It is a bright red candle, not scented or anything, and I think it must have been made by the Pakistani Petroleum Works, because it burns with a romantic plume of black smoke. Funniest thing I ever saw: she wants things to be romantic, and this thing is pumping out unburned hydrocarbons like it's idling in front of the Flying J Truck Stop. She has surrounded it with one of these curvy glass sleeves to keep it from blowing out, and we're collecting carbon samples on it.
Last night after the power went out we got to experiment with sources of alternative illumination. I have a couple of fake Chinese railroad lanterns on hand, and we have a bottle of highly-purified and rather expensive lamp oil that lives, appropriately, inside the cabinet with the flashlight batteries. These lanterns are surprisingly efficient and seem to have a lot of sophisticated features that I can't figure out. Lemme see if I can find an image, which is what we call pictures these days....
Hokay. There's a site called lanternnet.com that seems pretty good. Here's their diagram of the sort of lantern that we've got. It was invented, and still made, by the Deitz Co., but ours sure wasn't.
This shows how air from the top of the lantern is pulled down through the hollow supports to feed the flame, but there also seem to be subtleties that it ignores, like that draft down along the glass. This might be there to keep the glass cool, or to keep it clean. In any case, there are about a million little ports and screens and things on one of these, and I suppose they each contribute to producing a lovely light. And if you keep it turned down, it'll keep going all night.
It would be a real pain to fill every day, though, and even with the deodorized fuel it smells like something's on fire, which of course it is. Electric lighting was an awfully good deal in so many ways. It's one of those developments that we've lived with for so long that even the most appreciative of us can't truly grasp its impact: bedrooms no longer need to be ventilated to allow for combustion air. Libraries can stay open at night (yes, the fire hazard was simply too great, and even Harvard closed down @ local sunset.) Jobs like illuminating engine rooms and paint factories and mines became simple. Even architecture changed, since you didn't need to have such big windows for the highly-touted 'natural light.' Natural light was not only good because it had a spectrum that you could see by, but it didn't flicker, a quality that you can't get from any combusting-type lamp. But with a 60W reading lamp in a desk fixture in 1920, you were set. Just pay the bill when necessary and sit and study: no chimney cleaning, no spilled kerosene, no concerns about fuel quality.
That last was important, too. Kerosene was distilled from crude oil, just as it is now, but you couldn't guarantee that what you bought from the barrel at the general store didn't have a high proportion of gasoline in it, the vapors from which would blow up your house. John D Rockefeller, early oil man, recognized the problem, and made his fortune selling his high-quality kerosene in sealed cans. It was made to a high standard, hence the name Standard Oil, and you can supposedly find the steel from the cans integrated into the structure of century-old huts in newly-discovered villages in the mountains of central Asia. Lemme see if I can find a picture of the can, which I've read about but never seen.
...boy, there is nothing. I will see if there's something at the Exxon website...
Well, nothing there, either. I will check. It's odd that there's not a bit of evidence of one of the most common items of commerce ever sold. I read that the Bedouins or someone used to build shelters out of the stacked cans.
M Kinsler
No comments:
Post a Comment