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Comment by expedition32 | Hacker News Reader

People went to bed when the sun went down because candles cost money. The light bulb changed everything.

I find that when I go camping, I get sleepy early around 9pm and I wake at 6 feeling more refreshed than I do at home. Fresh air and birds chirping. It's honestly a dream

Lighting was the killer app for electricity.

Outdoor lighting in particular, at first at least. A fun historical anecdote on this one most don't know is the saying that somebody "can’t hold a candle to [x]". It's a reference to the old profession of link-boys who were mostly poor kids who'd carry a torch at night for people to see their way about, in exchange for a penny or two.

Electricity costs money too? I don't know how the cost of power compared to the cost of a candle in the beginning of the 20th century though.

I’m going to get an electricity bill each month no matter what. I won’t notice a few bulbs being on for a couple extra hours each day.

I would notice having to go out and buy candles all the time, or needing to make them. A candle can be consumed over the course of a day or maybe even a few hours. A light bulb can last months or years.

If light bulbs burned out as fast as candles burn, I would be a fanatic about keeping the lights off and only use them when absolutely necessary.

I asked gemini for the cost of power but it could be lying through its smirking sense of superiority and general all around disdain for the humans it will soon replace.

"The electrical cost to produce the same amount of light as a single standard candle is approximately $0.01 per year if run for 14 hours every day. In terms of energy consumption, a standard candle produces about 12.57 lumens of light, which can be matched by an LED bulb using only 0.1 to 0.2 watts."

Ehh, you can still do stuff when it is dark and there are plenty of crafts and tasks you can do in extreme low light on top of just socialization. Its not like northern people slept hours longer than southern people, or that people sleep way longer during the winter. The moon creates plenty of light outdoors for things, and if you don't have fires going and it is a clear sky even the stars are bright enough to walk around through open outdoor spaces. Not to mention nearly everybody had some sort of fire pit at home that they used daily for warming or cooking food and drink.

Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.

Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.

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