17 DECEMBER 2020
TO ADVERTISE CALL 020 3906 8488
How we’ve lit up the night throughout history BY CHAYA COHEN Imagine that you lived a very long time ago, before technology, before any technology at all. No, we’re not talking the 1960’s, we’re talking about thousands of years ago. Imagine that you’re lying on the grass watching Adam, the first man, on his first day on earth. He’s kicked out of the garden of Eden and the world is a place full of trees and flowers and rivers – but what’s happening? The sky begins to change colours, clouds twist and distort through red, orange, pink, purple hues and one by one, the sun’s rays dip below the horizon – and you’re blind!! Adam was terrified! And that night, he rubbed some rocks together – and discovered fire. That was the first time mankind dispelled the darkness, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Let’s take a trip through history and look at how we’ve fought off the gloom and darkness throughout history. At first, fire was hard to make and keep
and mostly, when the sun disappeared, you had no choice but to sleep. But even when the sun was up, you had to make sure to build your house or office in a way that allowed as much sunlight in as possible. The most famous example is the Pantheon in Rome which is designed around a massive hole in it’s dome. Then, mankind started experimenting and made touches. Not the battery powered kind and not even the simple burning sticks you’re picturing from the movies. The first lamp was made of some sort of shell, hollowed-out rock, or really any non-flammable object. You then filled it with something that was flammable like probably dried grass or wood,) and took out the very first lighter fluid – animal fat! And then you set it on fire! Chimneys soon followed so that people could light fires inside their homes. That simple invention (well, let’s be honest, is a hole an invention? Even a very sophisticated one) was followed by wicks. Wicks are rolled pieces of flammable material such as cloth and held in a suspension of wax or whale fat for our Asian friends, that slowed down the burning. Archaeologists have found remnants of candles in the pyramids!
Did you know? The word candle derives from the Latin “incaendium” which means wildfire, heat, or torch (either Latin is a very versatile language, or historians are just really certain about their definitions). We actually have beeswax candles from a thousand years ago! The Oberflacht candles were found in a graveyard in the entirely easy to pronounce in English - Seitingen-Oberflacht, Kreis Tuttlingen, Germany. You can now find them in another easy German word -Württemberg (helpful hint, you need to pronounce every word like you’re choking) State Museum in Stuttgart Germany. Our next development came hundreds of years later when William Murdoch, in 1790, invented the gas lamp. He was British – just saying. And America didn’t take them until 2 years later and even then, only on one street. But they were so popular and useful and revolutionary that just a few decades later, they were on every street in every developed country and inside many homes too. The first electric light was invited by… did you say Thomas Edison? Nope, another British bloke called Humphry Davey. He used a bunch of batteries and two charcoal rods to show the Royal Institute the first incandescent light. Today we call those arc lights. We still use them today. For what? I don’t know, I’m not an electrician. But the big name in electric lighting is Thomas Edison’s and that’s because he invented the first useful lightbulb. One that could be installed everywhere and would actually last for a while. On October 22, 1879 his incandescent light burned for… drumroll please, a whopping 13 and a half hours! Well, it was a massive achievement back then. A few months after that Edison worked out that he could use a (pretentious scientific technobabble coming up) carbonized bamboo filament and that meant his bulbs could burn for 1200 hours! That’s 50 days for those of us who can do math (or know how to ask google to do the math for you). This massive breakthrough meant electricity became the main power source – and that changed the world as we know it. During the 20th century we have filament bulbs, hydrogen bulbs and finally LED lights. I could go through all the physics, but you could pick up a textbook for that. As we sit, enveloped in light amongst the gloom of night, just think how much it took for you to be able to walk into a room and flick a switch to illuminate it. 2,000 years ago, a few
THEJEWISHWEEKLY.COM
FEATURE 37
in 2020, Judaism and the light of the Torah is so easily accessible, with the push of a button or two. brave Jews looked around and decided they also wanted to end the darkness around them and now, in 2020, Judaism and the light of the Torah is so easily accessible, with the push of a button or two. Chanukah is a time when we celebrate the light, so this is an appropriate time to thank Hashem for the physical light too, that we enjoy every day with barely any effort.