The history of light (classic)

How do you measure human progress? Light is the answer. For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise the cow, feed the cow, kill the cow, get the fat out of the cow, cook the fat, dip wicks into the fat. All that — for not very much light. Now, if we want to light a whole room, we just flip a switch. Nobel-winning economist Bill Nordhaus passed away last week. He was known for his work on the economics of climate change, but he also came up with this idea that the history of light explains reveals why the world today is the way it is. It explains why we aren't all subsistence farmers, and why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers. (And, yes, people who make podcasts about the history of light.) The history of light is the history of economic growth — of things getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient. It shows us the pie can get bigger, sometimes, there can be a type of progress where everyone is better off. On today's show, one of our all time favorites: How we got from dim little candles made out of cow fat, to as much light as we want at the flick of a switch, and how that is a measure of what economic progress means. (Note: This episode originally ran in 2014 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/04/25/306862378/episode-534-the-history-of-light.) Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUBOur weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuwsTikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrqYouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3CFacebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. Today's show was hosted by Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum. It was originally produced by Caitlin Kenney and Damiano Marchetti. Today's rerun was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Jacob Goldstein. There is an episode of Planet Money that I co-hosted a long time ago that I still think about a lot, like, at least once a week. And at the heart of the show is what I think is the biggest, most important lesson that I learned covering economics. And that is this: the pie can get bigger. It is at least theoretically possible for everybody to be better off. The economist whose work is at the center of the show is a guy named Bill Nordhaus. And a few years after we talked to him for this episode, he actually won the Econ Nobel for his work on the economics of climate change. Last week, Bill Nordhaus died at the age of 85.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  And so today, we are rerunning this episode in his memory. I hope you like it.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Long before there were light bulbs, there was fat. For thousands of years, if you wanted to light up your cave, your mud hut, or if you were really lucky, your castle, you had to find some fat, something to use for a wick, maybe some moss, maybe a piece of fabric, and you had to light it on fire. This was not easy. Even today, it's a hard way to get light.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Adam and I.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, hi. Do you sell fat, maybe beef fat?

• 1:36Speaker 03

  No, I don't carry that, no.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  OK, thanks very much.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Hi, do you sell fat, like beef fat?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  No, we don't sell any of that.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Sue it?

• 1:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  OK, thanks very much.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, hi, do you sell beef fat?

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that we have all the time.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  How much is that?

• 1:56Speaker 03

  $2.98 a pound.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  OK, great, thanks very much.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  You're welcome, bye.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  I got two pounds. A big nasty lump of fat came from around the cow's kidney. I got some twine from the hardware store, and I went home to my apartment to try and make candles.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  God.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  It's a little harder to chop than you might think. Kind of sticks to itself. I put the fat on the stove.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's pretty melted. It smells really nasty.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It's like animal nasty. I strained it, then I started dipping the wicks into it. Dipping, dipping. You have to let the fat dry, then you have to dip the wick some more. More dipping. It was maybe, I don't know, 45 minutes or so of dipping. Dip, dip. I got kind of dipped crazy in there. Dip, dip.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  After hours of work, not counting raising the cow, or killing the cow, or making the twine, I had six tiny, crooked, smelly candles.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  And I'm David Kestenbaum. Today on the show, the story of how we got from dim little candles made out of cow fat to as much light as we want at the flick of a switch. And I don't think I'm exaggerating here. This one little story, it explains why we are where we are today, why billions of people don't have to worry about starving today, why we aren't all subsistence farmers, why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers, and yes, radio reporters doing stories about the history of light.

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• 4:53Speaker 04

  Jacob, you brought these scraggly little candles in the office. I'm holding them up here. They look, uh...

• 5:01Speaker 04

  They look a little gnarled.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  They're definitely not straight, and they're not, like, sleek.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  No, it looks like some mold has grown on a...

• 5:09Speaker 01

  On a string.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  On a string, yeah. So you brought these candles into the office here, and we wanted to show them to an expert. And we sat down with this woman, Jane Brox. Jane wrote a book called Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  So I made a few different candles. I tried...

