Having a voracious appetite for reading, I have found few books that I didn't like. This one fascinated me as I work with LED's, lasers, etc. I didn't realize it would go into such detailed history of lamps, candles, and every possible method of producing artificial light beginning thousands of years ago. There are so many instances of historical significance in this book, I just have to buy a copy for my History Teacher Son. I would consider it one of the most fascinating history texts available. The author has a wonderful ability to describe things in a way that you almost feel as though you had experienced it yourself. She makes even dull scientific data fascinating and interesting. I love books, I love reading. I have read books for sixty years. But this is easily one of the best books I have ever read.
Thank you Jane Brox for your marvelous masterpiece.
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This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light.
Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world’s ecosystems.
Edison’s bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light
In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light.
Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world’s ecosystems.
Edison’s bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 29, 2010
- File size2701 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: In Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, Jane Brox illuminates the fascinating and forgotten history of man-made light, tracing its development through centuries of sputtering, smoking candles, to the gradual refinement of gas and, finally, electric light. Brox captures the sense of wonder that permeated the Chicago World's Fair as electric light lit up the "White City," and shows how quickly we became reliant on electric light, recounting the trepidation and anxiety that accompanied the mandatory blackouts of World War II and the power outages that have plagued New York City's power grid since the 1960s. Brox also addresses the unexpected consequences of light pollution, detailing the struggles of astronomers who are no longer able to see stars, and migrating birds that confusedly circle lit buildings at night until they die from exhaustion. Brilliant is an eloquent account of how a luxury so quickly became a necessity, and permanently changed human history. --Lynette Mong
Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Jane Brox, Author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
Dear Amazon Readers, So much of life as we know it--our long evening hours, our flexible working days, our feelings of safety at night--depends upon cheap, abundant light made possible by the incandescent bulb. Now that new government energy efficiency standards will make filament light bulbs illegal by 2014--and for the first time our new means of illumination may not be as satisfactory as the old--it's the perfect moment to look at the extraordinary story of how we came to inhabit our world built of light. Just five hundred years ago almost everyone lived at the mercy of the dark. In a time before street lighting, travel at night was always perilous, and forbidden to all but a few. Most people were confined to their homes after sunset--authorities in some towns even locked citizens inside their houses for the night. Within their close quarters, many had no hope of more than a few hours of light in evening--meager, troublesome light cast by one or two stinking tallow candles or oil lamps. Since then, each century of painstaking progress in illumination has had its own drama. The 18th century's need for more and more light spurred a world-wide hunt for whale oil, which proved to be so exhaustive it put the very survival of some whale species in peril, while the 19th century race to build a viable electric light involved the work of many scientists throughout Europe and America. In truth, Edison's bulb was not the isolated triumph it often seems to us now. His achievement was only possible after centuries of evolving understanding of electricity, and decades of experiments by dozens of scientists racing to fashion a workable incandescent light. Edison's light assured cheap, abundant illumination for many, but not all. The democratic distribution of light in the United States depended upon the decades-long struggle by rural Americans to have the same access to electricity as those in the cities and suburbs. And controversies continue: as the demands for energy efficiency compete with our desires to have the light we want, we find ourselves in the midst of a new race for the perfect energy efficient light of the future. And as the grave consequences of light pollution become more and more evident we are faced with the question: How much light is too much? When you read Brilliant you'll not only gain insight into the history of artificial light, you'll find that the surprising, complex story of our illumination is also the story of our evolving modern selves. -Jane Brox(Photo © Luc Demers)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A superb history of how the availability of ever more artificial light has changed our world over the centuries, from stone lamps in prehistoric caves to contemporary light-emitting diodes (LEDs). No simpleminded technological determinist, Brox (Here and Nowhere Else) appreciates how culture and technology have affected each other at every stage. She repeatedly reveals how humankind™s increasing ability to extend the hours of light available for work and for leisure has been critical to the evolution of societies almost everywhere. Her readings of, for example, prehistoric southern French caves, medieval and early modern villages, whaling and other ships, industrializing cities, Chicago™s White City of 1893, and wartime and peacetime blackouts are invariably fascinating and often original. In addition, she conveys technical information clearly and concisely. Brox™s concluding portions, about the unexpected negative effects of too much artificial light on observatories in southern California and elsewhere, are provocative and dismaying. With Brox™s beautiful prose, this book amply lives up to its title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Brox's intriguing blend of science, cultural analysis, and social history drew diverse reactions from critics. While the Boston Globe and the Washington Post would have preferred a tightened focus on technology, others applauded her ability to illuminate the relationships between and interdependence of culture, politics, economics, and science. Brox may not be an authority on such matters, but whatever she lacks in expertise, she makes up in enthusiasm and rigorous research. Her elegant writing, engaging characterizations, succinct technical explanations, and vivid evocations of a darkened nighttime world that no longer exists compensate for a meandering narrative and some debatable conclusions. Readers may never look at their bedside lamps in the same way again.
