Brilliant (19 page)

Houses were lit by burning bear grease in a shallow bowl with a wick, or by burning long wands of split wood, one after another. Bear grease was scarce, and the hand-held wands were inconvenient, so in midwinter the dwellings were often dark after twilight faded. Faced with long wakeful hours in the blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories.... The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: "I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it."

For those in the northernmost coastal villages of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska—where in the heart of winter, the only natural light comes from the stars, the moon, and the aurora borealis and the only source of fresh water is locked in snow and ice—stone lamps were utterly essential for survival: among the Inuit of Greenland, "the constellation of the Great Bear is called...
pisildlat,
lamp foot or stool upon which the lamp is placed."

Above the tree line, where only occasional driftwood might be available for fires, people relied almost entirely on seal oil, a more efficient fuel than reindeer fat or the fat of other land animals. Women carefully gathered every last bit of it from the carcass, scraping the skin with an ivory scoop, and they saved any oil that might drip from the lip of their lamps, which were carved of soapstone. The exact size and shape of the lamps varied from village to village, but most were elliptical—a foot or two long—with a thick edge. A wick of dried moss, catkins, or peat—rubbed between the palms with a bit of fat—would be laid in a thin line along the edge. The lamp could be tipped to feed more oil to the wick. Sometimes a slab of seal blubber hung over the bowl and fed more fat to the lamp as it melted.

If more than one family shared a snow shelter, as often happened, each possessed its own lamp, which kept family members warm and cooked their food. Its heat also dried their clothes and boots and was used to tan hides. Steam rising off the cooking pots helped the people to bend straps of wood and pieces of bone, from which they fashioned snowshoes and boxes. Most essentially, it gave them water to drink. Humans can't eat snow—it isn't high enough in water content to prevent dehydration before it lowers the core body temperature to fatal levels. So those living in the farthest north had to melt snow for their drinking water, either directly over the flame or near it, where a chunk of snow or ice might lay on an inclined slab, its meltwater slowly running into a container.

As the lamp burned, it warmed the cold air coming through the entryway of an ice house; the heat rose and escaped through a vent in the ceiling. The walls continually thawed and froze, thawed and froze. When people placed animal skins over the interior walls to keep them from dripping, the lamp might throw enough heat that family members could sit shirtless in the house. In small, low ice houses, the lamp might smoke as the family slept, and they would wake covered with soot, suffering from headaches, and starved for oxygen. In the late 1960s, when scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research examined the mummified remains of an Aleut (Aleutians also used seal oil lamps), they found the lungs to be coated with a thick, black substance. One of the scientists said, "Had he smoked I would have called him a three pack a day man."

However smoky, the lamp meant so much to families that in lean times, so as to have enough fuel for the fire, they were willing to go hungry. The fire was almost always kept alive, most often carefully guarded and tended by the woman of the household. She spent much of her day alongside it, cooking, preparing hides and skins, sewing winter clothing, and drying clothes. The flame, a few inches high, was difficult to keep clear and smokeless. In the late 1800s, anthropologist Walter Hough noted: "Lamp trimming only reaches perfection in the old women of the tribe, who can prepare a lamp so that it will give a good, steady flame for several hours, while usually half an hour is the best that can be expected. In an Eskimo tradition a woman takes down some eagle's feathers from a nail in the wall and stirs up the smoking lamp, so as to make it burn brightly." Elsewhere he wrote, "The Eskimo have no phrase expressing a greater degree of misery than 'a woman without a lamp.' After the death of a woman her lamp is placed upon her grave."

For those living in the early-twentieth-century cities of Europe and America, the regard the inhabitants of the circumpolar regions had for their soapstone lamps might have been as hard to fathom as the meagerness of the flame. In these cities, any open flame, however bright, had become easy to disparage and at best carried a hint of nostalgia. All the improvements—the twisted rag becoming a plaited wick, Argand's steadying of the flame, the clarity and brilliance of kerosene and gas light—would soon be no more than history, and the lamp's mysteries would be memory's mysteries, as essayist and critic Walter Benjamin knew. In the 1930s, Benjamin remembered the lamp of his childhood, a lamp that,

unlike our lighting systems, with their cables, cords, and electrical contacts, you could carry ... through the entire apartment, accompanied always by the clatter of the tube in its casing and the glass globe on its metal ring—a clinking that is part of the dark music of the surf which slumbers in the laborious toil of the century.... Now the nineteenth century is empty. It lies there like a large, dead, cold seashell. I pick it up and hold it up to my ear. What do I hear?...The rattling noise of the anthracite that is emptied from the coal scuttle into the furnace;...the clatter of the tube in its casing, the clink of the glass globe on its metal ring when the lamp is carried from one room to another.

Soon most would forget how to light a lamp and how to husband the flame. They would become a little afraid of it, and it was its obviousness that seemed dangerous: its smell, substance, and centuries of meaning. How could a simple flame hold a plea against electricity? Aggressive, unhindered electricity: "Let's Kill the Moonlight!" proclaimed the Italian futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, for he saw the natural world as irrelevant, canceled by the speed and brilliance of the modern. Giacomo Balla, in his 1909 oil painting
Arc Lamp,
seems to have done just that. Artificial light dominates everything; even the iron base of the streetlamp has relinquished its solidity. It's just a ghost, clouded by the sizzle of energy—circular, radiant, pulsing, full of hot color—flaring out from the arc. The light's sharp power and verve strike at soft, billowing, susceptible night. There is hardly any room left for the dark, which is trying to hold its own in small quarters at the corners of the painting. That's more than can be said for the pale crescent moon, helplessly obscured in the background—illuminated, but not radiant, captured, as it is, by human light.