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Oh, look, they're beautiful.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Beautiful, you mean a total disaster.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  In the, in the olden days, if a mother was trying to teach her daughter to make candles, she would not be pleased with these candles. But we'll see what happens. I was afraid when we lit these things that we might set off the fire alarm or the sprinkler system in the office. I mean, that is how weird it is to have light from fire these days.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I was afraid we weren't going to be able to light them at all. I mean, it's just beef fat and twine. But we pulled out a lighter.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Oh, we have, we have light. That's not too bad. Should we see how long it lasts?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's not pretty, but I'm very impressed.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  It's a beautiful color. Look at the nice yellow flame, wouldn't you say?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Dude, you made a candle. Jane says that the quest for this, for something that gives you light after the sun goes down, drove people to do all kinds of things.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  In the United States, in the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans used dried salmon. They basically made a salmon candle. In the tropics, people would catch fireflies and try to make a kind of firefly lantern. And then there's this bird called the petrel. The storm petrel. And then north of Scotland, where they would just, which is a very oily seabird, which they'd catch and dry and thread a wick down its throat and then light it, and then that was a lamp.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Just carry around a dead bird?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Well, it would be on a table. And I would imagine they'd have a little storage area with a lot of dead storm petrels. Martha, we need another petrel.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  The petrel supply is getting low.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  These ways of making light were all a huge hassle. They took a lot of work. It was not just that I didn't know what I was doing when I made those candles. The writer Harriet Beecher Stowe said making candles from animal fat was seven times as bad as washing clothes.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  I mean, think about it. You got to get a cow, you got to raise the cow, you got to have food to feed the cow, you got to kill the cow, you got to get the fat out of the cow, you got to put the fat in your Cuisinart.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Which isn't going to be invented for 100 years.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  From an economic perspective, if you want to try to quantify how much of pain in the butt it is to make something, or at least how hard it is to get that thing, you can ask a simple question: how much does it cost? Bill Nordhaus, an economist at Yale a while back, got obsessed with this question. He decided he wanted to calculate exactly how expensive light was thousands of years ago, and how that cost changed over time. Because light, you know, light is this thing society has needed and sought forever. It was a way to track progress, not just in light, but in all kinds of things. Unfortunately, in order to do this, he needed to know how much things cost thousands of years ago, like in ancient Babylon. He wasn't even sure those numbers existed, but they did.

• 8:24Speaker 07

  I ran into a woman at Yale, and she, believe it or not, it's just unbelievable, actually. She actually had wage data and price data from the Babylonian era, so 4,000 years ago.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So now he has these numbers, but he needs to know one other thing. How much light are people getting for their money? In ancient Babylon, people used lamps for light, so Nordhaus decided to make one.

• 8:53Speaker 07

  I did this in my dining room. Where else?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  He buys an ancient-style lamp from a catalog. He gets it burning. To measure how bright it is, he borrows a light meter from a facilities guy at Yale, and he does some science.

• 9:06Speaker 07

  And I would just measure it and write it down, just the way you see in the, in the old movies, some guy in his lab coat writing down the measurements.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Jacob, odd little note here. I happened to be taking Nordhaus's economics class right around this time, which I will say was a pretty serious, like, no-nonsense class. And it is so funny for me to think that at night, he was going home and measuring ancient lamplight in his dining room with a light meter.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  So, so he does this, the light meter and the ancient lamp, and he has his numbers. But now, he has to figure out a way to compare the price of light over thousands of years.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  So here's one measure he uses. If you take a day's wages, you work all day, you take all the money you earn in that day, and you spend it on light, how many minutes could you light up a small room at night with as much light as you get from today's modern light bulb? Here's the answer for ancient Babylon.

• 9:58Speaker 07

  Maybe 10 minutes. It was really expensive.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  An entire day's wages got you the equivalent of 10 minutes of light from a kind of dim light bulb. Economists talk a lot about productivity, how much one person can produce with a day's labor. And back then, the answer was not much. I mean, everything was hard. Growing food was hard. Making candles, for instance, took hours, and it used up fat. Fat, which, by the way, was expensive, because raising animals was hard.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  This was a world where, when the sun went down, almost everyone lived in the dark. And this may sound sort of romantic, but basically, it was awful. The dark was not some beautiful thing you went out and explored. It was dangerous. It was something that trapped you. In Paris, at one point, there was actually a law that said, every night, everybody has to give their keys to a magistrate, go home, and lock themselves in the house.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  And for basically 4,000 years, very little happens with light or with the economy in general. Most people work all day, and that gets them enough to eat. The way things get better, the way an economy grows, the way people get richer, is that someone comes up with a better way to do something. A way that takes a little less work.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Over time, there are small improvements in life and in light. The Romans figure out how to make a lamp that's a little more efficient. People start to use whale oil. This, of course, is very, very bad for whales, but whales have a lot of fat. They were like these big swimming sources of fuel. Still, even when you get all the way to the 1700s, life still looks more like ancient Babylon than the modern world. People still travel the same way, by foot, by horse, by sailing ship. Most people are still subsistence farmers, usually living in some kind of hut, trying to grow enough food not to starve to death.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Year after year, there are tiny gains in productivity, little bits of economic growth, but not a lot. And light? Light still comes from finding stuff that's lying around and just lighting it on fire. Again, economist Bill Nordhaus.

