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>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was.
It’s amusing how often these sorts of exposés start off with this “the transformation that the world forgot” meme. There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT instead that, in all honesty, not enough time passes from one article to another on the same subject that gives enough time to forget. We constantly have to be reminded of some absolutely astonishing fact. Perpetually. I suppose this defines the 24-hour news cycle as applied to the internet.
The actual article itself is empty on juicy content and shills a book instead. Skip. Maybe the author forgot what good article writing is like, but that fact certainly won’t be lost on civilization as a whole.
Yes.
It's a poor history of lighting. They missed the incandescent lamp mantle, the limelight, and the arc light. That's when light output finally got serious. Gas lamps were dim, and generated more heat than light. You need more than just a flame. You need to get up to incandescence temperature.
The arc light changed cities from dark to bright.[1] Suddenly, for the first time in history, major city streets were brilliantly lit. If someone had been able to see the earth from space, for the first time there would be lights at night.
Arc street lights worked fine. Way too much light for your house, of course. Arc lights remain a thing, but today the arc is run in xenon or sodium vapor rather than air.
Incandescent lamps came later.
You can still see arc lights in Austin's "moonlight towers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_towers_(Austin%2C_Te...
Arc lights also enabled fascism in the early 20th century. A spectacle like the Cathedral of Light and the new technologies used by the Nazi party were transformative in terms of mass rallying:
Can't all aspire to the slow cadence of https://www.damninteresting.com/archives/
>There are enough writers out there who are making ends meet writing boring articles for publications like BT
There's too many people doing bullshit jobs like this, creating useless content, when they should be doing something more productive instead, like cleaning public bathrooms or picking crops.
I don't fully buy the thesis. Human vision is logarithmic; the article's central metric of "cost per lumen-hour" isn't a well-founded one—it has linear utility implicit in it.
You're right about the linearity being flawed, but I think there's an important and rescuable construct there. Humans do have ranges of illumination where we can easily accomplish certain classes of tasks - very few want to tat lace or operate heavy machinery by starlight, for example.
Also dismissing the 24 hour availability of labor
We aren't talking about installing a single light that we pump all of the world's energy into, making it ever brighter as we drive the cost/benefit further and further into the realm of diminishing returns. We are talking about scaling a few common "good enough for X activity" lighting setups across billions of installations, and that process is very linear.
So £40,000 per million-lumen hours = £0.40 per lux, no?
Today that metric might look 10x better, around 4 cents per lux
LEDs can put out 200 lumens per watt, 5000 watts of that for one hour is a million-lumen hours.
Assuming perfect efficiency, that would use 5 kWh of electricity, which is $0.40 total if you pay $0.08/kWh.
I believe that works out to .00000004 cents per lux.
An opportunity to speak about a resource most people take for granted in their daily lives.
This reliance on electrical power leaves us vulnerable to solar events, particularly coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These massive bursts from the sun can disrupt electrical grids, satellite communications, and even the internet, yet many remain unaware of the potential consequences of a grid collapse.
The Carrington Event of 1859 serves as a historical warning; it caused significant disruptions to telegraph systems, highlighting our susceptibility to solar storms. Today, as our technology becomes increasingly dependent on electricity, the risks associated with a large-scale CME grow. Experts suggest that significant solar events occur every 100 years or so, making the possibility of another Carrington-like incident a real and pressing concern.
Despite this knowledge, many remain oblivious to the implications of a potential grid failure. Such an event could lead to widespread blackouts, crippling essential services and throwing modern society into disarray. Our ability to predict and mitigate these solar threats is limited, and the sun’s unpredictable behavior adds layers of uncertainty.
In an era where attention is scarce, it is critical to focus on the serious risks posed by our electrical dependence. The stakes are incredibly high—food and water supplies, emergency services, and national security could all be compromised by a severe CME. Acknowledging our vulnerability to these solar events is essential for developing resilience strategies and investing in infrastructure that can withstand such threats. Our civilization’s fate may very well rest in the hands of the sun, and we must prepare for that possibility.
Keep in mind that telegraphs were uniquely sensitive to that kind of event. Our power distribution lines are the most sensitive thing we have today, and yet are much more robust.
Also, distributed generation, like we get with photovoltaics only improves the situation.
Anyway, we could still have large scale blackouts and localized equipment loss due to those. That's true. We should be able to protect ourselves, we know how and it's something perfectly practical; besides, we will have about a half-year of warning. But it's unclear if we will.
Also, we know how to protect power grids by grounding the equipment. My understanding is that grounding is harder than just running ground rod, but that it is doable. It is the kind of thing that government mandate and some money could solve.
This is something that most movies set in past eras get wrong.
They always show a bunch of candles in the houses, even in poor ones, and a lot of torches outside.
No, just no. No poor household could afford candles, they used pinewood chips, if they could even afford them.
And torches were also expensive, and lasted only a short time.
Even firewood was expensive.
Many movies also show kerosene lamps in eras where they weren't even invented. The worst thing I've seen is a korean movie, set in the 16th century, showing an Aladdin mantle lamp (without the mantle, and grossly misadjusted). Those things were invented in the 1920s, and became popular in the 1930s.
