American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 by Jeremy Zallen

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 by Jeremy Zallen Sean Adams American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865. By Jeremy Zallen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. [xii], 356. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5332-7.) The illumination of interiors is a convenience so embedded in modern American life that we rarely contemplate its origins or its history. The ability to work, read, or socialize after sundown may be taken for granted today, but readers of Jeremy Zallen's superb history of illumination will gain a new appreciation for the origins of artificial light and the many overlapping systems that provided it from 1750 to 1865. Tracing the process of supplying light from whale oil, camphene, coal gas, lucifer matches, and finally, kerosene, Zallen uses clear, often poetic, prose to focus on the labor required to bring illumination into the modern era, with a healthy respect for the sweat and suffering that process required. American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 is essentially a study of labor regimes, sometimes local and sometimes global, that coordinated machine, man, and animal to provide light on the cheap. Rather than a narrative of triumphant technology, the story of modern illumination, Zallen asserts, is one of "violence and labor, blood and sweat" (p. 8). American Lucifers begins its labor history of light with an account of nineteenth-century whaling from the perspective of the sailors themselves, who engaged in not only the hunt for whales, but also the whales' processing at sea, in order to sell whale oil to an eager public. Americans found more localized sources of illuminating fuel with camphene (a distilled product of turpentine) and coal gas. As industries centered in the American South, these endeavors relied on enslaved workers to scrape the pine resin from trees and descend into the notoriously gassy mines of eastern Virginia. Even in the nominally [End Page 695] free-labor contexts of lard oil and candles centered in Cincinnati, Ohio, the work required to turn hogs into light was not only debilitating but also disgusting. The simple lucifer match, which brought instant flame with the flick of a wrist, drew upon a global system of miserable labor. Workers trudged through mucky guano deposits off the coast of South America in order to provide phosphorus for matches; the process of dipping small wooden strips into a mixture of gum, cholate of potash, and phosphorus required a small army of children to produce. In the United Kingdom and the United States, these match boys sometimes suffered from "'the compo,'" a disfigurement of the jaw, or they quite literally glowed in the dark; all workers around lucifer matches bore the telltale stench of their labor with noxious chemicals (p. 12). American Lucifers concludes with a discussion of the American oil industry's rise in the context of the American Civil War, which ushered in a new landscape of oil wells and refineries that pushed kerosene into American homes. In the epilogue, Zallen concludes that middleand upper-class Americans in the Gilded Age enjoyed illumination while "safely disconnected from past and present systems of oppression they wanted to ignore and to forget" (p. 258). The Civil War had destroyed slavery and its camphene industry; cheap kerosene and then electric light finished the job on whale oil and lard. American Lucifers works hard at uncovering its tale of "a hidden relationship between industrial slavery, industrial captivity, the exploitation of children and outworking free women, and the democratization of artificial light" (p. 269). And by reconstructing this world, Zallen forces readers to contemplate the many costs of their comforts. The systems connected to our light switches still draw on dirty and dangerous work to deliver us our conveniences, and this important book reminds us to never ignore that essential fact. Sean Adams University of Florida Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association