• 11:56Speaker 07

  As you look at the picture of what happened here, it's economic history in a nutshell. From Babylonian times to around 1800, there were, even though there were improvements, as best we can tell, they were very modest. And then around 1800, in the lighting, you can see it so clearly in lighting. It's just an enormous change in the pace of improvement.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  What happens in the 1800s is a few things. We start to really actively experiment. We try to discover stuff. And around 1850, a guy in Canada comes up with something that's not just a slightly better wick or a slightly more efficient lamp. It is this magical liquid. With the right techniques, you can get it from coal or oil.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  This big breakthrough? Kerosene. Not cutting edge now, but back then, Jane Brock says, kerosene was a huge deal. When the first kerosene lamps came out, it was, as one historian said, it was the kind of oil people had dreamed about for centuries. It was brighter, it was cleaner, and importantly, it was much cheaper.

• 13:01Speaker 07

  You work a day, you get about an hour of whale oil. Kerosene, you get about five hours.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:13Speaker 07

  So it's about five times more efficient. Kerosene lit the world and saved the whales.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  So if kerosene was so great, why did it take the world so long to find it? Science. This idea of professional scientists, this idea that there are lots of people who go to work every day at universities and do experiments. In the 1800s, this is still a new thing.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  If you happen to be president of Yale University, this is around the time when you're thinking, you know, maybe we should get one of those science departments.

• 13:45Speaker 07

  Why weren't they doing those experiments a century earlier? Well, Yale didn't have scientists a century earlier. They were teaching Greek and they were teaching logic.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Now, all these scientists are working on better ways to make light. And light is getting cheaper. More people are using it. No more locking yourself in and huddling in the dark all night. Around this time, streetlights start popping up and people start going out at night.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  So we have kerosene. What's the next big advance after that?

• 14:12Speaker 07

  OK, next big advance after that is the electric lamp.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  The big one.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  Well, you might think so.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  You know, Jacob, I thought I knew the story of the light bulb. You know, Thomas Edison, the great inventor, story about science and innovation. You know, Edison's trying all these different filaments, these different designs, and finally getting one that'll glow for hours. But this eureka light bulb moment, it is not, it's not enough to get you to the world of really cheap light because Edison needed this other thing. He needed money. He needed lots and lots of money.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  After the break, how many bankers does it take to turn on a light bulb? One, JP Morgan. More or less.

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• 15:19Speaker 01

  Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I interviewed John Turturro, and he was great talking about learning to be a pickpocket for his new movie and how growing up in a volatile home helped him as an actor.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  My brother said to me once, I've given you a lot of material. And I said, you know, you're really right. You're right. I said, but at a high cost.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Find it on the NPR app or wherever you listen to Fresh Air.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  So right now, we're at the location of the original power plant in Lower Manhattan. This is Paul Israel. He's an Edison scholar. We met him here in New York City. And we're standing in front of this plaque. It says Thomas Alva Edison in big letters. And there's this picture, an etching.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  And the image that they show is the generator room of the power plant.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  With a bunch of guys in really long mustaches and hats.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Right, and this is 1882, so lots of mustaches at that point.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  The money part of building the power plant is so important that when they finally get this historic thing completed in 1882, they get the power plant built and they're ready to turn it on. Edison is not here. He's a few blocks away at a big, impressive stone building, where today there is another plaque to a guy you may have heard of, JP Morgan. It reads, "The capitalist's capitalist known throughout the world of finance, sought out by presidents, helped bankroll the industrialization of America." Can't write that on too many people's plaques. JP Morgan's bank and a bunch of investors, they put up the money for the power plant.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  To be clear, they built this great, big, expensive, complicated power station, the first central power station in the world, right? Basically inventing electric light. And when they turn it on, Edison is not there.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Right. Right, he was where he needed to be with the people who had funded the whole thing, right? So at 3:00 PM on September 4th, Edison flicked on the switch here at JP Morgan's office.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And what happened?

