For millennia humans rose with the sun and went to sleep when the sun set. The ability to do anything outdoors in the hours of darkness was rare. Travel at night was only something done by the brave or when completely necessary and anything beyond that was all but impossible, even in the largest cities.
Fire is the only option
Illumination at night came from one source: fire. Whether it was a candle, a bonfire or a handheld torch, it was the only way to provide a source of light in the darkness for centuries. If enough could be brought together a wealthy king or lord could hold an outdoor party at night but instances of those prove to be only rare occasions.
That said outdoor lighting has in fact been documented as far back as the 4th century in Antioch in modern Turkey and in several Arab cities in the 9th and 10th centuries. In 1417 London became the first city to light some of its streets. It was only certain streets and only done in the winter months with candles in lanterns being suspended from poles. Prior to that in order to navigate the streets safely teams of “link boys” would escort people from one place to another. The profession of the lamplighter emerged and that person would light every lamp beginning their toil around dusk.
Illuminating Europe
Nevertheless other European cities began to illuminate the night. A century later in Paris all homeowners were required to have lit lanterns in the front of their house. In 1594 lanterns were installed in each Parisian neighborhood though lantern bearers were still necessary to escort a person from one place to another at night. By 1729 6,000 glass encased lanterns were installed 20 yards apart from each other on every street in the city by order of Louis XIV and candles were giving way to oil as a fuel source. Unfortunately for many French aristocrats the posts that were used to hang the lanterns proved to be a favorite place to hang them during the Revolution.
Benjamin Franklin, the father of outdoor lighting
The American inventor Benjamin Franklin saw the lamps along the streets in London on a visit in 1757 but also observed that they became very dirty very quickly. The problem was that the candles had to be shielded from the wind, lest they blow out but the soot that the candle puts off needed somewhere to go. He set about to devise a new type of street lamp adding a funnel and vents so that the smoke could escape making him the father of the American street lamp. The cities of Colonial America soon became illuminated with Franklin’s new lamp which was a huge success.
Something other than fire
Candles remained the primary source of light throughout the rest of the century but a new source of energy would soon make the candle obsolete. In 1792 Scottish engineer William Murdoch developed a system of distilling gas from coal while working for James Watt and Matthew Boulton. The gas that could be distilled from burning coal had been a favorite parlor trick of Dr. John Clayton dating back to the 1730s when he would capture the gas in an animal bladder and then light it on fire to the delight of his guests calling it the “spirit of coal.”
Murdoch’s home in Cornwall was the first to be lit by natural gas but the problem of how to transport the gas with the poor condition of the roads proved difficult to overcome. Despite that the first public building to receive illumination was the entranceway to the Manchester commissioners of police in 1797. Murdoch’s own place of work, the Soho Foundry was lit by gas the following year. Outdoor lighting has never been the same since and stay tuned for the next post in this series as we explore advancements in lighting technology in the 19th Century.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV_of_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Murdoch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Boulton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soho_Foundry
