Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/280

270[February 20, 1869] it was in former times. The fall in the price of wax has entailed a diminution in the value of the sacrifice. The gift of a taper can no longer procure absolution.

The cost of wax lights continued to be exceedingly high until the sixteenth century. Up to that time there were very few wax tapers burned, even in king's palaces, except on extraordinary occasions. About the period of the Tudors, the price diminished sufficiently to allow monarchs and very rich noblemen to adopt this method of lighting; and in the year 1509 the idea occurred to certain chandlers, of mixing animal fat with wax, and forming a cheaper "composite." For some unaccountable reason, however, a royal edict put an abrupt stop to the development of this new invention. Perhaps it was that fraudulent dealers (there seems to have been no lack of them, even in "the good old times"), had passed off the composite candles for genuine wax, and so wrought scandal in the land, or perhaps it was simply that the new discovery threatened to prove a dangerous competition to the real wax trade, of which some mighty noble, according to the fashion of the day, had a monopoly. But whatever may have been the reason, the invention came to nought.

It is a well-known circumstance, that Oliver Cromwell once blew out one of two wax candles, that he found burning simultaneously on his wife's work-table. This excellent man who amidst all the cares of state, ever kept a shrewd eye to his own affairs had probably remarked in his grocer's bill that wax tapers (of the size we now call "fours"), cost five-and-thirty shillings the dozen, in the year 1654. Indeed, the item "lighting," continued up to the beginning of the present century to form one of the most dispiriting entries in a household budget. Louis the Fifteenth, whose predominant quality was not precisely thriftiness, exclaimed one day that one could keep a regiment, music and all, with what was spent each year at Versailles on wax lights alone. Voltaire, when dissatisfied with the pay afforded him by Frederick the Great, used to pocket the candle ends of his royal master. During Napoleon's consulship, the cost of lighting at the Tuileries, averaged twenty thousand francs per annum; and eleven years later, during the emperor's stay at Dresden, there were burned in one night, at a state ball, six hundred-weight of wax tapers: the cost being three thousand two hundred francs (one hundred and twenty-eight pounds).

But meanwhile, the burning of wax candles in drawing-rooms had caused the oil lamps to descend into the parlours and kitchens. There was no place for the smoky, grimy contrivances in apartments where paintings and gildings flourished; for throughout the lapse of ages the oil lamp had remained exactly what it was at first; being neither modified, nor in any way improved. There was this difference, however, that towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of oil lamps amongst the poorer classes increased considerably, by reason of the invention of colza oil. The new liquid was by far cheaper than either the olive oil used in the south of France and in Italy, or than the oil made out of whale's blubber, and burned in England and the north of Europe.

It was not till the year 1783, that the regeneration of the oil lamp was seriously undertaken. In that year appeared a radical reformer in the science of lighting. His name was Argand; he was a native of Switzerland; but resident in London, and an Englishman by adoption. This man invented the cylindrical wick of hollow form, and so devised as to fit between two cylinders of metal, placed one within the other, and standing up like a funnel from out of the body of the lamp. By a somewhat complicated process, the oil was made to flow up between the metal cylinders and saturate the wick; the which, thanks to its peculiar form, allowed a current of air to circulate within and around it, and thus double the force of the light. But this was not all, for it remained to discover some way of suppressing the smoke, and adding yet more, if possible, to the brilliancy of the flame. This twofold result was obtained by placing a glass chimney over the wick. By this means the smoke was consumed by the strength of the draught of air, the unpleasant smell of oil was abolished, and the glare of the lamp was rendered so powerful, that shades or screens became necessary.

The new lamps were at once popular, both in England and France. In the latter country they took the name of "Quinquet," from Jean Quinquet, the man who had imported and slightly improved them, by the addition of a convex reflector of polished metal, which, placed behind the lamp, had the effect of rendering it too dazzling for the sight to bear. Soon after, the brothers Frederick and Philippe Girard, Frenchmen, yet further improved the "Quinquet" by simplifying the method of conveying the oil into the wick-holder. They placed the receptacle for the oil below the wick, instead of above it, thus rendering the apparatus less cumbersome; and in order to deaden the crude glare of the flame without diminishing its intensity, they contrived those well-known globes of whitened glass, which give such a pretty effect to artificial light.

The first public appearance of the brothers Girard's new lamp took place in London in 1807, at a party given by the Duchesse de Berry, then in exile. It was enthusiastically admired; so much so, indeed, that the Empress Josephine, although a little nettled that the two Frenchmen should have taken their invention to England, ordered the brothers to attend at the Tuileries, and bring a lamp with them. This circumstance, though of no great moment in itself, becomes so from the fact that the lamp presented by the MM. Girard to the wife of Napoleon, was adorned with paintings on China by a young and obscure artist, at that time poor and struggling hard for bread, but destined later to become known throughout the world by the name of Jean Augustin Ingres.

The next inventor, or rather improver, of oil lamps was Carcel, another Frenchman,