T
HIS MUCH HAS ALWAYS
been true: electricity can't be stored. It must be generated as needed and consumed within moments of its generation. The supply must continually adjust itself to fluctuating demand, and a power plant must have sufficient capacity to meet all its customers' needs at any given moment of the day. Maintaining this balance was especially fraught during the first tenuous decades of electrical expansion. Edward Hungerford, writing about the gas and electric plants of New York City in 1910, described how the smallest change in the skies could create a sudden spike in usage:

In days of old, watchers were stationed upon the high housetops of mediaeval cities, to give warning of the coming of an unexpected foe. In these days there are watchers upon the high housetops of the modern city. They go there whenever the barometer begins to spell uncertainty. With powerful glasses they skim the distant corners of the horizon. A distant black cloud—a seemingly harmless thing in the far-away sky, but a thing of magnificent potentialities close at hand—is seen. Its approach is closely noted.... The watcher of the skies gives quick warning over the telephone. The drone of lazy midday ceases instantly. [In the power house] men come out of their drowsy cat-naps. They rush to their positions, fresh fuel goes upon a hundred banked boilers[, and]...the 'chief operator,' who is king of the situation, orders additional engines and generators into service.... When the black clouds finally rest above the town and the myriad hands are reaching for desklights, the strain has been already met. The light ... burns as steadily and as brightly as it burned five minutes before, when less than one-fifth the quantity was the demand.

In Hungerford's time, it was also true that electric plants created black clouds of their own, for not all energy generation could be as clean as Niagara. Power plants in places far from any viable waterpower source often relied on coal-fired furnaces to heat water, which produced the steam that commonly rotated the turbines of the generators. And the predominance of alternating current meant that in a city like New York, the hundreds of small local plants that once pocked the city were now consolidated into a few huge generating stations. By 1910 the New York Edison Company plant at Thirty-eighth Street and First Avenue, which replaced four hundred small electric power plants in Manhattan, took up two city blocks and furnished almost 90 percent of the electricity for Manhattan and the Bronx. It ran 152 boilers, which consumed more than half a million tons of coal in the course of one year. The grime and soot the plant produced was a constant source of irritation to neighboring homes and businesses, not only noxious to breathe but also damaging to furniture and draperies. The company, repeatedly fined by the health department for coal smoke violations and cinder nuisances, had watchers of its own. The
New York Times
reported that during an ongoing investigation, "when it was found Health Department men were trying to photograph the smoke stacks, 'scouts' were put on the company's roof who ordered the feeding of coal stopped whenever photographers appeared."

Whatever the fuel source, electric companies have always sought to cultivate a consistent demand for power, since a plant is most efficient and profitable when its output is constant. In the early twentieth century, they courted industrial and commercial customers, who not only used large amounts of electricity at predictable times but also were usually located in concentrated areas, which meant there'd be minimal investment in lines. They particularly sought customers whose demands might complement the municipal drain on electricity from trolleys and street lighting, both of which used a good deal of power early in the morning and later in the day.

Electric companies—still called "light companies" in the early decades of the twentieth century—were private corporations, and since access to electricity was not yet considered the right of every citizen, they felt no obligation to deliver power to individual homes. Electric light in homes, they believed, would exacerbate strains on their systems, since people would turn on their lamps during the peak-demand hours of dusk. It hadn't yet occurred to them to promote the sale of washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, and irons, which would have increased daytime electric use in homes. At least in the early years of the century, they had little faith that householders would be interested in such things. So by 1912, more than three decades after Edison's Menlo Park demonstrations, only 16 percent of American homes were connected to central station power, and most of those were in wealthy and upper-middle-class districts.

Even in homes wired for electricity, those who wanted to use electric appliances faced a host of obstacles. Household wiring was unregulated and rudimentary, sufficient for little more than lighting alone. The styles and types of plugs varied from manufacturer to manufacturer, and people could plug in smaller appliances only if they had the correct outlets for them. If a family purchased a stove, which required insulated wires, or a refrigerator, which ran on higher-than-normal wattage, they usually had to upgrade the wiring in their home. As late as 1926, one commentator observed: "Electrical articles are the only ones which cannot be taken home and put to use by the purchaser, when, where, and as he pleases!"

The quality and design of many early appliances was poor as well. One man, recalling his mother's first iron, noted: "It was a Dover iron. And even though it had a plain, unplated iron soleplate and a nickel-plated shell, we thought it looked pretty swell.... The new iron did a wonderful job. But the attached cord, which ran directly inside the shell to the terminals, kept burning off because of the heat at that point." There were no safety standards and few guarantees. When appliances broke down, as they often did, there was no system of service for repair. What was a householder left with? Often no more than a "so-called instruction booklet which never in eight years has helped us in a single emergency.... Does the motor stop, the engine refuse to start, is there a mysterious 'spark,' 'smoke,' unexplained 'knock'—we can pore through the booklet in vain for help."

Even so, the marvel and mystery of it all was very much alive, however unrealistic and unattainable. Manufacturers continued to demonstrate electricity's promise at world exhibitions and in model electric homes outfitted with clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, stoves, and refrigerators. Books such as
Electricity in Every-Day Life
and
Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning, Etc., Being a Manual of Electricity in the Service of
the Home
gave readers a brief history of electricity and explained how it would inevitably revolutionize their lives. One author exclaimed, "Fancy cooking cutlets and frying pancakes with captured lighting!" Such books promoted electricity not only as a timesaver for women but also as a replacement for domestic help, which had become scarce as workers increasingly chose more lucrative and independent work in factories over domestic employment. One advocate of appliances proclaimed: "There is no household operation capable of being mechanically performed, of which, through the motor, electricity cannot become the drudge and willing slave."