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

Turning Night Into Day

To understand this picture you have to remember that in those days servants and shoemakers were considered of much less importance than any silly fop.

An Easy Riddle

So the problem of the candle was finally settled satisfactorily, but lamps were as bad as ever. No matter how many clever devices they thought up, no matter how many springs and pumps were added, lamps continued to burn wretchedly. And no wonder, for no matter how much the lamp burner was improved it wouldn't help—because the trouble was not in the burner but in the fuel. As soon as people learned how to get kerosene from petroleum —this was in the middle of the last century—all their difficulties vanished.

All their ingenuity had been wasted in trying to devise some way of making a fuel burn well which by its very nature burned badly. It's quite another story with kerosene. It runs up into the wick much more easily than oil. So the inventor of the kerosene lamp, an American named Silliman, didn't have to think of anything new. All he had to do was to discard all the unnecessary parts of the old lamp, the pumps and springs, all the contraptions that had been used to force the oil into the wick.

That's the way it often is: people puzzle and worry and think up all kinds of complicated apparatus, and in the end it turns out that the answer is very simple. All that is necessary is to find the clue. Kerosene was this clue.

A Flameless Lamp

A Poker and a Lamp

EVERYONE knows that a poker is not a lamp. But a poker can be made to give light. All you have to do is to hold it in the stove for a long time. It keeps getting hotter and hotter until it finally becomes a dark red color.

Keep on holding it in the fire and it will get cherry red, then bright red, then yellow and finally white.

(You can't heat a poker white hot in an ordinary heating stove. To do that you must have an intense heat, one that cannot be measured by the ordinary thermometer, 1300° C.)

Take a candle or lamp, any kind of lamp, electric, gas, kerosene, or any other kind, they all give light for the same reason that the poker does because they are raised to a very high temperature, are incandescent. In the flame of the candle and the lamp there are tiny particles of incandescent carbon, floating like the dust motes in a ray of sunlight. We don't see them ordinarily. They are visible only when the lamp smokes. Now, sooty smoke is very disagreeable. But it would be a great misfortune if there were no soot that is, tiny particles of unburned carbon in the flame. The flame of burning alcohol, for instance, has no soot in it and for that reason gives hardly any light.