From Booklist
Brox’s fluency in history blossomed in the third of her memoirs about her family’s farm, Clearing Land (2004). She now leaps from cultivation to illumination to cover another watershed in human civilization, the development of artificial light. A companionable writer, Brox begins by considering the simple yet ingenious lamps used by the artists who created prehistoric cave paintings, then moves on describe the exhausting labor involved in making household tallow candles. Whaling and whale oil lamps, the rise of gaslight, and the invention of kerosene and the start of the oil industry––Brox elucidates each wave of technological innovation with lively interest and an eye to social ramifications. Naturally the story of electricity dominates, delivering a curious cast of inventors to the page along with incisive critiques of electrical inequities, the appliance boom, and the need today for a new “smart grid.” Brox also explains the adverse consequences of continual artificial light on humans and wildlife. Invaluable and thought-provoking, Brox’s inquiry into artificial light reminds us that the too-much-of-a-good-thing paradox is inherent in all of our technological endeavors. --Donna Seaman
Review
"Just one of the many pleasures of Jane Brox's sweeping history of human light is its evocation of the wonder and fascination the lowly light bulb roused when it was new, before it became, by virtue of the reverse alchemy of mass production, abundant and déclassé. Brox succeeds brilliantly thanks to writing that rivals her subject in sparkle, glow, and wattage." --Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind “I'll gladly read anything by Jane Brox on any subject, but her poetic and original retelling of the story of manmade light provides a suitably grand occasion for her superb powers of observation and her intimate, precise, startlingly evocative prose to shine.” --Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time "In gracious, elegant, unhurried prose, Jane Brox unspools the story of light. Every page contains at least one small marvel, but the greatest wonder is the realization that what she has illuminated is nothing less than a story of ourselves, and of the myriad ways our lives are 'interconnected, contingent, and intricate.' BRILLIANT, indeed."- --Leah Hager Cohen , athor of Train Go Sorry and House Lights
"Brilliant is fascinating in its subject matter, charming in its storytelling and accessible style, and meticulously researched. This kind of book helps place science in a human context." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
"Brilliant is fascinating in its subject matter, charming in its storytelling and accessible style, and meticulously researched. This kind of book helps place science in a human context." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
From the Back Cover
The Fascinating Story of Our Emergence from Dark and How We Came to Inhabit Our World Built of Light
“It takes a special turn of mind to even think of writing a history of artificial light. But Jane Brox takes this curious, thin slice of history and makes of it a dazzling epic.” — Lev Grossman, Time, “Top 10 Everything of 2010”
“Ruminative and curious, Brox excels at discussing the cultural and psychological changes wrought by more and better light . . . An intriguing investigation of a state of being — well lighted — that we take utterly for granted.”— New York Times Book Review
Five hundred years ago almost everyone lived at the mercy of the night. Today, life as we know it — long evening hours and our feeling of safety — depends upon cheap, abundant light. In Brilliant, award-winning author Jane Brox offers a sweeping history of our relationship with light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs of the future. In this compelling story — imbued with human voices and startling insights — Brox also raises timely questions about how the light to come will shape our lives, and ultimately reveals that as we have changed light, light has also changed us.
“Brox succeeds brilliantly thanks to writing that rivals her subject in sparkle, glow, and wattage.” — Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
JANE BROX is the author of Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine. Visit www. janebrox.com.
About the Author
JANE BROX is the author of Brilliant, Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine.
From The Washington Post
Until the 18th century, night was an impenetrable abyss. Tallow candles, made of rendered animal fat, barely lightened the darkness. The workday was tied to the sun; once you could no longer see your work, labor stopped. Then tallow candles began to be replaced by whale spermaceti candles, which were twice as brilliant, and by lamps that burned cheap and abundant whale oil. Small wonder that this era was later dubbed the Age of Enlightenment.
Robert Louis Stevenson likened gaslight, which by the 1820s was supplied to London via several hundred miles of underground mains, to the work of Prometheus. A few decades later, around the time that Russia's Paul Jablochkoff was making major improvements to the arc lamp -- the first electric light -- Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled electric lights for banishing the shadows created by "the flame of oil, which contented you before." Artificial light, it seemed, was progress made visible.
But, Jane Brox asks, at what cost? Though she celebrates human ingenuity and technical advances in "Brilliant," her history of artificial light, Brox also presents damning evidence that in our millennia-long quest for ever more and brighter light, we've despoiled the natural world, abandoned our self-sufficiency and trained ourselves to sleep and dream less while working more. It's time, Brox urges, to "think rationally about light and what it means to us." Yes, the history of artificial light has its dark side, for those who aren't too dazzled to detect it.
Unlike the compact fluorescent light bulb, about which the author rhapsodizes at one point, "Brilliant" isn't very efficient. For example, it's concerned at least as much with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Northeast Blackout of 1965 as it is with what we might call the dialectic of artificial enlightenment. Yet like Edison's incandescent bulb, which has become the cartoonist's symbol of bright ideas, Brox's history is warm and illuminating.
What artificial light has signified to us, according to Brox's analysis, is the Enlightenment's promise of liberty and equality. But in reality, the wealthy and powerful have always acquired new kinds of light first and enjoyed a disproportionate share of their splendor. The advent of new lighting in the 19th century, Brox notes, "stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry." As late as 1906, when electricity was not yet considered essential for everyone, electric lighting was available only to businesses, manufacturers and wealthy homeowners. Until the New Deal, everyone else was consigned to darkness.
But perhaps, Brox argues, that wasn't such a bad thing. Before the advances in lamp technology, the nights were long, and sleep was divided by one or more intervals of semiconscious wakefulness when men and women shrouded in gloom might talk, make love, pray, reflect, even visit others. Sounds delightful, doesn't it?
Alas, thanks to improvements in artificial lighting, free-running sleep long ago went the way of handlooms. Working hours, meanwhile, have grown longer. The God of Utility, in Baudelaire's pejorative phrase, demanded brighter illumination, and he received it. Gas lighting was first embraced by factories; a century later, Edison's light bulb helped establish the three-shift day and the final erasure of natural time in the workplace.
