The Manufacture of Light - A Lecture Delivered at the Meeting of the British Association at York #247044

Primitive man also discovered that a piece of dry wood, or a rope of grass dipped into melted fat, would make an excellent torch; and by dipping a dried rush into molten tallow he procured for himself in small portable form a candle. To substitute a woven wick, and to devise means of casting tallow or wax around the wick in a mould, were improvements devised a little more than a hundred years ago. If we were to go back to the days of good Queen Bess we should find that the means of lighting either hovel or palace were primitive in the extreme. In the guttering of the rushlights and the splutter and smell of the lamps fed with animal oil we should scarcely rejoice.