American Lucifers : The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor--those American lucifers--as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood. "American lucifers tracks how struggles to produce light transformed American history, beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s and culminating in the emergence, around the Civil War, of the petroleum industry and its primary product, kerosene. Between this shift from oil harvested from whales to oil extracted from rocks, American light was substantially derived from a substance called camphene, a highly explosive liquid mixture of spirits of turpentine and highly distilled alcohol, generally extracted from North Carolina pines by enslaved workers. Over the course of this narrative, Jeremy Zallen reveals the centrality of slavery to labor in gasworks, coal mines, guano islands, and factories that made illumination possible. Moreover, though the lights they created may have offered a veneer of progress and convenience, they also made it possible for industry to extract workers' and slaves' labor around the clock. The availability of these illuminants extended men's working days to the point that women and children were expected to shoulder all domestic labor as a matter of course"-- Provided by publisher Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Prologue......Page 14 1. Dragged up Hither from the Bottom of the Sea......Page 26 2. Piney Lights......Page 70 3. Dungeons and Dragons and Gaslights......Page 107 4. Lard Lights and the Pigpen Archipelago......Page 149 5. Lucifer Matches and the Global Violence of Phosphorus......Page 181 6. Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted......Page 227 Epilogue......Page 269 Acknowledgments......Page 286 Notes......Page 290 Bibliography......Page 324 A......Page 348 B......Page 349 C......Page 350 E......Page 354 G......Page 355 H......Page 356 I......Page 357 L......Page 358 M......Page 359 N......Page 361 P......Page 362 R......Page 363 S......Page 364 T......Page 365 W......Page 367 Z......Page 369 The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This text tells their stories Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Prologue 14 1. Dragged up Hither from the Bottom of the Sea 26 2. Piney Lights 70 3. Dungeons and Dragons and Gaslights 107 4. Lard Lights and the Pigpen Archipelago 149 5. Lucifer Matches and the Global Violence of Phosphorus 181 6. Rock Oil, Civil War, and Industrial Slavery Interrupted 227 Epilogue 269 Acknowledgments 286 Notes 290 Bibliography 324 Index 348 A 348 B 349 C 350 D 354 E 354 F 355 G 355 H 356 I 357 J 358 K 358 L 358 M 359 N 361 O 362 P 362 Q 363 R 363 S 364 T 365 U 367 V 367 W 367 Y 369 Z 369