If illumination-disadvantaged people were out of sight and out of mind, so too were the negative effects of artificial lighting on the natural world. In the early 19th century, the demand for whale oil led to the near-extinction of sperm whales. Gaslight, a byproduct of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke, required dangerous mining. Kerosene produced from petroleum encouraged oil drilling, the costs of which we're still trying to calculate in lost troops abroad and ruined habitat at home.
Part of the allure of electric lighting, Brox recounts, was its supposed cleanliness: "All the attendant work and grime of production existed somewhere out of sight." Yet, until the energy crisis of the early 1970s, few realized how essential coal mining and oil drilling had become to the energy grids of industrialized countries.
Exploitation of fossil fuels won't be possible forever, yet visions of a "smart grid" and organic light-emitting diodes won't fix our fundamental energy problems. Why? Because the more modern we've become, the more we've taken our lighting and its power sources on faith. Before gaslight and then electrical lighting, Brox writes, "light -- however meager -- had always been one's own and self-contained within each dwelling." In the wake of the gasworks and the generating plant, though, light became something "interconnected, contingent, and intricate. . . . It marked the beginning of the way we are now, with our nets of voices, signs and pulses, with power subject to flickers and loss we can't do anything about." The 21st century has the potential to become a new Dark Age -- except we're all less self-reliant now.
As I write this, Concord, Mass., is taking down hundreds of streetlights on side streets and rural roads to cut costs while reducing its carbon footprint. Emerson, the sage of Concord, who compared the evolution of lighting with moral progress, might be dismayed to learn that those who wish to keep a light shining in the darkness have the opportunity to do so -- if they can afford $17 per streetlight, per month.
bookworld@washpost.com
Reviewed by by Joshua Glenn
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Robert Louis Stevenson likened gaslight, which by the 1820s was supplied to London via several hundred miles of underground mains, to the work of Prometheus. A few decades later, around the time that Russia's Paul Jablochkoff was making major improvements to the arc lamp -- the first electric light -- Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled electric lights for banishing the shadows created by "the flame of oil, which contented you before." Artificial light, it seemed, was progress made visible.
But, Jane Brox asks, at what cost? Though she celebrates human ingenuity and technical advances in "Brilliant," her history of artificial light, Brox also presents damning evidence that in our millennia-long quest for ever more and brighter light, we've despoiled the natural world, abandoned our self-sufficiency and trained ourselves to sleep and dream less while working more. It's time, Brox urges, to "think rationally about light and what it means to us." Yes, the history of artificial light has its dark side, for those who aren't too dazzled to detect it.
Unlike the compact fluorescent light bulb, about which the author rhapsodizes at one point, "Brilliant" isn't very efficient. For example, it's concerned at least as much with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Northeast Blackout of 1965 as it is with what we might call the dialectic of artificial enlightenment. Yet like Edison's incandescent bulb, which has become the cartoonist's symbol of bright ideas, Brox's history is warm and illuminating.
What artificial light has signified to us, according to Brox's analysis, is the Enlightenment's promise of liberty and equality. But in reality, the wealthy and powerful have always acquired new kinds of light first and enjoyed a disproportionate share of their splendor. The advent of new lighting in the 19th century, Brox notes, "stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry." As late as 1906, when electricity was not yet considered essential for everyone, electric lighting was available only to businesses, manufacturers and wealthy homeowners. Until the New Deal, everyone else was consigned to darkness.
But perhaps, Brox argues, that wasn't such a bad thing. Before the advances in lamp technology, the nights were long, and sleep was divided by one or more intervals of semiconscious wakefulness when men and women shrouded in gloom might talk, make love, pray, reflect, even visit others. Sounds delightful, doesn't it?
Alas, thanks to improvements in artificial lighting, free-running sleep long ago went the way of handlooms. Working hours, meanwhile, have grown longer. The God of Utility, in Baudelaire's pejorative phrase, demanded brighter illumination, and he received it. Gas lighting was first embraced by factories; a century later, Edison's light bulb helped establish the three-shift day and the final erasure of natural time in the workplace.
If illumination-disadvantaged people were out of sight and out of mind, so too were the negative effects of artificial lighting on the natural world. In the early 19th century, the demand for whale oil led to the near-extinction of sperm whales. Gaslight, a byproduct of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke, required dangerous mining. Kerosene produced from petroleum encouraged oil drilling, the costs of which we're still trying to calculate in lost troops abroad and ruined habitat at home.
Part of the allure of electric lighting, Brox recounts, was its supposed cleanliness: "All the attendant work and grime of production existed somewhere out of sight." Yet, until the energy crisis of the early 1970s, few realized how essential coal mining and oil drilling had become to the energy grids of industrialized countries.
Exploitation of fossil fuels won't be possible forever, yet visions of a "smart grid" and organic light-emitting diodes won't fix our fundamental energy problems. Why? Because the more modern we've become, the more we've taken our lighting and its power sources on faith. Before gaslight and then electrical lighting, Brox writes, "light -- however meager -- had always been one's own and self-contained within each dwelling." In the wake of the gasworks and the generating plant, though, light became something "interconnected, contingent, and intricate. . . . It marked the beginning of the way we are now, with our nets of voices, signs and pulses, with power subject to flickers and loss we can't do anything about." The 21st century has the potential to become a new Dark Age -- except we're all less self-reliant now.
