Lighting the Home 
By RICHARD MORTON 
D URING the last twenty years, more progress 
has been made in the art of illumination 
than in the twenty centuries preceding. 
Shakespeare and Socrates both found the night dark 
without and dim within—no general system of street 
lighting and only a few primitive lamps and candles 
for the interior. 
The invention of the Argand od burner a century 
and a quarter ago was epoch making. And a cen¬ 
tury ago coal gas was first used as an illuminant. 
Westminster Bridge in London was lighted by gas 
in 1813, Paris in 1820, Baltimore in 1821, Boston in 
1822, New York in 1823. 
Gas and oil were the illuminants of the nineteenth 
century, and the discovery of the petroleum fields 
of Ohio in the fifties introduced a veritable Age of 
Kerosene and Standard Oil. The kerosene lamp 
is as far ahead of earlier oil lamps as the mantle gas 
lamp is superior to the open gas flame. 
But while the mantle gas lamp is the cheapest 
light known, next to the electric arc light, it is much 
less convenient for general use than the incandescent 
electric bulb that became common in the last ten 
years of the nineteenth century. 1 he arc lamp 
that preceded it by about ten years cannot be utilized 
in sufficiently small units for the lighting of the home. 
The incandescent electric lamp is the latest word 
on interior illumination and specially lends itself 
to decorative uses. While 16-candle power bulbs 
are those most generally employed, lights as small 
as 2-candle power can he installed when desired, and 
should be more frequently desired. 
The unsatisfactory unit of electric, gas and kero¬ 
sene lighting that our legislators selected as a normal 
and usual light for residences, is one of 16-candle 
power. This unit is too large for a light emitted 
from a slender glowing filament. The effect on the 
eye is extremely injurious. Wherever possible 
8-candle power bulbs should be substituted for i6’s 
and the tip or all of the bulb should be frosted. Or 
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LATE GEORGIAN MUSIC ROOM 
