The history of light in our species sounds a bit obscure but it’s one of the most interesting and relevant stories there is, both historically speaking and socially speaking. While today we may have things like commercial led lighting, high intensity illumination, led canopy fixtures, led warehouse lighting and other lights of many a varied and interesting nature, things weren’t always so bright for our societies. Literally. Our past is a dark one in the truest sense of the word, a history of trying light huge dark spaces with tiny lights and only succeeding sometimes. As of the past three decades, there is now no one left living who remembers what true darkness is like, the time before the invention of electric lights and the street light. There is no one left to remember what that world, the world of the lamp and the candle, was like. With this loss of cultural memory comes the death of one world and the beginning of another for, surely, if you think about, our modern high tech world is only the beginning. The start. But it came from that old world, the one where night was full and complete and inescapable. That world was a very different one but its attitudes and ideas continue to resonate to this day, affecting the homes and behaviors and civilizations that it eventually inspired today. So how did we get here? What was that world like and what can we do to move our own world into the future? These are difficult questions and they don’t have particularly easy answers. Not at all. We might live in a world awash with knowledge but there’s no one easy way to answer the effect that permanent light has had on our psyches and lives. Some researchers say it has caused insomnia to rise, others say it is cutting off from the night sky in a fundamental way. It is affecting our lives and our sleep. But others say it is good and that it helping us adjust to this new world, this technological place we’ve ended up. So, what is the real story of light?
How It All Started
Before commercial led lighting, before electric light or power plants or the idea of externally powered machines in general, we had fire. No one knows how we discovered it or who was the first to use it. It is likely that one of our ancestors picked up a flaming stick one day far in the past and realized it could be used as a weapon or a tool. This idea spread quickly, as ideas among humans tend to do as that’s kind of our big evolutionary advantage, and soon most people were using fires to protect themselves in the night. It wasn’t commercial led lighting or any other type of advanced lighting, it wasn’t very good lighting but it was enough. We huddled around fires and watched as the world passed by outside of us, a strange and magical place. We had no answers to what was out there. We only had light and what it could do for us.
Fire and Light
For the next millenia, fire was the only light we had. This sounds kind of obvious but really give it some thought. Fire was discovered as a tool millions of years ago and until somewhere around 1890 that was as far as it went. It could heat metal, it could be used as a weapon and in guns but for light that was all we had. Electric lights are radically new, in that respect. They’re a whole new thing and energy efficient electric lights, like commercial led lighting, are even newer. We’ve truly entered a new world and because humans are so short sighted sometimes, we never stop to think about it. Fire was used in candles, lamps. Everywhere. And fire, you might remember, is not exactly the brightest substance. Oh it is bright but the world back then was a flickering, shadowy place. Living half your day among shadows made for a very different world psychologically. So we should respect the past and work towards making our future as bright and energy efficient as possible.