The Human Wonder That Fought Back The Darkness
The staggeringly cheap invention which made us infinitely productive
I’m writing this story in the dark. Well, let me rephrase that. It’s dark outside, but far from dark within my house. LED lighting allows me to see the keyboard and reference material.
I’m also wasting the illumination. Like a billionaire lighting cigars with dollar bills, I have lights on all over I don’t need.
“So what?” you ask. But hold your eye rolls until this story is complete. The fact I can illuminate my house this way is astounding — particularly how I can just waste the resource without a thought. Namely, because it’s cheap.
Not too long ago, light and the material to make it was a precious resource. Not only did it require lots of time to gather the materials, but the cost could be prohibitive. A lamp or candle was expensive. It also wasn’t good.
The lumens a basic LED light puts out compared to a candle is mind blowing.
While many in our current age preach doom like it’s a religious revival, there’s an inconspicuous device around you which shows monumental human progress. We barely take note of it.
It’s simple, inexpensive, and fights back the encroaching darkness. It’s also an invaluable resource in our search for knowledge, adding valuable time to our days. This is mankind’s story of light. Not the bulb. But the thousand-year multi-generational building of the technology we take for granted.
And it all starts with a flame.
The Campfire And Simple Oil Lamps
“The first use of artificial or produced light probably coincided with the controlled use of fire. The first tool, known as the Oldowan chopper, has been dated from 2.6 million years ago, while the tentative identification of domesticated fire used by Australopithecus was discovered in Africa and dates from 1.42 million years ago. More definitive evidence of the controlled use of fire was found in the caves of Peking man (Homo erectus) dating from around 500,000 years ago.”
— William D. Nordhaus, Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not
The cost of light over the ages isn’t easy to calculate for many reasons. First, Neolithic man had no money. Bummer, right?
Even when humans did have currency, comparing a long dead means of transaction to our Dollars, Yen, and Pounds is difficult at best. Then, you need to take inflation into account.
William Nordhaus in his scholarly paper above found a few workarounds — the best being time. While Australopithecus had no money, he did have time. This method of transaction hasn’t changed. A minute and hour are the same today as they were 500,000 years ago.
Our first human-created light source was the campfire.
Nordhaus points out it was likely used to light up a cave but was also valued for its ability to cook food and produce heat. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains apes and gorillas can spend anywhere from six to eight hours a day chewing food. Fire frees humans by breaking it down.
Talk about saving time.
While it was amazing, it wasn’t exactly convenient. Nordhaus calculates it took about fifty-eight hours of work per thousand lumen hours (TLH). A lumen is a “unit of light flux.” You’ll notice all modern bulbs use the unit of measure to gauge light produced.
So, campfires leave a lot to be desired. Nordhaus puts them at .00235 lumens per watt. A Neolithic lamp (38,000 to 9,000 BC) using animal fat was five times more efficient and took only fifty hours of work per TLH.
Then things started getting a little more recognizable. A market formed. In Babylonia around 2000 BC, it took shape around sesame oil used for lamps. But it was too expensive for the common laborer and used mainly in temples. According to Nordhaus:
“The wage of a common laborer was approximately one shekel per month, which was also approximately the price of two sutu (ten liters) of sesame oil. I have performed a number of experiments with sesame oil and lamps purportedly dating from Roman times...These experiments provide evidence that an hour’s work today will buy about 350,000 times as much illumination as could be bought in early Babylonia.”
For some perspective, a tallow (rendered fat) candle in 1800 was only about five hours work per TLH.
Lighting advances moved slowly until the Industrial Revolution.
Town Gas And Light Bulbs
William Murdoch perfected coal gas or “town gas” lighting in 1792, experimenting in his own home. Afterwards, he started a company. By the early 19th century, many of the cities of Europe were lit by gas light.
This lamp, along with its predecessor the whale oil lamp, about doubled the tallow candle in lumens per watt at a cost of a little over seven hours labor per TLH in 1827. Within fifty years it was down to about .33 labor hours per TLH.
Kerosene lamps also appeared at this time. In 1855 this lamp cost about .23 labor hours per TLH. It also saved countless whales who’d otherwise be powering lamps across the world. But this was nothing compared to electricity.
Edison’s 1883 filament lamp improved upon the lumens per watt of the early town gas lamp by a magnitude of twenty. It did this at the cost of .75 labor hours per TLH.
Now, I’ve given you lots of numbers. Once you put them all together, you get a picture of stunning improvement over a brief period. And “time” is the measure we need to explain it. Along with a handy chart
Light Becomes Essentially Free
Dr. Marian Tupy and Dr. Gale Pooley at Humanprogress.org took the idea of time-cost averaging and ran with it. They break it down in a chart. Forgive the small numbers, it’s the best I can do in this format. It shows the number of seconds worked needed to purchase an hour of light
So, how much light could one hour’s worth of work buy you? The answer is staggering over time.
In 1800, six hours of work bought you one hour of light. By 1850, it was about two and a half for an hour of light. By 1900, almost eleven minute’s worth of work got you an hour. Well, how about now?
In 2011, half a second’s worth of work got you an hour of light. So, it’s technically free.
Your mind may be blown by this statistic — I know mine was — but there’s something greater here. What does light do for you? It makes you more productive by far. For instance, instead of being sentenced to a dark house at night, you can read, work, or enjoy life.
Functioning when the sun goes down isn’t a luxury relegated to the wealthy anymore.
While it took thousands of years, technically over the course of a few hundred, humanity defeated the darkness. It was banished with the flick of a switch. Powerful story? I truly think so, and one we should share with the gloomier members of our kind.
So, are you feeling pessimistic about our world? Turn on a light.
-Originally posted on Medium 9/7/22