The Historical Cost of Light
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Our understanding is that mastering fire was one of the earliest steps of humanity’s climb towards civilization. Even today, hardcore campers spend an hour chopping firewood that’ll sustain a fire overnight. It’s hard to believe that it’s been significantly harder to do this historically.
Slightly related: I love this book “In praise of shadows” by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. He lived through Japan’s rapid modernization period and talks about how much darker everything was before electric lights, and how the darkness and dim firelight created a very different aesthetic that’s lost in the era of bright electric lights.
>Method: This project is a visualization of a 1990s paper[0] by William Nordhaus, wherein the economist assessed the amount of illumination that workers could purchase at various times in history. I’d recommend the paper even if you’re not a fan of academic writing; it’s approachable, and Nordhaus is the type of Nobel prize-winning overachiever who goes so far as recreating a Babylonian oil lantern to assess its illumination capacity.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf
And you're either gathering dead fall or using a sharp steel axe. Dead fall is a limited resource, if you need some every day you'll run out close by soon. So soon you're spending more time traveling for wood than collecting. Eventually you'll have to use a stone axe. IIRC, it takes three days to chop down a tree with stone axes that would take an hour with a steel axe. You'll go through several axes chopping down one tree, so you spend much more time making and sharpening axes than chopping.
Not for reading light, perhaps, but this starts with the contention that people had to go to bed when the sun set because you couldn’t see anything. Huddling around a fire into the night on the other hand is probably a human activity as old as fire itself.
You don't lose any energy from fire just because it's emitted in visible spectrum.
doesn't work here either.
In case this puzzled you, this is referred to as “segmented sleep”. Here is a synopsis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4763365/
What's more interesting is people, like this article, now speak of it as true.
Even though we all sleep, we can go visit places without electricity, and a billion people still live without modern lighting.
We chose 'interesting' over logical.
Rural cabins had while familly in one room so one person needing to go is likely to cause cascade.
Perfectly consistent with travelers observations in article and still dumb to call it "first sleep" and "second sleep" as if it would be something special.
The scroll got stuck and became unresponsive. Safari, iOS 14. Eventually I figured out that I could “scroll” by pinch to zoom, but gave up.
Figured I should say something. Love the visualization.
No
Among the arguments is that wood was far more important to humanity until about the 19th century than any other resource that gets its own age (i.e. stone, bronze, iron). There's some evolutionary biology stuff in it that I find a bit far-fetched, but at least is an original take on things.
If you'd rather just read a review, this one is pretty good: https://newrepublic.com/article/160298/age-wood-roland-ennos...
It takes a lot of firewood to produce the same amount of light as a regular lightbulb. Heck, it takes a lot even compared to an oil lamp.
I read "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" by Daniel Yergin some time ago. One of the things that struck me was just how much of an effect kerosene lamps had on society. It was the main use for oil in the early days, and indoor lighting went from expensive whale oil (or dirty, still-costly tallow) to cheap, abundant kerosene. It provided hours more leisure time every night in the winter.