Brilliant (7 page)

Yet a fourth tower was planned for the reef, this time designed by engineer John Smeaton, who based his plans for it on the shape of an English oak tree, believing that a flared base would give the tower greater stability. The innovative design would be the model for lighthouse construction for more than a century. Smeaton built his light entirely of stone, using granite for the foundation and exterior and softer Portland stone for the interior. Masons in the coastal city of Plymouth began cutting one-ton stones in August 1756, and the following summer they began to build the light. Stevenson wrote:

Fenders fixed on the east side of the Rock prevented boats from fretting against it. Shears and a windlass were fixed for raising the stones directly from a boat and tested by hoisting above the Rock a heavy longboat complete with crew.... Sunday 12 th June saw the first stone, weighing 2 tons fitted in position and bedded with mortar.... Next day the masons set the other 3 stones of the 1st course. On the 15th a heavy swell carried away 5 of the 13 stones ... but the masons at Plymouth working day and night, cut duplicates in 2 days.

They sometimes worked into the summer nights, seeing only by the flickerings of lighted links, or torches, and still it took more than three years to finish the tower, which weighed more than a thousand tons and stood eighty feet above the rocks. First lit in October 1759, the light shining from Smeaton's tower was no different, or stronger, than that in the previous Eddystone lights: a chandelier of twenty-four candles (each about the size of a contemporary dinner-table candle), which the keeper lowered every half-hour for snuffing, then raised again into place. If the glass was clean and the light well snuffed, it could be seen for seven miles: "very strong and bright to the naked eye, much like a star of the fourth magnitude." It stood on the reef for 120 years.

Traffic on the seas increased markedly during the eighteenth century, and the story of the Eddystone light illustrates the lengths to which people would go to achieve even a small glimmer of illumination. They had no hope for more than that, really. In spite of the widespread slaughter of whales, the stink of try-pots, and the complex process of making spermaceti candles, eighteenth-century light wasn't appreciably brighter than what could be had in Roman times, for lamp technology had hardly changed, in part because not even the scientists of the time understood the nature of the flame they were gazing into at night. What would eventually bring about the first measurable increase in the brightness of lamps occurred a world away from the oil-slicked decks of whaling ships, in the laboratories of Europe.

At the time of the French and American revolutions, scientists adhered to the belief that all matter contained phlogiston, a flammable substance that was imparted to the air during combustion. "So long as the air can receive this substance from the combustible matter so long the body will continue burning," noted Professor Samuel Williams, who lectured at Harvard at the time.

As soon as the Air is saturated and can receive no more of the Phlogiston, the combustion must cease for no more Phlogiston can escape or be thrown out from the burning body. And therefore when fresh air is admitted to receive Phlogiston, the combustion will again take place.—And hence are derived the phrases of
phlogisticated
and
dephlogisticated
air. By phlogisticated air is intended air which is charged or loaded with Phlogiston, and by dephlogisticated air is meant Air which is free from Phlogiston; or which does not contain this principle or element of inflammability.

Quite a few scientists experimented with combustion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, most notably Joseph Priestley in England and Antoine Lavoisier in France. Eventually, Priestley identified oxygen in air, although he continued to hold fast to the phlogiston theory. It was Lavoisier, working in Paris, who built on Priestley's understanding of oxygen and concluded that rather than imparting a substance to the air, burning materials were fueled by oxygen in the air.

François-Pierre Ami Argand, a Swiss scientist who worked briefly in Lavoisier's laboratory, made use of his and Priestley's findings to create the first significant improvement in the lamp. The most essential component of Argand's design was a tubular wick, which he fed between two metal cylinders. Openings at the base of the cylinders allowed air to reach the flame from both inside and outside the wick. The increased oxygen created a more robust flame than in previous lamps, and it also burned at a higher temperature, making for a cleaner fire in which the carbon particles were almost completely consumed. An Argand lamp produced very little soot and smoke, and there was little need for snuffing. Later, Argand enclosed the wick in a chimney—perforated metal, then glass—which not only protected the light but also created an updraft that increased airflow to the flame. He also designed a mechanism for raising and lowering the wick. According to some accounts, his lamp shone more brightly than six tallow candles. Others claimed that if it was fed by spermaceti oil, it produced about ten times the illumination of a customary lamp, and the flame—rather than being the usual orange—was "very white, lively and almost dazzling, far better than the light of any lamp proposed before."

This light born of experiment, of the investigations of a handful of men in private quarters, seemed so immediately bright that to some it was more than the human eye could bear. One account suggests that "as the light emitted by [these lamps] is frequently too vivid for weak or irritable eyes, we would recommend the use of a small screen, which should be proportionate to the disk of the flame, and be placed, at one side of the light, in order to shade it from the reader's eye, without excluding its effect from others, or darkening the room." And, after so many centuries of dreaming of more light, people did shield the flame, with mica, horn, and decorative glass. These were the first lampshades.

The Argand lamp had its challenges. Though efficient, the large wick and increased oxygen required much more oil than previous lamps, which not only made the lamp costly to run but also meant that Argand couldn't count on capillary action alone to feed the flame, since the viscous animal and vegetable oils of the time rose so slowly up the wick. To solve this problem, Argand designed an oil reservoir adjacent to and higher than the burner, which used gravity to feed fuel to the lamp, but the reservoir partially obscured the light and cast a shadow.

