To the inhabitants of Jupiter, who have always one, two, or three
of their four moons in active and efficient radiation, or of Saturn
displaying the broad luminous oceans of his mighty rings in addition to
the minor lamps of his eight ever-changeful satellites, the relative
merits of rushlights, candles, lamps, and gaslights may be a question
of indifference; but to us, the residents of a planet which has but
one small moon that only displays her nearly full face during a few
nights of each month, the subject of artificial light is only second in
importance to those of food and artificial heat, and every step that is
made in the improvement of our supplies of this primary necessary must
have a momentous influence on the physical comfort, and also upon the
intellectual and moral progress, of this world’s human inhabitants.
If a cockney Rip Van Winkle were to revisit his old haunts, the changes
produced by the introduction of gas would probably surprise him the
most of all he would see. He would be astonished to find respectable
people, and even unprotected females, going alone, unarmed and without
fear, at night, up the by-streets which in his days were deemed so
dangerous, and he would soon perceive that the bright gaslights had
done more than all the laws, the magistrates, and the police, to drive
out those crimes which can only flourish in darkness. The intimate
connection between physical light and moral and intellectual light and
progress is a subject well worthy of an exhaustive treatise.
We must, however, drop the general subject and come down to our
particular paraffin lamp. In the first place, this is the cheapest
light that has ever been invented—cheaper than any kind of oil
lamp—cheaper than the cheapest and nastiest of candles, and, for
domestic purposes, cheaper than gas. For large warehouses, shops,
streets, public buildings, etc., it is not so cheap as gas should be,
but is considerably cheaper than gas actually is at the price extorted
by the despotism of commercial monopoly.
The reason why it is especially cheaper for domestic purposes is,
first, because the small consumer of gas pays a higher price than the
large consumer; and secondly, because a lamp can be placed on a table
or wherever else its light is required, and therefore a small lamp
flame will do the work of a much larger gas flame. We must remember
that the intensity of light varies inversely with the square of the
distance from the source of light; thus the amount of light received
by this page from a light at one foot distance is four times as
great as if it were two feet distant, nine times as great as at three
feet, sixteen times as great as at four feet, one hundred times as
great as at ten feet, and so on. Hence the necessity of two or three
great flames in a gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling of a
moderate-sized room.
In a sitting-room lighted thus with gas, we are obliged, in order to
read comfortably by the distant source of light, to burn so much gas
that the atmosphere of the room is seriously polluted by the products
of this extravagant combustion. A lamp at a moderate distance—say
eighteen inches or two feet, or thereabouts—will enable us to read
or work with one-tenth to one-twentieth the amount of combustion, and
therefore with so much less vitiation of the atmosphere, and, if we use
a paraffin lamp, at much less expense.
But the chief value of the paraffin lamp is felt where gas is not
obtainable—in the country mansion or villa, the farmhouse, and,
most of all, in the poor man’s cottage. We have Bible Societies for
providing cheap Bibles; we have cheap standard works, cheap magazines,
cheap newspapers, etc.; but all these are unavailable to the poor man
until he can get a good and cheap light wherewith to read them at the
only time he has for reading, viz., in the evenings, when his work
is done. One shilling’s worth of cheap literature will require two
shillings’ worth of dear candles to supply the light necessary for
reading it. Therefore, the cheapening of light has quite as much to do
with the poor man’s intellectual progress as the cheapening of books
and periodicals.
For a man to read comfortably, and his wife to do her needlework, they
must have a candle for each, if dependent on tallow dips. They may,
and do, struggle on with one such candle, but the inconvenience soon
sickens them of their occupation; the man lolls out for an idle stroll,
soon encounters a far more bright and cheerful room than the gloomy one
he has just left, and, moth-like, he is attracted by the light, and
finishes up his evening in the public-house.
We may preach, we may lecture, we may coax, wheedle, or anathematize,
but no amount of words of any kind will render a gloomy ill-lighted
cottage so attractive as the bright bar and tap-room; and human nature,
irrespective of conventional distinctions of rank and class, always
seeks cheerfulness after a day of monotonous toil. Fifty years ago the
middle classes were accustomed to spend their evenings in taverns, but
now they prefer their homes, simply because they have learned to make
their homes more comfortable and attractive.
We have not yet learned how to supply the working millions with
suburban villas, but if their small rooms can be made bright and
cheerful during the long evenings, a most important step is made
towards that general improvement of social habits which necessarily
results from a greater love of home. We may safely venture to predict
that the paraffin lamp will have as much influence in elevating the
domestic character of the poorer classes as the street lamps have had
in purging the streets of our cities from the crimes of darkness that
once infested them.
A great deal has been said about the poisonous character of paraffin
works. I admit that they have much to answer for in reference to
trout—that the clumsy and wasteful management of certain ill-conducted
works has interfered with the sport of the anglers of one or two of
the trout streams of the United Kingdom—but all the assertions that
have been made relative to injury to human health are quite contrary to
truth.
The fact is that the manufacture of mineral oils from cannel and shale
is an unusually healthful occupation. The men certainly have dirty
faces, but are curiously exempt from those diseases which are most
fatal among the poor. I allude to typhus fever, and all that terrible
catalogue of ills usually classed under the head of zymotic diseases.
This has been strikingly illustrated in the Flintshire district.
The very sudden development of the oil trade in the neighborhood
of Leeswood caused that little village and the scattered cottages
around to be crowded to an extent that created the utmost alarm
among all who are familiar with the results of such overcrowding in
poor, ill-drained, and ill-ventilated cottages. Rooms were commonly
filled with lodgers who economized the apartments on the Box and Cox
principle, the night workers sleeping during the day, and the day
workers during the night, in the same beds. The extent to which this
overcrowding was carried in many instances is hardly credible.