• 17:15Speaker 03

  It went on. And as did lights all over the district. About a square mile of Lower Manhattan suddenly was lit by electricity.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  You think of Edison, the inventor, but even more important is Edison, the businessman. At the time, buildings in Lower Manhattan were running off gas lights, and Edison knew that was who he had to be. So he spent a lot of time thinking about economics.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, he did. Yeah, in fact, if you look at his notebooks, constantly he's going through and comparing the cost of what he's doing to what the cost of the gas system is.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  You never think about that.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Well, and that's what made him such a good innovator, right? Because he recognized that these economic questions were just as important in designing what he did in the laboratory.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  When you think of economic growth, how much do you think of it as coming from like individual like eureka moments and inventions and stuff like that? And how much is it the stuff around it? Like the ability to finance these things, the economic structure around it?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  So most of it is actually the structure around it.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  To light a square mile of Lower Manhattan, Edison needed a whole financial system. He needed patents, a way to protect his ideas so no one would steal them. He needed a company, a way a bunch of different investors could come together and risk money, a lot of money, to build a power plant and lay wires so you could try this crazy thing, light without fire. Edison comes along at a time when all this machinery, patents, corporations, banks, is in place.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  There were consequences to growth. I mean, those first power plants burned coal and pollution was pretty bad. Edison built a huge power plant on the east side of Manhattan. And at some point, the city health department got involved. And this is according to the New York Times. Quote, "When it was found, health department men were trying to photograph the smokestacks. Scouts were put on the company's roof. Who ordered the feeding of coal stopped whenever photographers appeared." On the other hand, you now had a city lit up with cheap electric light. Trade offs.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Around this time, everything is getting faster and cheaper. Scientists keep making new discoveries. You get the internal combustion engine, the tractor. For the first time in human history, most people don't have to work as farmers.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  This went on decade after decade, all through the 20th century. All kinds of things got much cheaper, like light.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  And if you look at the really long arc here, it's amazing. I mean, go all the way back to the Babylonians, OK? Babylonians, you worked all day. You got the equivalent of 10 minutes, 10 minutes of light.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  4,000 years later, in the 19th century with kerosene lamps, things are better. A day's labor gets you five hours of light.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And by the time Nordhaus does his light study in the 1990s, if you work a day, how much light do you get?

• 19:52Speaker 07

  Um, maybe 20,000.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  20,000 hours?

• 19:57Speaker 07

  20,000 hours, yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 07

  I mean, you basically, you have your, you have your house lit up. You have your streets lit up. You have your, all your equipment on. You have your air conditioner on. You have all the stuff you're doing. You're saturated with light. The main thing is you're saturated with light.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Economic growth isn't all good. There is pollution, there are environmental consequences. But fundamentally, growth is about things getting faster, getting cheaper, getting more efficient. It's about doing the same amount of work and being able to buy 20,000 hours of light instead of 10 minutes. And as a result, it's about being able to work less or to buy other stuff that used to be just for the wealthy. We can buy books. We can take vacations.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Even today, there are still people who go to work every day and try to figure out how to make a better light bulb.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Uh, this morning, I went to the bulb factory for about an hour.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  This is John Edmund. He's one of the founders of a company called Creep. They make LED light bulbs, which of course are much more efficient than regular bulbs.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  You'll make, you'll try and experiment and you'll say, holy crap, we just got more light out of this thing by using this contact material or flipping the chip over.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Jacob, when we talk about economic growth every year, you know, when we say the economy grew a couple percent, that happens because every day out there, someone, somewhere in some corner of the economy has figured out how to do something a little bit better or a little bit faster or a little less expensively. And this process has gone on year after year for hundreds of years now. And one question I always have when I think about this is like, and not just with light, but this whole story of constant economic growth, constant productivity improvement. My question is, is it going to go on forever? Or at some point, we're going to run out of ways to make things better?

• 21:47Speaker 03

  We might, we might double from where we are now, but we're not going to be tripling and quadrupling it because there are physical limits. I mean, will a car go a million miles an hour? No. It just won't. It's just, it's not going to happen.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  For the light bulb, at least, John says, we may actually be near the end.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  That episode was from 2014. Today, I host a podcast called Business History. It's a show about the history of business. If you like Planet Money, I think you'd like Business History. We recently did an episode on the banana business in the early 20th century. It's got capitalism and imperialism and communism. It's got all of the isms and it's got bananas. The show is called Business History. Check it out. Also, please sign up for the Planet Money newsletter. Every week, the newsletter takes an issue in the news or your life and finds the economics behind it. This past week, newsletter writer Greg Rosalsky looked at California's proposed wealth tax. He reviewed the arguments over whether the tax would generate money for the state or chase it away.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Sign up at npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter. That's npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter or just click the link in the show notes. This episode was originally produced by Caitlin Kenny and Damiano Marchetti. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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