The first moveable lighting device was probably a burning stick pulled out of a fire. Thousands of years later, people were still using the same method: a Medieval woodcut shows a man and a woman going about their chores, holding foot-or more-long torches in their mouths.
American Indians and Puritan settlers used torches of pitch pine, called candlewood, or in Maine, fatwood. On the Orkney Islands as recently as the late 19th century, people burned fatty birds for light. The Smithsonian has specimens of stormy petrels with wicks stuck down their gullets as well as candlefish jammed onto a cleft stick. On and on. The story of lighting innovation is gnarled, amusing, amazing, and fascinating.
Banishing the Dark: An Exhibit of Lighting Devices Though the Ages opened at the Wilson Museum in Castine in June. Curator Sandy Dinsmore (who also writes for Working Waterfront) will give a lecture and demonstration, “From fat lamps to light bulbs: A stroll through the history of lighting,” at 7 p.m. on July 30.
Featured in the exhibit are two types of whale oil lamps. The first is a primitive but ingenious Inuit soapstone lamp, usually fed by blubber dripping from suspended whale meat. Used from prehistoric times, lamps like these are still used today in isolated areas. The second type is a pair of rare survivors, American glass whale oil lamps still containing orange-colored sperm whale oil that glows jewel-like in the light. The lamps date from about 1825 and must have been put away with the oil still in them when replaced by lamps that burned more up-to-date, less expensive fuel.
Other objects on view include a tinned sheet iron double cruisie lamp and a tiny tinned chandelier used by early settlers as well as a porcelain candle lamp from the China trade, made one hundred years later, featuring embracing lovers being watched from behind a tree by a voyeur.
For further information, go to www.wilsonmuseum.org or call 207-326-9247.