<x-charset WINDOWS-1252>Fuels and Society: 1. The Need for Light
We've come full circle......
Lamps for the Night
The story of auto fuels and air pollution begins with lamp fuel. Long
before recorded history, people found comfort by a firelight and ways
to light up the dark, Cave paintings dating back 60,000 years were
probably created by the light of torches. Oil s from around 6,000 B.C.
have been found in the earliest Babylonian cities.
Archaeologists have found a wide variety of lamps and
lanterns made during the Classical civilizations of Egypt,
Greece, Rome, India and China. The lamps burned vegetable
oils or animal fat and usually had a spout or a wick.
Decorative lanterns held candles made from beeswax or
fat.
The designs for these devices didn’t change much over the ages.
Anyone from a Classical civilization could have easily
used the kinds of lamps and lanterns that were typical
thousands of years later in 18th century Europe and America.
People still read by the weak light of candles and oil lamps
that used the same vegetable oils. One new development was
whale oil, which was harvested and traded on an industrial
scale in Europe in the mid-18th century and the U.S. in the
early 19th century.
Oil lamps and candles tended to be expensive. For
example, whale oil sold for $1.50 to $2.50 a gallon
around 1850, while lard oil sold for 90 cents a gallon.
The light from oil and candles were also too weak
for large public places.
Demand for better lighting came in the 19th century
with the growth of literacy, industry and urban life. People
were reading more, partly because there were more publications
and also because of the democratization of political life.
Lighting was needed to extend the work day for industrial
operations like mining and factory work. Police wanted better
lighting for city streets. And theaters needed safer lighting
systems to lower insurance premiums.
New lighting systems would be developed and the fuels for these, in
turn, would be the fuels that automotive inventors used in their early
cars.
http://chemcases.com/fuels/fuels-01.htm
(And now we make the cars run on the vegetable oil!!)
Edward Beggs
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
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