
Cities used to be very dark at night, notes Jane Brox’s book Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light.
“Before the seventeenth century, street lighting was almost nonexistent everywhere in the world. . . . Renaissance Florence had no streetlights, nor did imperial Rome.” In Ancient Rome, “Night fell over the city like the shadow of a great danger. Everyone fled to his home, shut himself in, and barricaded the entrance. The shops fell silent, safety chains were drawn across the doors.” Centuries later, that had not changed. In early modern Europe, “Almost everyone gladly left the streets to the thieves” and “the scurrying of rodents.”
The earliest artificial lights were simply rocks with animal fat poured on them and set on fire. “Often the lamps were merely unworked flat slabs of limestone, or limestone with natural cavities for the nubs of tallow—animal fat—that had to be replenished every hour.” Later, shells were used to enclose the fat, and finally pottery developed to make lamps. The shape of ancient lamps evolved to enclose the oil in Greek and Roman civilization.
In Asia, candles were made from insects and tree nuts. Meanwhile, Egyptians and Romans were dipping reeds and papyrus in animal fats to light their way.
It was expensive to obtain the tallow (rendered animal fat) used in lamps. “In the middle of the fifteenth century in Tours,” a major French city, “a laborer had to work half a day to earn enough for a pound of tallow.” Because of the cost, people used any type of fat they could find. Islanders in the Pacific and Caribbean used captive fireflies for light. Only the richest people could afford better-smelling beeswax:
Rare and costly beeswax was long the province only of the wealthy. Most other people depended on fat they pressed or rendered from animals, fish, or vegetation near at hand: manatees, alligators, whales, sheep, oxen, bison, deer, bears, coconuts, cottonseed, rapeseed, and olives, the chosen oil of the Mediterranean. In England tallow candles from domestic herds provided the main source of light…In the West Indies, the Caribbean, Japan, and the South Sea Islands, people saw by the light of numerous fireflies, which they captured and kept in small cages. South Sea Islanders skewered oily candlenuts on bamboo to make torches, while those on Vancouver Island placed a dried salmon in the fork of a stick and lit it.
New England settlers used “deer, moose, and bear fat.” Ancient Romans may have created the first beeswax candles. Beeswax was the preferred wax to use by the 13th century, due to its fragrant smell.