The history of domestic lighting has been governed by economics, but also by snobbery and tradition, and occasionally by a dangerous desire for novelty.
As ‘If Walls Could Talk’ is being repeated on the TV at the moment, I thought you might enjoy a quick history of domestic lighting. Yawn, what a dull subject, you might think! But just think about life without electricity. One of the biggest changes in domestic life ever must have been the moment when the lights came on in the late nineteenth century. Before that, people must have had a cat-like ability to manage in low light levels.
For centuries, rushlights were the poor person’s light-source of choice. You make them by repeatedly coating a rush in hot fat, building up the layers to create a rather scrawny candle. These long, gently-curving lights were balanced in special holders. To double the illumination, you could ignite both top and bottom (‘burning the candle at both ends’).
The expression ‘the game’s not worth the candle’ makes it clear that lighting a candle felt like burning money itself. The twenty minutes for which one rushlight lasted was a familiar unit of time, and had to be exploited to the maximum. A housewife might have invited village neighbours over to share a rushlight for an interval of hurried darning.
Only the rich could afford a profusion of beeswax candles. In large households, a daily ration of candles was often included in employment conditions, and the fate of candle-ends was hotly disputed: they were the preserve of senior servants, who’d sell them on to supplement their wages.
Yet there was another, cheaper alternative. The tallow candle was made from animal fat, ideally sheep or cow, because ‘that of hogs … gives an ill smell, and a thick black smoke’. The art of creating the longest-lasting blend was very valuable, and in 1390 tallow chandlery was listed among the foremost crafts of London. Tallow candles had a horrible brown colour and made a dreadful meaty stink. Despite this, desperate people would eat them in times of famine for the calories they contained.
Apart from the unpleasant smell, the great drawback to tallow candles was the need to snuff. Their wicks had to be trimmed every few minutes or they smoked. And, in an age of candles, fire-light and timber-framed houses, accidents were common. Once in seventeenth-century London a servant named Obadiah illicitly took a candle up to his bedchamber. There it fell over and burnt ‘half a yard of the sheet’. But the quick-thinking Obadiah woke a fellow servant, and together they ‘pissed out the fire as well as they could’.
Interiors lit by candle-light were designed to magnify the limited light available. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles was the first room in history to be illuminated to something approaching the light-levels we’d find safe and pleasant today. Its ubiquitous glass reflected candle-light so effectively that the French court began for the first time to hold regular evening parties.
In prosperous Georgian drawing rooms there was likewise silver or sparkle everywhere. The gold rims of plates, the silver of keyholes, even the metallic embroidery on waistcoats: all were intended to aid the eye and maximise candlelight. In fact, a lady’s silver dress had the effect of making its wearer gleam.
The light, bright colours of Georgian interiors would be replaced by rich, dark hues in the Victorian age. Deeper tones helped hide the soot produced by oil lamps, which began to replace candles in the later eighteenth century. ‘I have seen houses almost filled with the smoke from lamps, and the stench of the oil’, one footman recollected. In grand houses, lamps required a new room for the cleaning of their glass shades. The Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle had a trifling 400 for his hard-working servants to polish.
Yet the oil lamp would soon be superseded by gas, which made its appearance in factories, theatres and street-lighting long before it penetrated the home. Today our gas is natural, piped from pockets beneath the sea. It burns much more brightly than the baked coal gas used between late Georgian times and the 1970s.
Gas made its debut in London when an entrepreneur named Frederick Windsor organised a public demonstration of the new lighting for George III’s birthday in 1807. People both marvelled at and feared the properties of this ‘illuminated air’. Windsor reassured potential clients that gas is even ‘more congenial to our lungs than vital air’.
By the 1840s, gas began to make a tentative appearance in the urban home. Gradually it became a middle-class must-have. A contributor to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine even recommended that parties ‘must always be given by gas light … if it be daylight outside, you must close the shutters and draw the curtains’, the better to show off your gasoliers.
Gas must have provided a quite stunning improvement to people’s ability to read, write or sew in the evenings with minimal effort. It nevertheless had many drawbacks. There were frequent explosions, and it replaced the oxygen in the air with black and noxious deposits. The aspidistra, a hugely popular plant, became so because it survived well in oxygen-starved conditions. Victorian ladies frequently fainted partly because of tight-lacing, but also because of a lack of oxygen in their gas-lit drawing rooms.
The arrival of electricity in the 1880s caused a stir. It was immensely expensive and therefore terribly chic. A light bulb cost the same as the average week’s wages, and you needed your own home generator. Several Fifth Avenue millionaires installed generators in their houses in 1880s New York, and Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt even went to a costume ball as Electric Light. But these early adopters ran the risk of accidents. After her electrical system caught fire Mrs Vanderbilt panicked and had it taken out.
The widespread adoption of electricity was delayed for many years because each generator had a different output. So different towns had different currents, and manufacturers were reluctant to develop light fittings because there was no national market for their products. Not until the National Grid was created in the 1930s did electricity achieve ubiquity.
