About thirty years ago, I was flying over Saskatchewan in a small plane with then-Premier Roy Romanow. It was about midnight. I cannot remember the reason for the flight but do remember what we were seeing and what he told me.
Below us was darkness. Vast swatches of impenetrable darkness. I’ve worked in underground mines. The old mining song says a mine was “dark as a dungeon”. The view of rural Saskatchewan from top down rather bottom up was equally dark. But sprinkled around the darkness were points of light that revealed the shape of life in Saskatchewan. Small. scattered clusters of lights were farms. Larger clusters were towns. Lines of moving lights revealed highways. We approached Regina. Just as isolated stars form a galaxy visible as a single entity billions of kilometers away, thousands of individual lights of homes and streetlights formed a single glow on the edge of the horizon.
Premier Romanow broke the contemplative silence by saying, “I was once in a plane on a flight like this with Tommy Douglas. We looked down at the lights. He told me that this view was his most important accomplishment as a Premier. More important than Medicare. He and his government helped bring light to rural Saskatchewan”.
The Premier fell silent, looking at the lights; looking at the legacy of his illustrious predecessor.
Another story. It comes from the memoirs of Donald Rumsfeld – the American Secretary of Defense under both Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. Rumsfeld wrote that he kept a framed, satellite picture of the Korean peninsula in his office. The picture was taken at night. At the bottom of the picture was South Korea. It was glowing. A million points of light. At the top was China. It too was glowing. Not quite as much, but a lot. The middle was dark. The land mass of North Korea was indistinguishable from the sea.
This, said Rumsfeld, showed who was on the right side of the Korean War. America helped bring light to South Korea. The regime it fought against kept their country in darkness.
Now, I’m just going to assert this without offering a lot of proof and explanation. Tommy Douglas and Donald Rumsfeld were very different politicians. They had different world views. But they agreed on one thing.
Light was better than dark.
Both were right.
Darkness has its place. It is easier asleep in the dark than in the light. If you want to kill, rape, or rob it is easier to approach your soon-to-be victim in the dark than in the light. You get a better view of the stars if there are no other light sources.
But that is about it.
You cannot read in the dark. In your home, you stub your toe and skin your shin walking around in the dark. Travel – especially at high speeds or off roads and trails – is impossible in the dark. Killers, rapists, and robbers (and even monsters) lurk in the dark. You cannot work in the dark. You cannot really play in the dark. You can engage in carnal acts in the dark, but the building of desire works best if there is at least subdued lighting.
Light is better than dark. It was the first thing God created.
This is one thing that is incalculably better than “the good old days”. We have more light. Cheaper light. More reliable light. Healthier light.
The quest for light: windows
On average, we receive free light for 12 hours per day from the sun. It is great, but there are drawbacks. The further we are from the equator, the more erratic this lighting source becomes. For example, in Edmonton on December 21, the sun provides light for only 7 hours and 27 minutes. In Yellowknife, it is only light for 4 hours and 58 minutes. In Inuvik, it is dark all day. In fact, Inuvik gets no sunlight for 30 days every year. That’s a lot of darkness.
The bigger problem with sunlight is that it does not penetrate walls or roofs. If you build a house, a church or temple, a store, a school, or a factory, it is dark inside. This is why people invented windows about 3,300 hundred years ago. The first windows were simple. They were just holes in the walls or roofs. This worked quite well to let in sunlight (during the day) but had an obvious drawback. These simple windows let in the cold, the wind, the rain, and the snow at the same time.
Thus began a long search to find something that would let in the light but keep out the elements. It is believed that the first “glazed” window was made from an animal hide. It did not let in much light Next up were animal horns pounded flat and thin. This was a little better. The ancient Greeks tried thin slices of marble, but it was hard to cut rock thin enough. In about 100 CE (2,000 years ago), the Romans invented glass windows. These were blown glass in a bottle shape. They kept out the elements, but also most of the light. The first known mention of a glass window you could see through came in 1154. The window was in the palace of the ruler of the Ghana Empire. A technique for making flat glass was developed in England in 1226, but glass windows did not become cheap enough to be used in the dwellings of people other than kings and major aristocrats until the 17th century. In China, Korea and Japan, they developed a form of paper window. This worked fairly well, but only in mild climates.
It took centuries for windows to become something that we would recognize as a window. The contradiction between letting light in and keeping the elements out was tough to overcome.
There were intrinsic problems to windows – even good windows – as a light source. Light did not reach corners. Interior rooms remained dark as a dungeon. At night, windows did not work. In 1932, Columbia University School of Journalism Professor Walter B. Pitkin wrote the grumpiest book I’ve ever read. The 532-page book was called A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity. Like I said, grumpy. Pitkin argued that every human group was stupid, but stupid in different ways and for different reasons. In one chapter, he said Russians were particularly stupid because they had long, cold, dark nights spent in housing without windows. All that time huddled in the dark without anything to stimulate their minds made Russian peasants exceptionally stupid.