Come on, guys. You have internet. Getting it right just consts you one Google search.
Other non-obvious things about historical candles:
Self-trimming candle wicks were invented in 1825. Before that people had to regularly trim the wicks of candles (there were special scissors made for this) or the candle would produce huge quantities of smoke when the exposed wick got too long.
Paraffin wax was invented in 1830. Before that candles were made of tallow, which smelled bad and made a lot of smoke, or bee's wax, which was very expensive.
How do self-trimming candle wicks work?
Re lamps - whale oil was used, at least in Europe and US, way before any kerosene was ever invented. That's why they were hunted almost to extinction.
All 18th and 19th novels I recall were mentioning them. Before that, honestly don't know and you are probably right. But yes poorer went to sleep with sun going down, unless there was active fire going on for warmth. Not something poor londoner can pay for regularly, but where I come from forests and mountains were endless sources of fuel.
Whale oil lamps - I suspect those didn't smell too good....
The article explains this at length.
Perhaps historical accuracy takes a backseat to the need for illumination -- nobody wants to watch a movie with people sitting around in a room so dark you can't see what the actors are doing or their facial expressions.
It wouldn't be that terribly dark. Lighting technology may have been primitive prior to the last 200 years or so, but people, being people, don't like sitting around in dark places if they can improvise alternatives. I think we get a bit fetishistic these days about painting the past as overly dark (both metaphorically and, in this case, literally)
Curiously the 2015 horror movie "The Witch", which takes place on and around a 17th century New England farming community, was supposedly filmed entirely using natural light and lighting appropriate to what was available at the time. You can see everyone's face and gestures.
On movie sets the candles and whatnot are props not lighting, there are other lights in use to illuminate the set and actors.
Essentially giving up on artificial light has been life changing for me and my family… all of us used to take melatonin and have an awful time falling and staying asleep. Now we let the house go dark at sunset, and we all just fall asleep easily.
I think individuals sensitivity to artificial light varies a lot, but for many people - including me- it can basically destroy your ability to sleep, and as a result your overall health and quality of life.
How do you do things after dark with no artificial light? Especially in winter?
For the most part we don’t- we typically just go to bed at dusk. The earliest it gets totally dark in the winter is about 6pm. We do sometimes read for a while after dusk but usually with an incandescent bulb dimmed to the brightness and color of a candle.
Mostly it works great, but can be awkward spending time with friends and family whose schedules may be as much as 6 hours later than ours.
No mention of William Nordhaus, who famously did a study/survey of this in the 1990s?
* https://lucept.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/william-nordha...
* https://econlife.com/2018/10/the-light-side-of-economic-grow...
* https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38650976
He also co-authored the influential textbook Economics with Samuelson, and did important work on the economics of climate change:
Notice that his work on climate change is a terrible bunch of crap. Basically, the guy does the basic mistake of confusing weather and climate, and his conclusion goes along "most productive work in modern economies is done in offices and factories not exposed to weather, therefore are impervious to climate change". This is beyond belief really. Generally, the way mainstream economics treats climate change is just shameful.
If you want to learn more check Steve Keen's substack.
>We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was
For anyone that wants to remember, spend time in remote African villages. You go to bed when the sun does, and you get up when it does. It’s really nice, I was better rested after 3 years there than ever in my life.
The other thing that I was amazed by in Africa was watching hundreds of people walking beside highways in the pitch dark.
Isn’t that around 12 hours of sleeping time that close to the equator?
Yes, and I think that's about what people need. The 8 hour standard became a thing to support industrial work. 8 hours sleep, 12 hours at the factory, 4 hours to eat and get to and from work.
12 glorious hours, yes
William Kamkwamba's autobiography explains how cheap light from his windmill transformed his rural family's life when he built it about 20 years ago. This stuff is not strictly a question of centuries-ago history.
I misread this headline as 'Cheap, Light, Transformed Civilization'
It would be nice if English had a way to distinguish verbs from adjectives (and nouns), especially for titles/headlines like this.
Spoken English does by differing where the stress is placed in the word. That doesn’t make it into written English, however.
It used to be fully inflected (what you want).
How about we include or omit the commas as a way of distinguishing?
"Pick two"?
I don’t like this automatic editing out of ‘how’ in titles. It just makes it slightly more confusing, especially with the unnecessary capitalisation not present in the original.
Cheap Light Transformed Civilisation
How cheap light transformed civilisation
The second sounds like an article; the first sounds like a chant you might hear shouted at some kind of protest.
FWIW, I disagree, and the poster always has the ability to edit the title for a while after submitting, so nothing is lost. Also this comes up so often and the feature hasn't been modified, which suggests it likely never will, which also makes it off topic for this post. A better approach is to write an article titled "How HN Editing Titles Makes Them Confusing", for example.
True, but not every poster knows they can edit it, or even notices it happening. It just seems like an arbitrary rule imposed simply because the word 'how' occurs frequently.
However, I think it's actually more the capitalisation in this example that somehow offends me. It took my brain an extra few seconds to parse it.
The first is a title any time before the explosion of clickbait, when everyone started prepending “how” or “why” for some reason.
There is nothing called "civilization".