Artificial Lighting in America: 1830-1860 



By C. Malcolm Watkins 



Associate Curator, Division of Ethnology, United States National Museum 



[With 8 plates] 



The theee decades from 1830 to 1860 are of special significance in 

 the history of artificial lighting in America. It was during this 

 period that radical departures were made from tradition, and profuse 

 invention paved the way to modern lighting. It was an era of trial 

 and error, of the search for cheaper fuel and light. It bridged the 

 gap between the primitive lamp and the mass-produced lighting de- 

 vice and ended with the adoption of the first refined petroleum fuel. 



In its limited sphere this development reflected the larger design 

 taking shape over the country as a whole. During these years 

 traditional colonial patterns began to be disrupted by novel forces 

 whose effects marked the emergence of modern America. Railroads, 

 factories, cities, and population shifts were the outward indications, 

 and causes as well, of enormous transformations. The boiling up- 

 surge of the era impressed foreign visitors to America. Lady Em- 

 meline Stuart Wortley observed in 1850 : 



Everything in nature and art almost seems to flourish here. Schools, uni- 

 versities, manufactories, societies, institutions, appear spreading over the length 

 and breadth of the land, and all seem on such a gigantic scale, too ! Lakes, 

 forests, rivers, electric telegraphs, hotels, conflagrations, inundations, rows, 

 roads, accidents, tobacco, Juleps, bowie knives, beards, pistols, &c. ! moderation 

 or littleness appear not to belong to America, where Nature herself leads the 

 way and seems to abhor both, showing an example of leviathanism in every- 

 thing, which the people appear well inclined to follow. [Wortley, 1851, p. 33.] 



Frederika Bremer observed at about the same time tliat "to hurl 

 mountains out of the way, to bore through them and build tunnels, to 

 move hills into the water as a foundation for roads in places where 

 this is necessary — all this the Americans regard as nothing at all. 

 They have indeed the faith to move mountains." (Benson, 1924, 

 p. 20.) 



Dynamic innovation, however, was silhouetted against a background 

 of enduring habit. Change, indeed, was as conspicuous in its absence 

 as in its presence. The static feudal economy of the South, for exam- 



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