I’d like to see some references that back up this claim. It doesn’t pass an initial sniff test.
Our understanding is that mastering fire was one of the earliest steps of humanity’s climb towards civilization. Even today, hardcore campers spend an hour chopping firewood that’ll sustain a fire overnight. It’s hard to believe that it’s been significantly harder to do this historically.
Slightly related: I love this book “In praise of shadows” by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. He lived through Japan’s rapid modernization period and talks about how much darker everything was before electric lights, and how the darkness and dim firelight created a very different aesthetic that’s lost in the era of bright electric lights.
It appears this is cost-per-lumen, not just cost-for-any-level-of-illumination. So it makes sense. The bottom of the page has this information:
>Method: This project is a visualization of a 1990s paper[0] by William Nordhaus, wherein the economist assessed the amount of illumination that workers could purchase at various times in history. I’d recommend the paper even if you’re not a fan of academic writing; it’s approachable, and Nordhaus is the type of Nobel prize-winning overachiever who goes so far as recreating a Babylonian oil lantern to assess its illumination capacity.
Wood fires are great for heat, but really crappy for light. It's pretty hard to read by a camp fire.
And you're either gathering dead fall or using a sharp steel axe. Dead fall is a limited resource, if you need some every day you'll run out close by soon. So soon you're spending more time traveling for wood than collecting. Eventually you'll have to use a stone axe. IIRC, it takes three days to chop down a tree with stone axes that would take an hour with a steel axe. You'll go through several axes chopping down one tree, so you spend much more time making and sharpening axes than chopping.
You don’t use wood for light... wood burns at too low a temperature to be good for illumination, since radiant energy goes as temperature ^4, so in general lamps are based on a wicked oil, which burns hotter, and produces far less smoke. I think the numbers may be a little high, though, for the price of oil.
Not for reading light, perhaps, but this starts with the contention that people had to go to bed when the sun set because you couldn’t see anything. Huddling around a fire into the night on the other hand is probably a human activity as old as fire itself.
obviously people stayed up at night before the invention of electric lighting (there is a reason we call it burning the midnight oil!). People generally however, didn't have open fires in their houses. For one thing, in the middle east, the southern mediterranian, India, and southern china, you don't need to burn fuel for heat. An open fire is also an inefficient way of heating a houser. People used enclosed ceramic or metal stoves, or put screens in front of open hearths to prevent energy from being lost as light. Also, while cutting wood isn't terribly time conusming, much of europe, particularly in the south and east, and almost all of central, southern, and western asia lacks good wood to burn for a fire! People, especially the poor, needed to conserve firewood for cold days, when they needed to be active, and couldn't bundle under covers
This behaves really badly on mobile. I keep having the begin buttons not show up properly and it's too easy to blow past the text milestones with a flick of the finger. This makes it hard to track what's going on. ...
“Before modern lighting, we used to go to sleep when night arrived, waking briefly for an hour or two in deep into the night before retiring again until the morning.”
Like, I go to toilette each night and baby in pre-industrial village will wake up everyone. So it is safe to assume they will generally go piss and drink too and it will look like activity.
Rural cabins had while familly in one room so one person needing to go is likely to cause cascade.
Perfectly consistent with travelers observations in article and still dumb to call it "first sleep" and "second sleep" as if it would be something special.
If your point is that frequently interruptions of sleep is not the same as a sociological phenomenon? I think it is if it happens in every family, every night. It's exactly the kind of pattern that changes habits, cultures, and technology trends. It's worth documenting and giving it a name. If all of a sudden the pattern disappears, that's also worth noting.
Did it take 50-60 hours in ancient times to gather enough firewood to burn a fire for an hour, or does this limit the definition of artificial light to some kind of higher quality oil lamp?
The site doesn't specify it well, but this is cost for a given level of illumination, not cost for any level of illumination.
It takes a lot of firewood to produce the same amount of light as a regular lightbulb. Heck, it takes a lot even compared to an oil lamp.
I read "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" by Daniel Yergin some time ago. One of the things that struck me was just how much of an effect kerosene lamps had on society. It was the main use for oil in the early days, and indoor lighting went from expensive whale oil (or dirty, still-costly tallow) to cheap, abundant kerosene. It provided hours more leisure time every night in the winter.
Among the arguments is that wood was far more important to humanity until about the 19th century than any other resource that gets its own age (i.e. stone, bronze, iron). There's some evolutionary biology stuff in it that I find a bit far-fetched, but at least is an original take on things.
Straight up don't believe this. Even the premise of using lumens as a byway to quantifying an hour of light is flimsy. There's no way we have insight into babylonian economics or everyman illumination to know this to the level of certainty espoused here.
Our understanding is that mastering fire was one of the earliest steps of humanity’s climb towards civilization. Even today, hardcore campers spend an hour chopping firewood that’ll sustain a fire overnight. It’s hard to believe that it’s been significantly harder to do this historically.
Slightly related: I love this book “In praise of shadows” by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. He lived through Japan’s rapid modernization period and talks about how much darker everything was before electric lights, and how the darkness and dim firelight created a very different aesthetic that’s lost in the era of bright electric lights.