The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Turning Night Into Day
Streets Without Lights
Thousands of Edisons
WHO invented the electric lamp?
The usual answer to this question is: "Edison, a famous American scientist."
But this is not true. Edison was only one of the many inventors to whose work we owe the artificial sun which nowadays lights up our streets and houses.
There was a time when there was not a single street lamp of any description on any city street. People had to sit at home in the evening with only the dim light of a tallow candle or a smoking oil lamp.
This ancient oil lamp, shaped something like a teapot, hasn't the slightest resemblance to our electric light bulbs. Nevertheless, the modern electric lamp descends in a direct line from this queer looking old teapot, with many changes along the way some small and unimportant looking, but all significant.
Thousands of inventors throughout thousands of years have worked to give us a brighter and better lamp.
A Bonfire in the Living-Room
Compared with the lamps which preceded it, this clumsy oil lamp was an elegant and ingenious invention.
There were times when there was no such thing in existence as a lamp of any kind. Fifteen hundred years ago, on the spot where Paris stands today, stood a dirty little town called Lutetia. All the houses in Lutetia were tiny wooden huts with straw-thatched or tiled roofs. If you had gone into one of these little houses you would have seen a fire burning right in the center of its one room. In spite of a hole in the roof the room was full of smoke which would have made your eyes smart and filled up your lungs so you could hardly breathe.
This fire was their lamp, cook stove and fireplace. It must have been a very dangerous thing to light a bonfire inside a wooden house and you can easily imagine how many times their houses must have caught fire and burned up.
People had a terrible fear of fire in those days, and no wonder. They thought fire was some kind of awful, devouring enemy, always lurking about looking for a chance to fall on the house and destroy it.
It was only about seven hundred years ago that stoves with chimneys first appeared in Europe. It was even later here in Russia where until very recently peasants in some places still lived in "black", that is chimneyless huts heated by stove without any chimneys whatsoever.
When they started a fire in one of these stoves they had to leave the outside door open to let the smoke out. And to keep the children from being frozen to death by the cold air that came in or choked by the smoke in the room, they would put them to bed even in the middle of the day, and cover them up head and all with their big heavy sheepskin coats.