As I write this, Concord, Mass., is taking down hundreds of streetlights on side streets and rural roads to cut costs while reducing its carbon footprint. Emerson, the sage of Concord, who compared the evolution of lighting with moral progress, might be dismayed to learn that those who wish to keep a light shining in the darkness have the opportunity to do so -- if they can afford $17 per streetlight, per month.
bookworld@washpost.com
Reviewed by by Joshua Glenn
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lascaux: The First Lamp Although fire has blazed in hearths and flared from pine torches for half a million years, the earliest known stone lamps — fashioned by Ice Age humans during the Pleistocene — are no more than forty thousand years old. Their quiet flames shone more weakly than those of our candles, but they were cleaner than torchwood and easier to guard and tend. Often the lamps were merely unworked flat slabs of limestone, or limestone with natural cavities for the nubs of tallow — animal fat — that had to be replenished every hour. Some were roughly carved and their reservoirs carefully shaped with sloping sides so that the melted fat could be poured off without drowning the lichen, moss, or juniper wicks. Since limestone is a poor conductor of heat, there’d have been no need to carve a handle: people could hold the lamp in the palm of their hands. Except that the cups are charred, they could be mistaken for small mortars or grinding stones.Archaeologists have discovered such stone lamps overturned near open hearths and among cooking tools and spearpoints in shallow rock shelters. They’ve also unearthed them far from settlements, deep in the caves of what is currently southern France, caves that are now famous — La Mouthe, Lascaux — for there isn’t anything more beautiful than what Ice Age humans made by such light. Eighteen thousand years ago, while above them herds funneled through valleys on their way to the plains near the coast, people ventured far beyond the reach of day — working their way down stone corridors and twisting through narrows — to draw from memory on the limestone walls and ceilings. Sometimes their works extend higher than human reach: a man would have had to stand on scaffolding or upon a rock protruding from a wall to make marks with his hands and with bristles dipped in manganese and iron oxide. More often, the artist held the pigment in his mouth and blew it onto the cave wall to make a mark. He also blew through hollowed-out bones. Concentrated marks one after another produced the sturdy outline of an animal, while a more diffuse spray colored a flank or back. In places details are certain and fine. Elsewhere the marks are suggestive: four streaks make a cat’s head. At times the contours of the wall stand for the back of a horse, a small protuberance for an eye. The artists understood how to place a leg or draw the turn of a head to create a sense of visual depth in their work.In the chambers of Lascaux, black and brilliant animals swirl, eddy, and flow toward the deepest reaches of the cave: Galloping horses and horses superimposed on horses, a great red and black horse, a horse with a turned-back foot, a horse rolling on the ground, traces of a painted equid. A black stag, swimming stags, a fallen stag, a stag with thirteen arrows. A great stag and horse with merged outlines. A headless equid drawn in red. Two bison, the head of a bison, the head and horns of a cow, a red cow painted on the ceiling. The solitary head of a bull in the Hall of the Bulls. Panel of the Musk Ox, Panel of the Ibexes, Niche of the Felines. Wounded, grazing, fleeing, young: "The iconography of this cave," said archaeologist Norbert Aujoulat, "is, above all, a fantastic ode to life." Everything was contingent on the herds: food and clothing (needles and awls were carved from bones, while tendons provided thread and binding), as well the tallow in the lamps.There’s no evidence that Ice Age humans used more than a handful of lamps as they drew, and if carbon dioxide had built up in the chamber — as it often does in the still air of deep limestone caves — they might have had trouble keeping even their few lamps lit. It’s likely they saw only a small portion of their work at any one time, that it receded in darkness behind them and lay in shadow above them: "Achieving full and accurate color perception of the cave images along a five-meter-long panel," notes French archaeologist Sophie de Beaune, "would require 150 lamps, each of them placed 50 centimeters from the cave wall." So the artists couldn’t have perceived the reds, yellows, and blacks of their own marks as clearly as we moderns can under the incessant glare of electric bulbs or in contemporary color photographs of the friezes and panels.To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it’s likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly, wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 1960, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone. It differs from the others in more than the nature of the stone and its shape. (The handle was essential because sandstone conducts heat efficiently, and it would have been impossible to hold the lamp without it.) The lamp possesses a refined beauty: its maker created a perfectly symmetrical bowl, polished the sandstone smooth, and incised the handle with chevrons. Perhaps it was used for ceremonies, though that can’t entirely be known. Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination. Light as it would be for ages to come: light, its limits, and then the dark. Over time, lamps were fashioned out of shells, then pottery shaped like shells or slippers, and there were gradual improvements in the design: some bear turned-over lips on their terra cotta cups, which prevented spills. The cloth or rope wicks lay horizontally within wick channels shaped like thick spouts — perhaps suggested by the flutes of shells — which helped the oil to climb the wick and keep the flame steady. Ancient Greek and Roman lamps had enclosed reservoirs, which protected the oil from dirt or flies and guaranteed a little safety, but the flame itself was unguarded by glass.It is believed that the Romans might have fashioned the first beeswax candles, which gave a fragrant, clear, steady flame and burned so evenly they were eventually used to divide time into hours. The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great wished to "render to God, with a good heart, the fourth part of the service of his body and of his mind, both by day and by night." So as to tell accurate time in the dark or in the rain, he ordered that beeswax equal to seventy-two pence in weight be made into six candles, each twelve inches long. He needed to prevent drafts from affecting the burning time of the candles, for "the violence of the winds blew too much upon them . . . day and night without ceasing through the doors of the churches and the windows, and the chinks and holes in the woodwork, and the many rifts in the walls, and the thin tents." To do so, he "ordered a lantern to be well made of wood and ox-horn, for the horns of oxen, when white and planed down