"Being 'the thing,' the Argand or Quinquet lamps [as they were known in France] were usually made up in bronze, silver, porcelain, crystal, and other expensive materials that kept them well out of reach of the ordinary purse," observes historian Marshall Davidson. And it wasn't just the cost of the lamps that kept those of meager means from buying them; the quantity of oil required stopped them as well. Brilliance still came at a price, and they knew it. "The modest versions that Yankee tinsmiths were advertising as early as 1789 did not win any broad popularity," notes Davidson. "Absurd as it sounds they gave too much light. That is to say, it was impracticable to make them so small that they had no greater flame than that of a single candle and ... anything that burned more oil, proportionately, whatever its brilliance and efficiency, was uneconomical for ordinary domestic purposes."

For mariners, the Argand lamp was invaluable. A lighthouse equipped with one magnified by a parabolic reflector not only gave many times the light of the old lighthouse lamps, but the light proved steadier and more dependable. The adoption of the Argand lamp for seamarks, along with an increase in lighthouse construction, meant, according to Stevenson, that "the single most powerful light of 1819 exceeded the combined powers of all the navigation lights of 1780." And perhaps the greatest innovation, one used even now, was still to come.

In 1822 French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel designed a hive of light. His Fresnel lens—a lamp comprising concentric wicks set in bull's-eye glass and surrounded by rings of glass prisms—bent and concentrated light into a bright, narrow beam. The largest of his lenses, meant to aid ships along the most treacherous and fogbound coasts, was built of a thousand prisms and stood more than ten feet high. When placed one hundred feet or so above sea level—high enough to compensate for the curvature of the earth—its beam could be seen for twenty miles. Fresnel produced his lens in six different sizes; the smallest, a sixth-order lens used in harbors and bays, was a mere twelve inches in diameter and stood eighteen inches high.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in addition to installing Fresnel lenses and replacing old oil lamps with more dependable electric lights or gaslights, lighthouses would begin to adopt a system of flashing lights to distinguish one seamark from the next. Mariners unfamiliar with the coast could get their bearings even when daymarks—the painted patterns on lighthouse towers—disappeared with the sun. And lightships, light buoys, and sound signals such as whistles, bells, and foghorns frequently marked the more treacherous shoals.

Still, shipwrecks were a given well into the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, there were twelve working Coast Guard stations along fifty miles of the south shore of Cape Cod, and lantern-carrying surfmen patrolled the shores, scanning the waters for ships in distress. "Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see the coming and going of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a great northeaster, now through August quiet ... the beach traced and retraced with footprints that vanish in the distances," observed Henry Beston, who chronicled life on "the Great Beach of Cape Cod."

There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the worst.... The big three-masted schooner
Montclair
stranded at Orleans and went to pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.... Older folk will tell you of the
Jason
, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic
Castagna
and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.

Any mariner of the eighteenth century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles, or that such a light would not be essential to seeing a ship safely past the rocks; that there would come a time when navigators hardly needed to scan the horizon, for they would get their bearings from a prism of information—radar, GPS, and electronic charts. Data would become the new lamp.

A
T THE TURN OF
the nineteenth century, most people still saw by the same ancient light as always, though that would change in the decades to come. Not only would brighter, cleaner mineral fuels replace tallow and whale oil, but the story of human light would cease to be that of candles and lamps alone. It would become a story that defied linearity, one composed of inseparable strands of invention and improvement—gaslight, the safety match, electric arc lamps, kerosene, Edison's incandescent bulb, Tesla's alternating current—and as new forms of illumination overtook the old, they competed with one another in ways that stratified society and intensified the separateness of countryside and city, household and industry.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, gaslight led this transformation, at least for city dwellers and factory workers in England. The gas fuel of the time was a by-product of the distillation of bituminous coal into coke (the "charcoal of coal"), and coke production was well established in England, whose economy had been based on coal for more than a century. The English preferred burning hard, light, porous coke in both their home hearths and industrial furnaces. Unlike bituminous coal, which in its raw state burns with a smoky yellow flame, coke burns with a uniform and intense heat that produces no sparks and little soot or smoke. "It seldom needs the application of the poker—that specific for the
ennui
of Englishmen," noted one writer of the time.

Coke manufacture involved shoveling coal into vessels called retorts, which were set in large ovens and heated—a process that dissipated the tar and gases present in the coal. During the eighteenth century, coke manufacturers captured and sold the tar, which was used for caulking ships, but they released the coal gas into the air and let it go to waste. Although it had long been known that such gas would burn with a luminous flame and scientists had experimented with igniting bladders filled with coal gas and other flammable substances, until the turn of the nineteenth century, no one had developed a practical application for it.

In 1801 French engineer Philippe Lebon gave the first public demonstration of functional gaslight when he displayed, in Paris, what he called the
thermolampe.
This furnace housed a retort that fed distilled flammable gas—likely wood gas—to a condenser, then through a series of pipes to an outlet. Lebon imagined that his thermolampe would be used for both lighting and heating a household: "The inflammable gas is ready to extend everywhere the most sensible heat and softest lights, either joined or separated at our pleasure. In a moment we can make our lights pass from one chamber to another.... No sparks, coals or soot will incommode us any longer. Neither can cinders ashes coals or wood, render our apartments black or dirty or require the least care." He outfitted his own home with a thermolampe and sold admission for viewing it in an effort to arouse public interest. Many were curious, few were persuaded, and the thermolampe went no further.

Gaslight found its first sustained application as light alone in British machine shops and cloth factories, where the limits of tallow and whale oil were keenly felt. This was especially true in the winter, when the working day continued long after darkness fell, and the wavering light cast by such illuminants made precision work difficult. To light their workrooms, some large factories needed hundreds, even thousands, of tallow candles or whale oil lamps. Each required individual attention—lighting, snuffing, replacing, filling, cleaning—never mind the stink, the irritating smoke, and the heat. In addition, any simple accident could mean disaster. Some owners of large factories so feared a conflagration that they kept their own fire engines on hand. Such light was costly, too. According to historian M. E. Falkus,