Before Electricity, People Spent 10% of Their Income on This | History Documentary

Imagine it's 1400, you're sitting in your home, the sun goes down, and the darkness is complete. Not city dark, not the powers out dark, complete, suffocating, absolute, like you are in a cave. Your only option, the only thing standing between you and total blackness is a small, flickering flame. And that flame smells like death, not a candle shop smell, not vanilla or cedar, the smell of boiled animal fat, rendered cattle grease, the same stuff you scrape off a roasting pan. That was your light, that was everyone's light, every night for thousands of years. Before electricity, the average working class family in England spent nearly 10% of their entire income on candles, 10%, on light, that's more than they spent on clothing, more than they spent on medicine, because without light after dark, you couldn't work, you couldn't read, you couldn't see. I'm Aidan Thomas of Hidden History. This is the story of how the world started to see in the dark. This is the history of the candle. Imagine your entire world, your productivity, your safety, your social life, governed by a single rule, when the sun goes down, you stop. That was a reality for almost every human being who ever lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Fire helped, torches helped, oil lamps helped somewhat, but they were all unreliable, dangerous and expensive to maintain. The candle changed that, but it took a very long time for it to become what we recognize today. The earliest candles we know of come from ancient Egypt, around 3000 BC. But here's the thing, they weren't candles in the way we recognize them today. They were rush lights, just dried reeds soaked in rendered animal fat. You'd hold one end, light the other and walk, or prop it against a wall, no wick, no wax, no holder, just a fat soaked stick of dry grass and a hope that it didn't blow out. The Romans improved on this. They developed actual wick-based candles, rolled papyrus dipped in tallow or beeswax. Roman soldiers carried them, households used them, and already a class divide was forming. Beeswax candles burned clean, they smelled faintly of honey, they were used in temples and wealthy homes. Tallow candles, made from rendered cattle or sheep fat, burned with black smoke, dripped constantly, and smelled like you were cooking a very old, very bad steak. And tallow candles were what almost everyone used for the next thousand years. By the Middle Ages, candles were one of the most important industries in Europe, not a craft, an industry. Every town had chandlers, candle makers, and there were two kinds, tallow chandlers and wax chandlers, and those two groups absolutely despised each other. In London, the guild of tallow chandlers and the guild of beeswax chandlers were locked in an ongoing territorial dispute for centuries, who could sell where, who had the right to supply which buildings, who was allowed to make candles in which neighborhoods, because this was business, serious business. Beeswax candles were used in churches, cathedrals, and aristocratic households, they were symbols of holiness and wealth. Tallow candles were used by everyone else, the poor, the working class, the vast, unwashed majority of medieval Europe, but tallow candles had a problem beyond the smell. They melted unevenly, they sputtered, they went out in a breeze. The wick would bend and create a candle snuff, a lump of carbon that dimmed the flame, filled the room with smoke, and needed to be trimmed constantly. Trimming the wick was an actual job, in wealthy households there was a servant whose only task was to keep the candles burning properly, and nobody thought this was unusual. Now let's take a moment to really understand tallow candles. Tallow is made from boiled beef or mutton fat, the kind of fat that turns solid at room temperature, the kind you skim off a pot of soup and throw away. Now imagine an entire room, an entire house, filled with burning versions of that, every evening, every winter, for your entire life. Medieval people weren't bothered by this smell, they'd grown up with it, much like today if you grew up with a smoker, they didn't know any different. But historians estimate that wealthy homes, lit by beeswax, could be identified by scent alone from the outside. Your nose knew before your eyes did whether you'd arrived at a rich house or a poor one. In the 18th century everything changed, or almost everything. Whalers discovered something remarkable inside the heads of sperm whales, a substance called spermaceti. It was a waxy, crystalline oil, nothing like tallow. It burned cleaner than anything that had come before, brighter, with almost no smell, no smoke, no dripping. Spermaceti candles were the first truly high-quality candles available at a somewhat commercial scale. The whaling industry exploded. By 1770, American whalers alone were producing over 45,000 spermaceti candles annually. New Bedford, Massachusetts, became the candle capital of the world. Fortunes were made. Entire economies were built on the harvest of sperm whales. Candles were extraordinary, if you could afford them. They were still expensive, still a luxury item. But they represented