Everyday Things: Let there be Light
Let there be light, and there was light. But when and how? Something as simple as flicking on a light isn’t even given a second thought, but once upon a time it was a little trickier. The first lamps appeared about 70,000BC where animal horns, shells or hollow rocks were filled with mosses soaked in animal fats and lit.
After this, man-made inventions such as pottery and metal were used as holders with wicks later added to allow some control over the rate of burning. Terracotta lamps have been found in ancient Greece in 700BC, the word lamp comes from the Greek word lampas, meaning torch. The ancient Chinese lived rather more dangerously, lighting natural gas collected in animal skins for illumination.
Things changed very little until the 1700s, when a central burner was invented. The fuel (usually olive oil, beeswax, fish oil or nut oils) was housed inside a metal container and a metal tube poking out of the top controlled the rate of burning and the strength of the light. Flames were usually protected by small glass tubes.
A Swiss chemist was the first person to come up with a safe oil lamp with a glass-covered hollow wick in 1783. At the same time, coal and natural gas lamps were becoming more common and in 1792 William Murdoch set up the first home lighting system in his house in Redruth, Cornwall with coal gas. This coal gas lighting was patented by a German, Freidrich Winzer, in 1804. The early 1800s saw most of the cities in Europe and the United States lit up at night by street gaslights.
1801 was a landmark year in the history of the light when an English physicist, Humphrey Davy, invented the first electric carbon arc lamp (the same as those used in film projectors). Kerosene lamps appeared in 1853 and this style of light took a huge step forward six years later when petroleum drilling came on the scene.
The light bulb has been surrounded in controversy regarding who it was who actually invented it. Thomas Edison, the American inventor, was thought to have been the main protagonist but in fact two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans, came up with the light bulb in 1875. Sadly, they didn’t have the funds to register the invention and Edison (always full of bright ideas you might say) bought the rights to the invention with the help of some $50,000 industrial backing. Across the Channel another Brit, Joseph Swann, had the same idea at least one year before Edison’s bulb and so sued the American. Swann won his case, the penalty being that Edison was forced to hire Swan as a partner in his company, called the Edison and Swan United Electric Company, later shortened to just the Electric Light Company, which later still became General Electric.
Edison had put together a carbonised filament, a vacuum and a low current and showed off his new invention in 1879 by lighting the Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. His idea was not that new, but it was the first time a light source was reliable, long lasting, safe and practical for use in the home. The first bulbs burned for almost 14 hours, enough for most long winter nights; today’s, by comparison, last for about 1500 hours. Alongside the bulb came light sockets with on-off switches, another of Edison’s inventions. He also used the DC (direct current) system that had previously not been used, although some years later people realised the AC (alternating current) system was much safer.
In 1882, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electricity generating station was the first to provide neighbourhood power when it gave locals light in a one square mile area. It was ten-times more efficient than previous methods, but by the late 1880s, demand was no longer night-time only, but daytime too as industry demanded light and electricity.
One hundred years after Davy’s first electric light, Peter Cooper Hewitt developed a mercury vapour light which was the fore-runner of the fluorescent light in 1901. Street lighting in the 1930s adopted this mercury lighting along with sodium lights that started to appear routinely around most built up streets. Neon lights were born in 1911, thanks to Frenchman Georges Claude. These have since become synonymous with the ‘bright lights, big city’ look and night-life everywhere.
Light bulbs as we know them were aided by Irving Langmuir, a US inventor who produced the first Tungsten filament in 1915. Tungsten can withstand temperatures of up to 3,000ºC and is ideal because it lasts longer, and with less evaporation, than other metals. It also has a tensile strength greater than steel and can be easily formed into coils because of its ductility. Inert gases were later added to bulbs to prevent the tungsten evaporating and nowadays they are filled with argon or nitrogen. Modern bulbs can now come in all shapes, sizes and colours thanks to their illuminating history.
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