to a thin sheet, are as clear as glass. . . . And when this device had been so executed, six candles, one after another, burned for twenty-four hours without intermission, neither too quickly or too slowly. And when they went out others were lighted."Rare and costly beeswax was long the province only of the Roman Catholic Church and the wealthy. Most other people depended on fat they pressed or rendered from animals, fish, or vegetation near at hand: manatees, alligators, whales, sheep, oxen, bison, deer, bears, coconuts, cottonseed, rapeseed, and olives, the chosen oil of the Mediterranean. In England tallow candles from domestic herds provided the main source of light. The highest-quality candles contained a large portion of hard, white mutton tallow, while softer beef tallow made a taper of lesser quality. Poor people couldn’t be fussy about their tallow and would use almost any household grease available for their lights, which were most often made of rushes that had been gathered from the marshes in late summer or fall. The work of making such lights was usually reserved for children and the old, who soaked the rushes and peeled away the outer skin. They dried the inner pith in the sun, then repeatedly dipped the rush in melted fat. Rushlights were frail and slim — "an object like the ghost of a walking-cane," wrote Charles Dickens, "which instantly broke its back if it were touched." A simple iron pincer held the rush at a slant, for upright it consumed itself too quickly. A well-made two-foot rushlight would burn shy of an hour.Light, it seems, could be gained from any viable thing at hand. In the West Indies, the Caribbean, Japan, and the South Sea Islands, people saw by the light of numerous fireflies, which they captured and kept in small cages. South Sea Islanders skewered oily candlenuts on bamboo to make torches, while those on Vancouver Island placed a dried salmon in the fork of a stick and lit it. Shetland Islanders caught, killed, and stored storm petrels by the thousands. The petrel, it’s said, was named after Saint Peter, because it seems to walk on water as it feeds: a sea bird, full of buoyant, insulating oil. When the islanders needed a lamp, they’d affix a petrel carcass to a base of clay, thread a wick down its throat, and set it alight.The first American colonists — possessing no domestic herds in the early years of settlement, but being surrounded by abundant woodlands — often used pine knots, called candlewood, for their lights. The knots smoked heavily and dripped pitch, so they were usually placed in the corner of a fireplace or on a stone slab. Wood splinters set in iron pincers provided portable lights. Even after herds were established in the colonies, poorer people continued to use candlewood, as did rural families: "It was said that a prudent New England farmer would as soon start the winter without hay in his barn as without candle-wood in his woodshed."New Englanders sometimes made fragrant candles from the waxy outer coating of bayberries, which they rendered by boiling the berries. They also made use of deer, moose, and bear fat, although once they established herds of sheep and cattle, they used the fat of their domestic animals as well. Women spent long hours painstakingly dipping candles — "a serious undertaking . . . sevenfold worse in its way even than washing-day," claimed Harriet Beecher Stowe. "A great kettle was slung over the kitchen fire, in which cakes of tallow were speedily liquefying; a frame was placed quite across the kitchen to sustain candle-rods, with a train of board underneath to catch the drippings." The day could not be too warm, or the quality of the candles would suffer. The tallow had to be "cut very small, that it may be speedily dissolved; for otherwise it would be liable to burn or become black, if left too long over the fire." The wicks couldn’t be dipped too quickly, or the candles would be brittle. After the first three dips, "water, proportionate to that of tallow, [was] poured in for precipitating the impure particles to the bottom of the vessel." It could not be done sooner, "as the water, by penetrating the wicks, would make the candles crackle in burning, and thereby render them useless." Afterward, the candles had to be cooled slowly, or they would be likely to crack. They softened in warm weather and, being made of animal fat, spoiled on the shelf over time. They had to be stored where the mice and rats couldn’t get at them.In later years, women used tin or pewter molds to make candles. Their work then was simpler and quicker, though still laborious, for a farm wife would have to make hundreds of candles to last for a winter of meager light. Historian Marshall Davidson notes that "even the best-read people remained sparing with candlelight. In his diary for 1743 the Reverend Edward Holyoke, then president of Harvard, noted that on May 22 and 23 his household made 78 pounds of candles. Less than six months later the diary records in its line-a-day style, ‘Candles all gone.’"Unlike the paraffin candles of modern times, tallow candles were not easy to keep lit. Not only did they soften in warm weather, but they also burned unevenly and lost their brilliance as they burned. To maintain more than a few at any one time required constant work: each would have to be snuffed — that is, the charred wick had to be trimmed — and rekindled at least every half-hour to be kept from guttering. (Guttering occurs when the melted wax channels down the side of the candle, which makes the taper burn unevenly and causes the flame to flicker.) A draft would misshape and often douse a candle. If it wasn’t properly extinguished, it would give off excessive smoke and an acrid stench, which was all the more problematic in well-to-do households, where many candles might be extinguished at once. Jonathan Swift gave extensive advice to servants concerning the dousing of candles: There are several Ways of putting out Candles, and you ought to be instructed in them all: You may run the Candle End against the Wainscot, which puts the Snuff out immediately: You may lay it on the Floor, and tread the Snuff out with your Foot; You may hold it upside down until it is choaked with its own Grease; or cram it into the Socket of the Candlestick: You may whirl it round in your Hand till it goes out: When you go to Bed, after you have made Water, you may dip the Candle End into the Chamber-Pot: You may spit on your Finger and Thumb, and pinch the Snuff until it goes out: The Cook may run the Candle’s Nose into the Meal Tub, or the Groom into a Vessel of Oats, or a Lock of Hay, or a Heap of Litter. . . . But the quickest and best of all Methods, is to blow it out with your Breath, which leaves the Candle clear and readier to be lighted. As for lamps, even with tallow of the highest quality, they needed frequent cleaning to work well. Tallow, being thick, had trouble climbing up the wick — often nothing more than a twisted rag in poorer households — which had to be pulled up from time to time and trimmed. If the fire was starved of fuel, it would produce a thin, smoky flame, though given too much, it would smoke as well. And it smelled