Of course this bright white light was enormously convenient, but once electricity had vanquished the night, we lost something significant: the art of entertaining ourselves in low light levels. Conversation, singing and storytelling were all the casualties of modern technology.
Conservation, &/or Conversation ?!
Hi Lucy,
Really enjoyed reading that – it was very well written and with so much passion and conviction..!! You have an excellent way of communicating your love of what you hold dear, and I could get lost in conversation with you, me thinks…!!! lol
Take good care, and Best Wishes –
Mick Wade x x x
What a great article. Succinct and informative. Please don’t make me think about life without electricity again, though. I might have nightmares.
Brilliant concise article on the history of light. Very good.
Fascinating, and you’re right about modern lighting making us forget how to entertain ourselves. Although another glowing light in the corner of the room really put the boot in cards, talking and reading…..!
History of electricity isn’t boring! It’s positively electrifying. A real shock to the system!
A really good article Lucy, well thought out, wouldn’t expect anything less from you.
Candles seem to have enabled people to work longer or facilitate gatherings of people for extended periods of time, a real benefit. It’s not surprising then that candles where prized items. As like most things in life, benefits means an opportunity to make money; and the government of the day wasn’t going to let this slip, so I believe they introduced tax on candles in 1709.
I can remember traveling to a little museum in Godalming where they talked about how this little town in Surrey was one of the first to experiment with electricity in 1881. The town council decided when the local gas company contract elapsed they would introduce electric lighting in the street. Somewhat of a brave decision, given it was untested at the time.
As a young child I can remember the country having to go on a three day week, which meant power cuts. Out came the candles, sitting in the darkness with my parents, no TV, no nothing. Hours of boredom, you couldn’t read by the light, so we had to talk to each other and my father told stories of when he was a kid.
A few years ago the substation in Fulham cutout and the whole area was in darkness. I can remember walking through the area in the dark with only the moonlight falling over the houses and streets. As I turned the corner of one street, all you could see was candles flickering in the darkness as neighbours went from house-to-house checking on each other; seeing the dim glow of candle light coming from the houses. It looked like something out of a Dickens novel, rather magical.
Sometimes in our very busy lives it takes the lack of electricity to bring people together for a short period of time. We are so reliant on electricity as an enabler today we don’t give it a second thought as to why it’s so important, or what we would do without it.
early to bed, earl to rise… saves candle money !
Hello Lucy,
Nice little history of gas lighting. Just wanted to point out that you missed out the development of the gas mantle. This was the single most important development to keep gas lighting ahead of electric lighting for many years. The mantle, invented by Count Auer von Welsbach around 1880 converted the open flame of gas lighting into a bright incandescent white light just at the time that the electricians were struggling to achieve any good result.
The early attempts at electric street lighting using an electric arc between two electodes were hugely problemattical because they burnt away until the gap between the electrodes was too big to sustain the arc. Some ingenious devices were dreamt up to to automatically move the electrodes together as they disappeared but this is just an example of the problems of early electric light. In the meantime the magnificent highly developed gas street light was able to prove time and again that ‘gas was the best’! The use of a cluster of gas mantles in street lighting provided another advance and there are still many places where gas street lighting can be seen today – and probably not recognised. Two of the most famous buildings that are still gaslit externally are Buckingham Palace and The Houses of Parliament – both using Sugg lamps.
If you wish to learn a little more about one of the best known companies that produced gas lighting – and many other gas appliances from 1837 onwards – and an ancestor who was involved with that very first demonstration of gas lighting in Pall Mall in 1807 do refer to my developing history website http://www.williamsugghistory.co.uk.
I was buying a bulb the other day and noticed a selection of bulbs that look and flicker like candles – I’m sure there’s some irony there somewhere.
I’ve been much enjoying your Regency Series and the repeats of “If Walls Could Talk” including the demonstrations of changes in domestic lighting. With regard to different towns with different currents, when I was a student in Cambridge in the 1960s the supply was at 200 volts so we needed different bulbs from those at home in Watford where it was 240 volts. Different currents (DC vs AC) would take you back to Edison’s original NYC power station in the 1880s – AC soon established its superiority as a means of local power transmission in most parts of the world.
The gas mantle was not introduced until the 1880s in an attempt to compete with electric light – before then there was only the inefficient open flame you demonstrated.
Given the high cost of candles in the past, most period dramas on TV and film show a completely unrealistic number of them – an exception was the scene in Cranford where there was a discussion of using one candle or two when visitors called.
A highly influential paper by Yale economist William Nordhaus (see http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p09b/p0957.pdf) made the point forcefully. By tracking lighting technology from campfires to oil lamps to today’s energy-saving light bulbs, he estimated that the real price of light (i.e. the cost per lumen-hour) had fallen 10,000-fold in 100 years. A single 100W light bulb burning for 3 hours nightly for a year would produce as much light as 17,000 candles.
Thanks for the comments, tips, and much-needed spelling corrections! Lucy