20 Dangerous Ways People Lit Their Homes Before Electricity

In 1789, naturalist Gilbert White recorded the grim economics of the rushlight, one of the cheapest ways a household could light a room. One consisted of the dry pith of the soft rush, stripped of the green bark and soaked in rendered bacon or mutton fat. Clamped at an angle in an iron holder, the one-foot stem would last from fifteen to thirty minutes, at which point it would be no more. Cheap, yes, but you’d be replacing it several times an evening.

Tallow candles were very affordable and commonly used candles made by dipping a wick into tallow made from sheep or cattle fat. Within minutes of being lit, a tallow candle smelled awful, dripped all over, and belched out soot. They also needed to be “snuffed,” or have their wicks trimmed with shears, every 15 to 20 minutes. If they weren’t, the room would become filled with smoke. This certainly doesn’t sound like a candle I want burning in my house!

One way to waste less fuel was the Betty lamp, likely named after the German word for “better,” not a woman called Betty. It had a sloping wick channel down into the grease pan, so any unburnt fuel would drip back into the pan to be recirculated rather than wasted. The similar Scottish Crusie lamp used two iron pans, stacked on top of each other, to achieve the same end.

For more than 3,000 years, a crescent-shaped soapstone basin called a qulliq provided light, heat, and a way to melt ice for drinking water for Inuit households in their snow dwellings. This lamp, fueled by seal oil or whale blubber, could be used to dry damp clothing and heat the entire dwelling, all with wicks of Arctic cottongrass.

When other fuel ran short, some households made “slut lamps.” This old English phrase, meaning either rags or kitchen workers, carried none of its modern connotations at the time. The lamp itself couldn’t have been much simpler: a dish of dirty kitchen grease with a twisted rag serving as the wick.

Beeswax candles burned brightly and almost smokelessly, with a honey-like scent, but they cost three to ten times more than tallow candles. Spermaceti candles were another expensive option, made from a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales. They were hard, white, didn’t slump in high temperatures, and burned so evenly that a standard unit of brightness in Britain was defined by their light. Based on other smelly and messy options, it’s no wonder the rich yearned for better alternatives.

A double-tube lamp design was used to burn oil derived from whale blubber. Whale oil was thick, so the lamps were made to transfer heat downward to the oil to keep it flowing. Overhunting reduced the whale population, which increased prices by the 1840s. As whale oil grew scarcer, more Europeans turned to colza, a type of rapeseed oil already used in some lamps, but it was viscous as well. New designs were necessary to accommodate it.

Before glass became the obvious choice for lantern windows, people could use thin sheets of cattle horn instead. The old spelling of “lantern,” “lanthorn,” reflects the fact that lantern windows were often made of cattle horn, scraped thin and softened by boiling. The translucent horn allowed light through while shielding the flame from the wind, which made it especially useful for carrying a light outdoors. Pierced tin lanterns were also used to project patterns of light.

In 1780, Swiss physicist Aimé Argand invented a lamp with a hollow cylindrical wick located between a pair of metal tubes, with a glass chimney on top to funnel a strong draft past the flame, giving it air from both sides at once. It burned six to ten times brighter than a candle and produced no smoke. He patented it in England in 1784.

In earlier oil lamps, the raised reservoir that fed the flame could cast an irritating shadow. In 1800, Carcel, a French watchmaker and inventor, patented a new model of lamp in which a spring-driven clockwork pump hidden in the pedestal base forced thick colza oil up to the burner, where excess fuel overflowed and actually cooled the burner. The clockwork mechanism could feed oil continuously for as long as 16 hours.

The Solar Lamp was patented by Robert Cornelius of Philadelphia in 1843. In reality, it had nothing to do with sunshine. Its dome-shaped brass ring drove air upward into a wick using an Argand-style design. This allowed the solar lamp to run on inexpensive lard or colza oil without creating any smoke.

Hog fat was one of the cheapest fuels around, but there was an inconvenient problem: it was solid at room temperature. Lard oil lamps got around this by conducting heat from the burner down wide copper or brass strips that dipped into the reservoir. That heat melted the lard and allowed it to flow up the wick. Between 1840 and 1860, several types of these lard lamps were patented in the United States.

Camphene (made by distilling pine turpentine) and “burning fluid,” a turpentine-alcohol concoction, produced a surprisingly bright flame at a surprisingly low price, but could readily vaporize inside a lamp reservoir and become explosive. Millions of households across North America adopted these lamp oils from the 1830s through the 1850s, as whale oil grew steadily scarcer and pricier, only to experience devastating house fires, horrific facial burns, and deaths.

Even a bright oil lamp had an annoying problem: its own fuel reservoir could block some of the light it was producing. By the early 19th century, the sinumbra lamp tackled this with a design that allowed light to fall directly onto the surface below without the reservoir casting a large shadow. Its name fittingly came from the Latin for “without shadow.” Examples from around the 1830s used whale oil and built on the earlier Argand lamp design.

In 1823, French chemist Chevreul isolated stearic acid from animal fat. The result was harder wax and a cleaner, easier burn. The tedious job of trimming the wick at least every twenty minutes was eliminated by an improved wick. Invented by Cambacérès, a French chemist, and patented in 1825, the new braided design curled outward as it burned, leading itself into the hottest part of the flame, where it consumed its own char. Around 1850, Scottish chemist James Young introduced paraffin wax, greatly reducing the cost of clean-burning candles.

Kerosene was patented by Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner in 1854. It was distilled at first from coal and later from petroleum, and was chemically different from the pine-derived turpentine in camphene. New lamps that used kerosene, flat-woven wicks, and glass chimneys worked quite well. Once oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, kerosene lamps spread rapidly, providing light to homes around the world for decades.

Beginning in 1816 in Baltimore and other cities, it became possible to light houses with “town gas,” which wasn’t the natural gas of today but gas manufactured from heated coal and piped into homes. Turning a valve on a wall bracket shaped like a fishtail or batwing made the flame appear instantly. Town gas did not need a wick or constant attention, a major convenience after centuries of trimming and refilling. However, the gas burned oxygen from homes and emitted carbon monoxide into the rooms.

In 1885, Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the incandescent gas mantle, a covering that glowed when heated by a gas flame, but the faint green light it gave off was unsatisfactory. Between 1890 and 1891, Auer von Welsbach created a recipe which, when burned, left behind a fine mineral network that gave off a blinding white light: 99 percent thorium oxide and 1 percent cerium oxide. This recipe produced five times as much light per cubic foot of gas as earlier versions.

Acetylene was commercialized in 1892 by Thomas Willson, who found a way to make calcium carbide. It was used in farmhouses as an independent source of light and in early vehicles as headlights. Acetylene generators worked by combining gray calcium carbide with water, producing a flammable gas that burned at the nozzle with a bright, sunlight-white flame. All that remained of the carbide afterward was chalky lime sludge.

Between 1900 and the 1920s, some prosperous farms adopted so-called “hollow-wire” systems that pumped pressurized liquid gasoline through small copper lines to ceiling fixtures, where the fuel was vaporized and burned to produce bright light. Instead of waiting for electrical lines to reach them, rural households could essentially pipe their lighting fuel around the house, giving them powerful indoor light while remaining completely off the electrical grid.

This content was created with the help of AI.