gamy: "stinking tallow," Shakespeare called it.In every century, those who had easy access to an ample fuel supply could enjoy adequate light, as did the wealthy everywhere, who also brightened their homes and halls by making use of precious mirrors to magnify the flames and who could be profligate with their beeswax. "At the Court of Louis XIV of France no candle was ever re-lighted and the ladies-in-waiting made quite a good thing out of selling, as their perquisite, the candle ends of expensive wax," notes historian William O’Dea. "This seems to have been the custom in other royal households." But for those who had to buy candles, the cost was dear: "In the middle of the fifteenth century in Tours, a laborer had to work half a day to earn enough for a pound of tallow. And wax was priceless." The lamp was one thing; lighting it was another, especially before the invention of the safety match in the nineteenth century. The earliest intentional fires were started with sparks made by striking flint against iron pyrites, or from the friction between hardwood and softwood, for which the fire builder might lay a hardwood stick set with drilled holes on the ground or across his knees, then insert a softwood stick into one of the holes and twirl it steadily — perhaps for less than a minute on a day with no rain — until the abrasion created enough heat to start the wood smoldering. Once he saw smoke rise, he would throw crushed dry leaves on it, cup the smoldering leaves with his hands, and blow the smolder into a blaze. Then he’d turn the fire over onto a small pile of twigs and leaves. It would be easiest to start with good dry sticks, which were often much cherished. Of the Karankawa Indians of Texas it is said: "Their fire sticks they always carried with them and kept them carefully wrapped in several layers of skins tied up with thongs and made into a neat package; they were thus kept very dry, and as soon as the occasion for their use was over they were immediately wrapped up again and laid away."In eighteenth-century Europe, getting a flame was hardly any easier. The tinderbox found in almost all kitchens would have contained fire steel, flint, and tinder — usually charred linen. To make a fire by striking flint against steel and setting off sparks, which were aimed toward the charred cloth, fed with more tinder, and fanned to a flame, was an ordinary task that could be accomplished quickly on a dry day in broad light, though on "a cold dark frosty morning when the hands are chapped, frozen and insensible," wrote one sufferer, "you may chance to strike the flint against the knuckles for some considerable time without discovering your mistake."Once gotten, fire was carefully guarded, and many households maintained some glowing embers in the hearth. If the fire went cold, a child would be sent to a neighbor’s with a pail or shovel to fill with live coals. James Boswell, author of The Life of Samuel Johnson, wrote of the consequences of losing one’s light: About two o’clock in the morning I inadvertently snuffed out my candle, and as my fire was long before black and cold, I was in a great dilemma how to proceed. Downstairs did I softly and silently step into the kitchen. But, alas, there was as little fire there as upon the icy mountains of Greenland. With a tinder box is a light struck every morning to kindle the fire, which is put out at night. But this tinder box I could not see, nor knew where to find. I was now filled with gloomy ideas of the terrors of the night. . . . I went up to my room, sat quietly until I heard the watchman calling ‘past three o’clock’. I then called to him to knock at the door of the house where I lodged. He did so, and I opened to him and got my candle re-lumed without danger. Sometimes the lack of a candle could be deadly. Historian Jane Nylander uncovered the record of an "unfortunate man staying at a tavern in New Haven in June 1796 [who] ‘was going to bed without a light . . . [and] opened the cellar door instead of a chamber door, and falling down the cellar steps fractured his Scull, of which he expired the next morning.’" But also the danger of fire from an open flame never ceased. In truth, as cities grew larger, entire districts of tightly packed wooden houses were at the mercy of an overturned lamp, a stray cinder, a child careless with a candle. One eighteenth- century writer noted, "The English dwell and sleep, as it were, surrounded with their funeral piles."Such danger might be reason enough to send the children to bed in the dark, but more likely it was done for economy’s sake. Before the advent of mineral oils in the nineteenth century, all fuel could also be used for food. John Smeaton, in his account of building the Eddystone Lighthouse off the coast of Plymouth, England, said that he "found it a matter of complaint through the country — that the light keepers had at various times been reduced to the necessity of eating the candles."In the worst of times, many saw only by the light of their cooking fires, or by dint of one candle or lamp at the center of a table, which they rarely lit before darkness fell. The poorest people might have no light at all. So a glimmer for a task, for an hour, for supper in winter. Farmers might repair their tools or carve new ax handles by lamplight. Women mended and stitched. It was hardly enough for precise work: "A French Book of Trades in the thirteenth century forbade gold and silversmiths to work [after dark], for ‘light at night is insufficient for them to ply their trade well and truly,’" notes historian A. Roger Ekirch. But what constituted "dark" wasn’t often clear: "From Easter to Saint-Rémi, tannery workers set the rising and the setting of the sun as the limits of the working day for summer, and for winter, the moment when there was not enough light to distinguish a denier [a small coin] of Tours from a denier of Paris."In a time when labor was often ceaseless during the day, the constrictions of the night could be welcome. According to Cyril of Jerusalem, "A servant would have had no rest from his masters, had not the darkness necessarily brought a respite. And often after wearying ourselves in the day, how are we refreshed in the night." The church, however, deemed night not only as a time of rest but also as a time for prayer and for the soul’s reckoning: "And what [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?" asked Cyril. "And when is our mind most attuned to Psalmody and Prayer? Is it not at night? And when have we often called our own sins to remembrance? Is it not at night?" Beyond rest and prayer, in the dimly lit interiors, in the close and crowded quarters of earlier times, people may have even found a little freedom within the confines of their homes, for the dark affords its own kind of privacy: no one and no thing can be fully seen. Still, people devised ways to increase what little light they had. Sometimes they would focus and magnify their lights by setting a water bottle in front of a flame. In European villages, women would gather at one cottage in the evening and position themselves around a raised lamp that had been surrounded with globes of tinted blue