The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Turning Night Into Day

A Frenchman, Leziere, figured out that a wick could be made flat like a ribbon, instead of being round like a cord, like the wicks in our little kitchen lamps. This gave a flat flame and the air could reach all parts of it more easily. Then Argand, the man who had thought up the idea of putting a glass chimney on the lamp, invented the very best kind of wick. His method was simple. He took a flat wick and rolled it into a cylinder. Then he made a burner in such a way that air could get at the flame from both the inside and the outside. This Argand burner is still used in our big kerosene lamps.

Try taking one of these burners apart and you will see a little crown with perforations in it to admit the air on top of a metal tube round which the wick is placed. This tube is full of holes through which the air gets to the inside of the wick, and thus reaches the center of the flame.

People were enthusiastic over this Argand lamp. But it had its enemies too. One old authoress, Countess de Genlis, said that "since lamps came into style all the young people have begun to wear glasses. Only older people who read and write by candle light have good eyes."

Of course this is not true. The Argand lamp wasn't in the least bad for the eyes.

The First Street Lamps

During these several centuries which separate the teapot lamp from the Argand burner, great changes had taken place on the streets of cities.

Paris was the first city to have lighted streets. It started by the police requiring every householder to keep a lamp burning in a street window from nine o'clock in the evening on through the night.

Soon regular companies of torch- and lantern-bearers began to offer their services to anyone who wished to hire them. And a few years later the first street lamps appeared in Paris.

This was a great event. King Louis the Fourteenth ordered a medal struck to commemorate the occasion. Tourists used to tell the most enthusiastic stories about the impression which the brilliantly lighted streets of Paris made on them. They say that the reign of Louis the Fourteenth is called the "brilliant" because of these street lamps.

It is interesting to read the memoirs of people of those times. I have before me a book, with a long title, after the fashion of those times:

A VISIT TO PARIS

DIRECTIONS INTENDED FOR THE USE OF TRAVELING GENTLEFOLK TO ADVISE THEM WHAT TO DO IF THEY WISH TO MAKE THE BEST USE OF THEIR TIME AND MONEY WHILE STAYING IN PARIS.

WRITTEN BY THE COUNSELLOR TO HIS HIGHNESS PRINCE
WALDECK JOACHIM CHRISTOPH NEMEITZ,
PARIS, 1718.