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

Zallen’s American Lucifers is a methodologically ingenious, elegantly written labor history of the light-generating industries that preceded the electric light. Chapter-by-chapter, Zallen relentlessly details the horrific working conditions of the common laborers who produced lighting fuels of various sorts. For low wages (or no wages at all) and at great risk to their health and well-being, they gathered and processed the raw materials enabling the lighting revolution that began in the mid-eighteenth century with urban streetlights. Readers will be struck by the vast range of illuminants available to Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century: whale oil for lamps and spermaceti for candles, camphene distilled from pine resin, coal gas, a chemically altered lard called stearine that rivaled tallow and spermaceti candles in its pure flame and affordability, phosphorus matches, and coal oil. To wrangle these far-ranging pieces of history into a coherent story, Zallen zooms in on...