water. (Women in cold countries used snow water.) The color, it was said, tempered the glare. Though all kinds of close work was done by such light, this was called a lacemaker’s lamp. The workers gathered "in orderly rows," Gertrude Whiting explained, "the best lacemakers on the highest stools nearest the lamp or candle-stand. Thus, we are told, some eighteen workers can be accommodated, the outer row of stools or chairs being lower to catch the falling rays of light shed from the pole-board. This graded arrangement is spoken of as first, second and third lights." Third light would have been particularly ghostly: the women facing the inky backs of their companions, gleaning light from the diffuse rays that fell from above or between those in front of them. It illuminated little more than their hands and work.Is it any wonder that in good weather women sat at the door of their homes and sewed, mended, or made lace in broad daylight? Although in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, large windows lightened the interiors of homes and showed up the dirt in the corners as never before — spurring housewives to sweep and scrub all that much harder — rooms were still consumed by shadows. In Vermeer’s The Little Street, the inside of a home glimpsed through glass windows appears dark in day, as it does through the open door where a woman in a white cap sits, intent on the white work in her lap. She’s framed in whitewash, then in sturdy, centuries-old brickwork, which has settled and cracked and been patched. The high façade makes the Dutch street seem akin to the shallow rock shelters of the last Ice Age, where women — bent over sinew, stone, and bone — also sat in the open, patiently tending to fleeting life.
Product details
- ASIN : B003U4VESK
- Publisher : Mariner Books; 1st edition (June 29, 2010)
- Publication date : June 29, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 2701 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 373 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #125,188 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #9 in Electric Energy
- #10 in History of Physics
- #14 in Optics for Physics
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About the author
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JANE BROX‘s most recent book, Silence, was published in January 2019. Her fourth book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission.
She has taught at Harvard University and Bowdoin College, and is currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program.
She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
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4.2 out of 5 stars
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15 customers mention "Content"15 positive0 negative
Customers find the information interesting, brilliant, and sheds new light on life. They also say the author has a wonderful ability to describe things in a way that almost feels as though. Overall, readers recommend the book for anyone interested in the subject.
"...She makes even dull scientific data fascinating and interesting. I love books, I love reading. I have read books for sixty years...." Read more
"Close but not brilliant. Certainly, a good portion of the book is fascinating and illuminating...." Read more
"...This is a book that will expand your understanding and perhaps even make you ponder why the gods were outraged that Prometheus stole fire and gave..." Read more
"...It includes interesting information such as the roles and perceptions of early street lighting (will it encourage crime or deter it?)..." Read more
10 customers mention "Writing style"7 positive3 negative
Customers find the writing style fascinating and well written.
"...allows her voice to shine through, the book is swift paced and cogently written...." Read more
"...Despite some sections heavy in technical detail, Brox has a lyrical style which capture's the reader's imagination from the pitch dark streets of a..." Read more
"EXCELLENT BOOK! Very well researched and written. I truly have enjoyed reading this. I rate it the full five stars...." Read more
"...The major problem in the book was the over-reliance on block quotes when the author could have easily paraphrased the material and referenced it...." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2010
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2010
Close but not brilliant. Certainly, a good portion of the book is fascinating and illuminating. When Ms. Brox allows her voice to shine through, the book is swift paced and cogently written. But, too often, Ms. Brox included long quotations, and relied too heavily on others to tell her story. On too many occasions, I felt that I was reading a college paper with sentences such as "the author notes that" followed by a lengthy quotation. Ah, but for a good editor.... These lengthy quotes were distracting. But when Ms. Brox tells the story of the social history of light in her own words, the story shines bright and clear.
I understand that including photographic plates would make the book more expensive. But, I often found myself having to consult internet sources to see the kinds of devices that are described in the book. Perhaps, some drawings or photographic plates would have allowed the reader to see clearly these early contraptions that illuminated the homes of our ancestors. (I often wondered whether Ms. Brox actually viewed some of the instruments of illumination for herself, or was she relying on secondary sources to describe the device for her.) Perhaps, too, the author could have written about the nature, physics of light. For example, though there is much discussion of the AC versus DC current, there is hardly a sentence describing the difference. I understand this was not a book about the physics of light. But, for the laymen, it would have helped to understand the rudimentary nature of that thing that illuminates our world.
On the whole, this is an enjoyable read. The subject matter (tracing the use of artificial light from prehistoric times through the present) is quite fascinating. Putting aside some of the stylistic criticism, this is an excellent book. It is both enlightening and enjoyable.
I understand that including photographic plates would make the book more expensive. But, I often found myself having to consult internet sources to see the kinds of devices that are described in the book. Perhaps, some drawings or photographic plates would have allowed the reader to see clearly these early contraptions that illuminated the homes of our ancestors. (I often wondered whether Ms. Brox actually viewed some of the instruments of illumination for herself, or was she relying on secondary sources to describe the device for her.) Perhaps, too, the author could have written about the nature, physics of light. For example, though there is much discussion of the AC versus DC current, there is hardly a sentence describing the difference. I understand this was not a book about the physics of light. But, for the laymen, it would have helped to understand the rudimentary nature of that thing that illuminates our world.
