In the modern lamp the simple device of a tube or two tubes to hold the wick is all that is needed over and above those used in ancient times. Tin tubes are placed in the top of the lamp and the wicks run up through the tubes. The lamp then being filled with oil, capillary attraction will bring the oil up to the top of the wick. The lamp when lighted will burn until the supply of oil is exhausted.
The invention of this modern lamp, though very simple, has been of great value. At first it was made of metal—lead, block tin, Britannia, brass—and finally of glass. Lamps of various patterns and different sizes became common. For a long while very little change was made in this new mode of obtaining light. This method continued in common use until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER IV.
KEROSENE.
It was a long step from the smoky and ill-smelling whale-oil lamp to the clear and brilliant kerosene burner. At the present time the best illumination is furnished by gas and electricity, but in the country and to a large extent in the cities the kerosene lamp is still in common use, and doubtless will remain so for a long time to come. This lamp with its recent important improvements is mainly of American origin and development.
Kerosene for lighting purposes has some advantages over gas or electricity. The light produced from it is steady; therefore it is less harmful to the eyes than the flickering light of illuminating gas, and even better than the electric light. It is far cheaper than either. It has a third advantage, since it can be used in a hand lamp which can be carried from place to place. A large portion of our population consider it so valuable that they would rather give up the gaslight altogether, or indeed the electric light, than be obliged to lose the kerosene lamp.
Kerosene is a form of petroleum which is obtained from the earth by deep wells. It is only within the last fifty years that this oil has been pumped in sufficient quantities to make it a valuable industry, though petroleum was obtained here and there in small quantities far back in the early ages. It seems a little singular that the people of Japan and Persia should have dug oil wells centuries ago. Herodotus, who wrote history five hundred years before Christ, tells us of the springs of Zante, one of the Ionian Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, from which oil flowed. It is said that these springs are still flowing.
China seems to have been the first country to draw oil from artesian wells. We proud Americans are accustomed to think ourselves a little ahead of all other people. When an American boy in San Francisco, for instance, meets a Chinese lad, he is quite apt to look down upon him and to think that this little Chinese boy came from a country hardly civilized and certainly far behind the "universal Yankee nation;" yet we are constantly finding traces of a civilization in China much earlier than our own.