Mr. R. Platt, who is surgeon to most of the collieries and oilworks of
this district, reports that Leeswood has enjoyed a singular immunity
from typhus and fever—that, during a period when it was prevalent as
a serious epidemic among the agricultural population living on the
slopes of the surrounding mountains, no single case occurred among the
oil-making population of Leeswood, though its position and overcrowding
seemed so directly to court its visitation. If space permitted I might
give further illustrations in reference to allied diseases.
There is no difficulty in accounting for this. Carbolic acid, one of
the most powerful of our disinfectants, is abundantly produced in the
oilworks, and this is carried by the clothes of the men, and with the
fumes of the oil, into the dwellings of the workmen and through all the
atmosphere of the neighborhood, and has thereby counteracted some of
the most deadly agencies of organic poisons. Besides this, the paraffin
oil itself is a good disinfectant.
Even the mischief done to the trout is more than counterbalanced by the
destruction of those mysterious fungoid growths which result from the
admixture of sewage matter with the water of our rivers, and are so
destructive to human health and life. The carbolic acid and paraffin
oil, in destroying these as well as the trout, are really acting as
great purifiers of the river, so that, after all, the only interest
that has suffered is the sporting interest. This same interest has
otherwise suffered. The old haunts of the snipe and woodcock, of
partridges, hares, and pheasants, are being ruthlessly and barbarously
destroyed, and—horrible to relate—hundreds of cottages, inhabited by
vulgar, hard-handed, thick-booted human beings, are taking their place.
Churches are being extended, school-houses and chapels built; penny
readings, lectures, concerts, etc., are in active operation, and even
drinking fountains are in course of construction; but the trout have
suffered and the woodcocks are gone.
We may thus measure the good against the evil as it stands here in the
headquarters of oil-making, and should add to one side the advantages
which the cheap and brilliant light affords—advantages which we might
continue to enumerate, but they are so obvious that it is unnecessary
to go further.
There is one important and curious matter which must not be omitted.
This, like the moral and intellectual advantages of the cheap paraffin
light, has hitherto remained unnoticed, viz., that the introduction
of mineral oils and solid paraffin for purposes of illumination and
lubrication has largely increased the world’s supply of food.
This may not be generally obvious at first sight; but to him, who, like
the writer, has had many a supper at an Italian osteria with peasants
and carbonari, it is obvious enough. He will remember how often he
has seen the lamp that has lighted himself and companions to their
supper filled from the same flask as supplied the salad which formed
so important a part of the supper itself. Throughout the South of
Europe salads are most important elements of national food, and when
thus abundantly eaten the oil is quite necessary, the oil is also used
for many of the cookery operations where butter is used here, and this
same olive oil has hitherto been the chief, and in some places the
sole, illuminating agent. The poor peasant of the South looks jealously
at his lamp, and feeds its stingily, for it consumes his richest and
choicest food, and, if well supplied, would eat as much as a fair-sized
baby.
The Russian peasant and other Northern people have a similar struggle
in the matter of tallow. It is their choicest dainty, and yet, to
their bitter grief, they have been compelled to burn it. Hundreds and
thousands of tons of this and of olive oil have been annually consumed
for the lubrication of our steam engines and other machines. A better
time is approaching now that paraffin lamps are so rapidly becoming
the chief illuminators of the whole civilized world, superseding the
crude tallow candle and the antique olive-oil lamp, while, at the same
time, the tallow candle is gradually being replaced by the beautiful
sperm-like paraffin candle; and, in addition to this, the greedy
engines that have consumed so much of the olive oil and the tallow are
learning to be satisfied with lubricators made from minerals kindred to
themselves.
The peasants of the sunny South will feed upon salads made doubly
unctuous and nutritious by the abundant oil; their fried meats, their
pastry, omelettes, and sauces will be so much richer and better than
heretofore, and the Russian will enjoy more freely his well-beloved and
necessary tallow, when the candle is made and the engine lubricated
with the fat extracted from coals and stones which no human stomach can
envy. I might travel on to China and tell of the work that paraffin and
paraffin oils have yet to do among the many millions there and in other
countries of the East. The great wave of mineral light has not yet
fairly broken upon their shores; but when it has once burst through the
outer barriers, it will, without doubt, advance with great rapidity,
and with an influence whose beneficence can scarcely be exaggerated.
(The above was written in the early days of paraffin lamps, and while
the writer was engaged in the distillation of paraffin oils, etc., from
the Leeswood cannel. These are now practically superseded by American
petroleum of similar composition, but distilled in Nature’s oilworks.
The anticipations that appeared Utopian at the time of writing have
since been fully realized, or even exceeded, as the wholesale price of
mineral oil has fallen from two shillings per gallon to an average of
about eightpence, and lamps have been greatly improved. At this price
the cost of maintaining a light of given power in an ordinary lamp is
about equal to that of ordinary London gas, if it were supplied at
one shilling per thousand cubic feet. The mineral oil, being a fine
hydrocarbon, does far less mischief than gas by its combustion, as may
be proved by warming a conservatory with a paraffin stove and another
with a stove. In the latter all the delicate plants will be killed; in
the first they scarcely suffer at all. If these facts were generally
understood we should be in a better position for battle with the gas
monopolies. The importation of petroleum to the United Kingdom during
the first five months of 1882 amounted to 26,297,346 gallons.)