Artificial light
Sunlight works best outside. It turns off at night. Windows are an imperfect solution to provide indoor light. As a result, people turned to light that can be best be conceived of as stored up sunlight. People began to burn plant or animal matter to create light.
A short, easy to read, history of these efforts was published in 1996 by Nobel Prize winning economist William D. Nordhaus. What follows is taken from his work. Nordhaus’s purpose was to help develop a methodology to measure inflation over the centuries. How, he asked, can we measure inflation or standards of living when most of what we now use didn’t exist in the past. His solution was to measure the cost of unites of light rather than the cost of candles or light bulbs.
Nordhaus used a unit called a lumen. It measures the amount of radiant energy within specified wave lengths. I won’t explain all the technical details because I don’t understand them, but the bottom line is simple. The typical candle generates about 13 lumens. The typical 100-watt incandescent light bulb generates about 1,200 lumens. Thus, a candle burning for an hour will generate 13 lumen-hours while the light bulb will generate 1,200 lumen-hours. Nordhaus then used a standard measure of 1,000 lumen-hours. Based on the technology (in Europe) available at the time, he calculated how many hours of labor would be needed, on average, to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light.
The first uses of stored up solar power were likely multi-purpose. Fires created both light and heat. This would work well enough to provide a general sense of surroundings in a cave or a room but would not generate enough light to do something interesting like read a book. Or write one, which is one reason there were not a lot of books. Nordhaus calculated that in paleolithic times, it took about 58 hours of labor to produced 1,000 lumen-hours of light. Neolithic technology brought this down to 50 hours, while metal axes to cut wood cut the time needed down to about 40 hours.
That’s right. A modern work week was needed to produce the same amount of light generated by slightly less than an hour’s worth of light produced by a 100-watt incandescent light bulb.
People wanted more light.
There was another problem with fireplaces as light source. They generated lots of heat. This was fine in cold climates but uncomfortable in hot ones. People looked for ways to produce light without as much heat. For moving around outside at night, torches were the answer. Indoors, lamps and candles became the thing.
The first lamps were stones with a depression to hold melted animal fat. This technology required about 50 hours of work to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light. About 3,700 years ago, Babylonians figured out how to make a lamp work with sesame oil. This cut the labor needed to produce 1,000 lumen-hours down to about 40.
The next major innovation was the candle. There were beeswax candles, but the most common were tallow made from animal fat. Candles were a big deal. They cut the labor time needed to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light down to just a little over 5 hours.
With that, progress ground to a halt for centuries.
One innovation came in the early 1700s. Wicked lanterns produced more lumens than candles but did not lower the cost of light very much. The major fuel source was oil made from whale blubber, so a by-product of this technology was a massive effort to hunt whales into extinction.
The really big innovation was figuring out how to move from sunlight stored in living plants and animals to sunlight stored in plants and animals that lived millions of years ago.
Burning coal was better at generating heat than light until - the late 1700s - a guy named William Murdock developed a way to turn coal into a gas. Murdock also developed a wick to improve the lighting efficiency of burning gas. The result was not dramatically less labor intensive than candles, but the light was brighter, more flexible, and safer. (It is easy to knock over a candle).
Light started to become cheaper in the 1800s.
Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania and a process developed to turn it into kerosine. This reduced the labor time needed to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light down to about 3. Kerosine for lambs was the first “save the whale” campaign. It also made Rockefeller rich as a Rockefeller.
The invention of the incandescent light bulb came next. This cut the cost of light from about 3 hours of labor per 1,000 lumen-hours to less than half an hour. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb initially marketed electric lighting as being safer (fewer fires) than lamp, candle, and gas lighting. This had limited appeal. George Westinghouse moved from direct current electricity to the more dangerous but cheaper alternating current. Westinghouse understood human nature better than did Edison, who eventually capitulated and moved his systems to the alternating current.
Light became a lot, lot, cheaper. Nordhaus calculates that in 1800, it took an average of 5.387 hours of labor to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light. In 1900, it took 0.2204 hours.
The twentieth century was, by and large, centered around improving on the developments from the nineteenth century and making them available to more people. But light became ever cheaper. Nordhaus’s data ends in 1992. At that time, it took 0.00012 hours of labor time to produce 1,000 lumen-hours of light.
Not as cheap as sunlight but getting close.
The development of things such as LED technology, solar and wind electrical generation (which allows us to convert the sun’s radiant energy into light without it being first processed by a plant or animal), and nuclear power generation (which allows us to by-pass the sun completely) has likely driven down the cost of light even more since 1992, but someone other than me will have to do the math.
More light and cheaper light as better light
I’m with Tommy Douglas and Donald Rumsfeld. I like light. I like cheap light.
Here is something to ponder.
In 1800, it took an hour’s labor produced 186.22 lumen-hours of electricity. In 1992, an of labor could produce about 8.5 million lumen-hours.
By my math, the production of light is 4,510,793 percent better.
Better than the dark “good old days”.