The evolution of lighting through history

The advent of reliable and energy efficient lighting in the home and in our workplaces has been and continues to play a major role in the modern way of life.

Besides the effect of running water on public health, and perhaps the impact of the Internet on interpersonal communication, it is hard to imagine a more impactful technology than lighting.

As you might imagine, lighting has come a long way to get to where it is today. Take a quick look at this diagram by the 20th-century French illustrator Maurice Desertain:

When you think about lighting, it’s important to consider three different things:

The fuel source, the luminance, and the technology used to produce visible light.

We will touch on these three elements when we look at the evolution of lighting from its birth to the modern-day revolution that is taking place with LED technology for the 21st century:

natural light:

The most important source of light is the sun and perhaps the most underappreciated use of this abundant light is architecture designed to take advantage of it.

The Pantheon is one of the most well-known examples of historic architecture that uses daylight through its design.

Perhaps the most significant architectural achievement from the Roman Empire, the Pantheon is designed almost entirely around an open-air circle at the top of its dome.

Torches:

According to the Society for Lighting Engineering, “The first attempt at man-made lighting occurred about 70,000 years ago.

The first lamp was invented from a shell, hollow rock, or other similar non-flammable object which was filled with a combustible material (perhaps dried grass or wood), sprinkled with animal fat (the original lighter fluid) and ignited.

Hand-held, building-mounted torches have advanced beyond their rudimentary beginnings but the basic principles remain the same:

A fuel source is a type of oil, wax, or combustible substance surrounded by non-combustible materials.

Candles and wick introduction:

As you might expect, technology such as ventilation (such as pipes and chimneys) has greatly improved the ability to use fire effectively for lighting.

Perhaps the most important technical advance, however, was the introduction of the wick for candle production.

Wicks, in combination with early candle materials such as beeswax or tallow (a derivative of animal fat), represented the most important technological advance in lighting since the discovery of fire itself.

According to author Patricia Telesco, “candle holders dating back to the 4th century BC.

Found in Egypt .

The Greeks and Romans are credited with introducing the wick to the Egyptian idea of ​​lighting lard.

Asian societies have been making candles separately from whale blubber since 200 BC.

did you know The word candle is derived from the Latin word “incindium,” which means wildfire, heat, or flame.

The oldest surviving beeswax candles are Oberflacht candles found in the Alamannic Cemetery in Sittingen-Uberflacht, Kreis-Tuttlingen, Germany.

They currently reside in the Museum of the State Museum of Württemberg in Stuttgart, Germany.

The following major developments in lighting (gas lamps and electric lamps) occurred in sequence nearly a century with the advent and progress of the Industrial Revolution.

The main advantages of gas (electricity barriers to entry) include the infrastructure already in place by the time the light bulbs went out and the ability to be dual-purpose (gas can also be used for cooking).

Let’s discuss them one by one.

Gas lamps:

 Gas lighting was developed in England in 1790 and introduced to the United States by William Murdoch shortly thereafter.

Pelham Street in Newport, Rhode Island was the first section of the road in America to introduce Murdoch’s gas lamps (they were installed in 1792).

Only a few decades later, gas fuel was used to light the streets in major eastern cities of the United States such as Philadelphia and Baltimore.

You can read the complete history of street lighting in the United States here.

Various types of gas have been used over the years to include methane, acetylene, butane, propane, hydrogen, and natural gas.

The growth of gas lamps and the infrastructure to support them in cities and suburbs reflects the era’s developments in hydrocarbon fuel production (coal, petroleum and distillation production).

light bulbs:

The first electric light was invented by Humphrey Davy.

According to the US Department of Energy, Davy “demonstrated the first incandescent light for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, using a bank of batteries and coal rods.

His invention was what we generally refer to as an arc light (modern versions of which are still used today).

Perhaps the person best known for developing light bulbs and the infrastructure to support them is American inventor Thomas Edison.

In 1879, Edison set out to create a long-lasting electric light bulb that could rival gas lighting (especially for indoor use).

Its first successful prototype was on October 22, 1879 when its incandescent light burned for 13 and a half hours.

A few months after that, Edison discovered charred bamboo filaments that burned for 1,200 hours.

This was the revolutionary advancement he was looking for and represented the necessary lighting technology needed to establish electricity as the primary source of energy for lighting both indoors and outdoors.

Incandescent lamps would continue to dominate the lighting world until fluorescent lamps were introduced commercially by Daniel MacFarlane Moore around 1904.

Although early fluorescent lights required high-voltage, non-standard conductors to operate, their relatively high efficiency when compared to incandescent lights was enough of a competition task to cause major incandescent company General Electric to improve their incandescent technology by introducing a tungsten filament.

At the same time (circa 1901) an inventor named Peter Cooper Hewitt developed the first mercury vapor light that was highly efficient and compatible with standard electrical infrastructure.
The twentieth century was the century of high intensity discharge lamps (high intensity discharge lamps)

. Among the most common and commercially successful types of HID lamps are fluorescent lamps, mercury vapor, and high beam lamps.

Sodium pressure, and metal halide.

All of these lamps are of the same type of technology in that they work by sending an electric current between two metal electrodes and through a glass tube filled with an inert gas which causes visible light to be emitted.
The only lighting technology that was significantly different from the various HID lamps invented in the 20th century was the light-emitting diode (LED).

LED lighting is a solid-state light (solid-state lamp) that does not require a glass cover like conventional lamps and produces light by converting electrical current using semiconductors.

The first LEDs were invented in
the 1960s by General Electric scientist Nick Holonyak, who called them “magic.”
Modern lighting has continued to improve across the spectrum (incandescent, fluorescent, metal halide, light-emitting diode, etc.).

To date, the most promising lamps for the 21st century seem to be LEDs

. Modern LEDs have a useful life 2-4 times that of their competitor while also producing higher quality light more efficiently.

For more information about LEDs you can read here.

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