven could produce no more than a very modest 600 watts of heating, and you couldn’t use the stovetop at the same time as the oven. There were certain design deficiencies, too. The knobs to regulate the heat were just above floor level. To modern eyes, these new electric stoves looked odd because they were built of wood, generally oak, lined with zinc or some other protective material. White porcelain models didn’t come in until the 1920s—and they were considered very odd when they did. Many people thought they looked as if they should be in a hospital or a factory, not in a private home.

As electricity became more freely available, many people found it unnerving to be relying for comfort on an invisible force that could swiftly and silently kill. Most electricians were hastily trained and all were necessarily inexperienced, so the profession quickly became one for daredevils. Newspapers gave full and vivid accounts whenever an electrician electrocuted himself, as happened pretty routinely. In England, the poet Hilaire Belloc offered a snatch of doggerel that caught the public mood:

Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip—

The Terminals—flash—a sound like “Zip!”

A smell of burning fills the startled Air—

The Electrician is no longer there!

In 1896, Edison’s former partner Franklin Pope electrocuted himself while working on the wiring in his own house, proving to many people’s satisfaction that electricity was too dangerous even for experts. Fires due to electrical faults were not uncommon. Lightbulbs sometimes exploded, always startlingly, sometimes disastrously. The new Dreamland Park at Coney Island burned down in 1911 after a lightbulb burst. Errant sparks from faulty connections caused more than a few gas mains to explode, which meant that one didn’t even have to be connected to the electricity supply to be perilously at risk.

Something of the prevailing ambivalence was demonstrated by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who went to a costume ball dressed as an electric light to celebrate the installation of electricity in her Fifth Avenue home in New York, but later had the whole system taken out when it was suspected of being the source of a small fire. Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named Shirley Foster Murphy, in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies—eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness, and possibly even “the premature exhaustion of life.” One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.

For the first few years, no one thought of plugs and sockets, so any electrical appliances had to be wired directly into the system. When sockets did finally come in, around the turn of the century, they were available only as part of overhead light fittings, which meant having to stand on a chair or stepladder to plug in any early appliance. Wall sockets soon followed, but weren’t always terribly reliable. Early ones reportedly tended to crackle and smoke, and sometimes shot out sparks. At one stately home in Scotland, until well into Edwardian times it was the practice to throw cushions at one particularly lively wall outlet, according to the historian Juliet Gardiner.

Consumer growth was also held back by the depression of the 1890s. But electric lighting was ultimately irresistible. It was clean, steady, easy to maintain, and available instantaneously and in infinite amounts at the flick of a switch. Gas lighting had taken half a century to establish itself, but electric lighting caught on much more quickly. By 1900, in cities anyway, electric lighting was increasingly the norm—and electrical appliances ineluctably followed: the electric fan in 1891, the vacuum cleaner in 1901, the washing machine and electric iron in 1909, the toaster in 1910, the refrigerator and dishwasher in 1918. By that time, some fifty types of household appliances were reasonably common, and electrical gadgets were so fashionable that manufacturers were producing every possible kind they could think of, from curling tongs to an electric potato peeler. The annual use of electricity in the United States went from 79 kilowatt hours per capita in 1902, to 960 in 1929, to well over 13,000 today.

It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this, so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light, but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition. It was also a vastly more lucrative one. Thanks to Thomas Edison, electric lighting became the wonder of the age. Interestingly, as we shall see a little further on, electric lighting turned out to be one of the remarkably few Edison inventions that actually did what he hoped it would do.

Joseph Swan was so thoroughly eclipsed that few have heard of him outside England, and he isn’t terribly much celebrated there. Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography gives him a modest three pages, less than it gives to the courtesan Kitty Fisher or any number of talentless aristocrats. But then that’s much more than Frederick Hale Holmes, who doesn’t get mentioned at all. History is often like that.

* The French, according to A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, had a curious expression, which I pass on without comment: “By candle-light a goat is lady-like.”

* Both gasoline and kerosene were variously spelled in the beginning. Gesner actually termed his product “Kerocene” in his patent application of 1854. Scientists hate inconsistency, and petroleum geologists have from time to time tried to make the spelling of the terminal syllables match, but obviously without success. They have been equally unsuccessful with the terminal pronunciations of hydrocarbons, as evidenced by turpentine. The British resolved part of the problem by calling kerosene paraffin.

* South Foreland Lighthouse, now in the hands of the National Trust and very much worth a visit, became famous again in 1899 when Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first international radio signal from there to Wimereux in France.