Lighting would transform theatres and coalmines in very different ways

Posted in Famous Inventors, Historical articles, History, Inventions, Theatre on Thursday, 28 November 2013

Click on any image for details about licensing for commercial or personal use.

This edited article about lighting first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 467 published on 26 December 1970.

Dickens gives a public reading, picture, image, illustration

Charles Dickens gives a reading by flickering gaslight on a Victorian stage by Neville Dear

Lighting a home by whatever means had an advantage over outdoor lighting. Roofs and walls excluded the elements, while these were ever-present outside. Lighting in the open-air had to evolve in a different way, for there were always wind and rain to contend with, and, if a light was carried, there was the draught made by movement to be overcome.

Mr. F. A. Winsor, with his showman instinct, and not contented with his lectures of the virtues of gas-lighting at London’s Lyceum Theatre, went on to light up Pall Mall – or, to be truthful, a few yards of it – on the birthday of King George IV on 4th June, 1807. Winsor was clearly the right man at the right time to inspire gas-lighting, for, as far back as 1765 the magistrates of Whitehaven in Cumberland had refused a Mr. Spedding permission to install lights in the streets of the town.

Winsor, lighting even part of a street in 1807, inspired the “Golden Lane Brewery” to feel “what you can do we can do better,” and promptly gaslit not only the street their brewery was in, but an adjoining street, using 11 lights in all.

Street-lighting by gas, of course, required a man to go round lighting each lamp, so that the “lamp-lighter” was called into being. These characters took with them a ladder and a hand-held lantern. At the top of each post or standard they turned on a tap to let the gas flow, then lit it with their hand-lamp – a very arduous business. But by the middle of the 19th century things got better for the lamp-lighters. The ladder was discarded, and in its place came a long pole containing a crude oil-lamp and a “lug.” With the “lug” the gas-tap could be turned on from ground-level, and the jet lit by the oil-lamp which was protected from the wind by a pierced iron shield.

Our old friend the nightwatchman, with his tallow-candle in a horn lantern, had disappeared, for in 1880 the “Hurricane Lamp” arrived. This was a wind-cheating device burning mineral oil which was brighter than candlelight. Tough glass replaced the dim horn.

Previously had come – to the boon and benefit of street traders – the “Naphtha Flare.” This flaming device was invented in 1848 by Messrs. Read and Holliday, designed to burn “Coal Tar Naphtha, a kind of oil.” The burner was wickless, and “Naphtha Flares” have been in use well into the century in which we live. We often see them in fairgrounds.

The theatre, of course, was among the first fields to benefit from gas-lighting. Before this arrived theatre lighting had been very simple, the stage itself being illuminated by candles with nobody worrying if a “snuffer-boy” held up the action of the play by strolling on to snuff the candles. When the “Argand Lamp” was invented, coloured glass chimneys over the wicks did much to create theatrical “effect”. Hitherto, dimming and brightening of lights were contrived by the turning up and down of wicks within opaque cylinders.

But then came controllable gas with the great benefits it conferred on theatre-lighting in general. It was then discovered that lime glowed brilliantly if heated by an oxy-hydrogen flame. The saying “In the limelight” came from the use to which this discovery was used in the theatre, when a lens was put in front of a limelight, producing what we know as a “spot-light.”

While some men were turning their minds to lighting streets, others to lighting theatres, still further inventors were concerned with those who worked underground – the miners. Dr. William Reid Clanny and Sir Humphrey Davy between them produced the famous “Davy Lamp,” a safety lamp for miners often beset by explosive gas.

It was in 1815 that Humphrey Davy gave his “safety lamp” to the underground world. It was not, at first, a total success, but its subsequent developments have made it, to this day, one of the great lighting benefits ever to be conferred upon mankind.

And to think that before Davy lit the miners’ darkness, they were able to see only by the tiny stream of sparks provided by a boy day-long grinding together the geared wheels of a “Flint Mill”!

Comments are closed.