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

Turning Night Into Day

Torches gave a very bright light. Whole rooms could be lighted up with them when great feasts were held. There is a story of how, in the hall of Gaston de Fois, twenty servants, holding torches, stood about the table during supper. In royal palaces there were often silver statues to hold the torches instead of living servants.

Torches, and kindle-lights too, may still be seen occasionally. In some places the fire brigade goes roaring through the streets with flaming torches, recalling those days of long ago.

The First Lamp

When they couldn't get pitch, people used to make torches by soaking the wood in some other inflammable material, such as grease or tallow. Besides giving a better light, the torch had another advantage over the kindle-light—it burned longer. It is easy to see why: there was much more pitch in a torch. This suggested the idea that the wood might be discarded entirely and only the pitch or tallow used. So they began putting the pitch or tallow into a cup of clay or stone and setting fire to it.

This was the first lamp. It would burn for several hours at a time, instead of only half an hornlike a kindle-light.
Now, the next problem was to get rid of the smoke and soot. For this primitive lamp smoked horribly.

Lamps and Smokestacks

Why do lamps smoke?

For the same reason that the smokestacks of a factory smoke. If you see thick black smoke coming out of the smokestacks of a factory that burns wood you may be sure that that factory either has poor furnaces or that the fireman doesn't understand his business. Only a part of the wood is being consumed in the furnace, the rest of it is going off up the chimney. Of course it is not going up in the form of wood, but as soot—that is, tiny particles of carbon which have not been burned up.

The trouble is you can't have fire without air. To get the wood to burn up entirely the fireman has to regulate the amount of air entering the furnace by opening or closing the damper in the chimney. If there is too little air in the furnace part of the wood will not be burned up, but will go off up the chimney in the form of soot. If there is too much air it is bad, too, because this will cool off the furnace.