On the whole, this is an enjoyable read. The subject matter (tracing the use of artificial light from prehistoric times through the present) is quite fascinating. Putting aside some of the stylistic criticism, this is an excellent book. It is both enlightening and enjoyable.
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2010
With this sort of book - an examination of an event, a process, an evolution - sometimes the complaint is a lack of continuity. Readers bemoan, and rightfully, what is little more than a collection of facts and anecdotes. In some particular order, yes, but not much of one. That complaint can't be made about Jane Brox's "Brilliant."
Brox establishes a beginning thread, then writes along it to enlighten the reader (sorry, I just couldn't resist) as to the role of artificial light - which is to say any light after sundown other than moonlight - as the reigning hallmark of civilization. She successfully depicts artificial light as inextricable from the social, creative and industrial evolution that has led to our modern life.
I imagine a stylized seminal moment, maybe ten thousand years ago, which might have been the beginning of the beginning of cities. In my setting a lone traveler is making his way as the sun fades. He spots a fire - small and contained, therefore made by a human - and heads toward it. By good luck, he and the other human speak the same words. The two spend the night in the circle of the fire glow, in some comfort given by the radiant heat from the fire. Our traveler has a rabbit hanging from the cord around his waist. The fire maker has gathered some berries and roots. They combine their holdings, eat well and converse. The anxiety and resultant depression in each human is abated. Your version will likely be different, but I'll bet whatever it is it includes a flame driving back the darkness.
In the movie "All the President's Men" Deep Throat, in the shadows of the parking garage, reveals his presence to Woodward not with a shuffle or by clearing his throat, but by striking a match. The metaphor is obvious, yet so right for the moment it is also delicious. As much as language - maybe more - a gem of light within darkness defines human beings on planet Earth.
Today we take electricity on demand as granted, barely giving this tool a first thought, much less a second. We tend to view electricity as something almost as natural as rain. One of Brox's resultant subtexts is a display of the millions of Americans who lived the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. In some cases there were still rural areas in America without electricity as late as 1960, of people still living by kerosene light and unable to lighten their endless farm work by using electric motors. Yes, at the dawn of the Space Age some distant farmers still lived and worked in the halo of chemical burning.
Jimmy Carter contributes several anecdotes about his flame-lit boyhood in southern Georgia. The same Jimmy Carter, of course, who was born well into the twentieth century and who would become a nuclear engineer and President.
(Some of the lesser reviews for this book fault Brox for technical mistakes, which are, in fact, in the text. I think this shortcoming lies more with the current state of publishing (i.e., the demise of editors) than with Brox. As well, this book is about the social impact of artificial lighting much more than the technical aspects, although I certainly learned a lot about the limitations, and frequent monitoring, any light with a flame required. A few minutes spent on the web page for this book indicates this content.)
Brox establishes a beginning thread, then writes along it to enlighten the reader (sorry, I just couldn't resist) as to the role of artificial light - which is to say any light after sundown other than moonlight - as the reigning hallmark of civilization. She successfully depicts artificial light as inextricable from the social, creative and industrial evolution that has led to our modern life.
I imagine a stylized seminal moment, maybe ten thousand years ago, which might have been the beginning of the beginning of cities. In my setting a lone traveler is making his way as the sun fades. He spots a fire - small and contained, therefore made by a human - and heads toward it. By good luck, he and the other human speak the same words. The two spend the night in the circle of the fire glow, in some comfort given by the radiant heat from the fire. Our traveler has a rabbit hanging from the cord around his waist. The fire maker has gathered some berries and roots. They combine their holdings, eat well and converse. The anxiety and resultant depression in each human is abated. Your version will likely be different, but I'll bet whatever it is it includes a flame driving back the darkness.
In the movie "All the President's Men" Deep Throat, in the shadows of the parking garage, reveals his presence to Woodward not with a shuffle or by clearing his throat, but by striking a match. The metaphor is obvious, yet so right for the moment it is also delicious. As much as language - maybe more - a gem of light within darkness defines human beings on planet Earth.
Today we take electricity on demand as granted, barely giving this tool a first thought, much less a second. We tend to view electricity as something almost as natural as rain. One of Brox's resultant subtexts is a display of the millions of Americans who lived the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. In some cases there were still rural areas in America without electricity as late as 1960, of people still living by kerosene light and unable to lighten their endless farm work by using electric motors. Yes, at the dawn of the Space Age some distant farmers still lived and worked in the halo of chemical burning.
Jimmy Carter contributes several anecdotes about his flame-lit boyhood in southern Georgia. The same Jimmy Carter, of course, who was born well into the twentieth century and who would become a nuclear engineer and President.
(Some of the lesser reviews for this book fault Brox for technical mistakes, which are, in fact, in the text. I think this shortcoming lies more with the current state of publishing (i.e., the demise of editors) than with Brox. As well, this book is about the social impact of artificial lighting much more than the technical aspects, although I certainly learned a lot about the limitations, and frequent monitoring, any light with a flame required. A few minutes spent on the web page for this book indicates this content.)
Top reviews from other countries
Workshopshed
5.0 out of 5 stars
A detailed look at the evolution of light
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2018
A detailed look at the evolution of light in our houses and work places. Looks at how light has affected our lifestyles and how the different types evolved.
Mr. P. Skeldon
4.0 out of 5 stars
non-fiction writing at its best
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2013
I enjoyed this book especially the early chapters before the advent of electricity. It really shows us what an everyday miracle electric light is, but also reminds us that it is denying us a view of the stars. Sometimes, the book strayed into becoming a story of electricity generation rather than light. However, it is an excellent read and very illuminating. I particularly liked the parts about Lascaux.