something new, the idea that candlelight didn't have to be a miserable, smelly, smoky compromise to get light. The problem was, the whales were being hunted to extinction. By the early 1800s, overhunting had decimated sperm whale populations. Whaling ships had to go farther, stay out longer, face greater danger for fewer whales. The spermaceti candle was the first green, clean candle, and it was already dying. We've reached the halfway point of our story, and if this is your thing, take a minute and hit subscribe. We put out new episodes every week, and there's a lot more from where this came from. All right, let's get back to our story. In 1811, a French chemist named Michel-Eugène Cheverol made a discovery that would eventually change everything. He figured out a way to separate the fatty acids in tallow. And one of those acids, stearic acid, burned harder, cleaner, and slower than raw tallow. He called it styrene. Within 20 years, the first commercial styrene candles were being produced in France. No more smoky black drips. No more rancid smell. No more constant wick trimming. Styrene candles burned like beeswax, clean and long, but they cost a fraction of the price. And this is the part history books usually skip. The factories that produced styrene candles in 19th century France were predominantly staffed by women. Working class women who had previously worked in tallow chandeliers, brutal, smelly, exhausting work, were now operating cleaner, more mechanized production lines. These were just workers. Many of them became expert technicians who refined the production process, adjusted chemical ratios, improved mold designs. The modern candle as we know it, the clean, even-burning, affordable candle, was built by women. In December 1848, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived stood in front of an audience of young people in London and said something extraordinary. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. This was Michael Faraday, the man who discovered electromagnetism. And he chose a candle for his lectures. His sixth lecture Christmas series, The Chemical History of a Candle, became one of the most famous science lectures in history. He walked his audience through combustion chemistry, capillary action, how the wick works, where the light actually comes from. Every answer led to another question. Every question opened into a field of science. What Faraday understood, and what most people don't today, is that the candle flame is not simple. It is one of the most complex chemical processes that can be observed with the naked eye. Roughly 1,800 chemical reactions happen in a single candle flame. 1,800 in the thing that you use to create a mood or create a smell. In 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated a working incandescent light bulb. And within a generation, the candle went from an essential survival technology to an afterthought. By 1920, electric lighting was standard in most American cities. The candle industry, thousands of years old, nearly collapsed overnight. But something strange happened. People kept buying them. Not for light, for something else entirely. For atmosphere. For ritual. For the way the flame moved, alive in a way that electric light simply wasn't. Psychologists have a theory about this, something called flame gaze. The way a flickering flame activates the same mental state as flowing water or rustling leaves, a kind of meditative calm that modern humans were suddenly, desperately missing. The candle industry didn't die with electricity. It transformed. And today, it's a $3.2 billion industry in the United States alone. Think about that. We have electricity. We have LED lights. We have screens that emit more lumens than the sun. And yet, we still buy candles. The candle has outlived every technology that was supposed to replace it. It outlived oil lamps. It outlived gas lighting. It survived electrification. Because it was never just a light source. It was a marker of time. The upper class used beeswax candles measured by the inch. Each inch representing one hour. They literally watched time burn away. It was a symbol of status. For a thousand years to call your candle, pull visitors exactly where you stood in the social order. It was a scientific instrument. A window into chemistry, physics, and the nature of combustion that one of the greatest minds in history spent six lectures unpacking. And it was built in its modern, democratized form largely by the hands of working women, whose names we never learned. The candle didn't survive because nostalgia is powerful. It survived because something about an open flame connects us to every human being who has ever lived. Every person who sat in the dark and pushed it back with a small, flickering light. It wasn't ambiance. It was survival. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden History. If you've got a moment and you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button. Like the video and comment below on another episode you would like to see. Next week, we're uncovering the hidden history behind another invention you are probably using right now. The hidden history of the chair. Now take a look around. History is everywhere.