ELECTRIC LIGHTING. 



PART I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 



HISTORICAL SKETCH. 



THE need of illumination in the absence of sunlight was 

 felt by man in the earliest ages of the world, and the 

 artificial production of light by fire, which he was able to dis- 

 cover, is even one of the great characteristics by which he is 

 distinguished from other animals. At first he had for light 

 merely pieces of burning wood, fragments of dry plants, or 

 branches of resinous trees, of which he made torches ; later 

 he would notice the combustible and illuminating properties 

 of certain oily liquids ; and we see that the Hebrews, the 

 Egyptians, and the nations of India and Upper Asia, were 

 acquainted with the use of lamps at the most remote antiquity. 

 But these lamps, even among the Romans, had smoky wicks, 

 such as would not be used at the present day by even our 

 rudest peasants. The tallow candles invented in England in 

 the twelfth century, and not introduced into France until the 

 reign of Charles V., were in the middle ages considered as a 

 great advance in illumination, and lamps for lighting towns 



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