Planet Money
00:01:36 · John Edmond, Paul Israel, Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum
[00:01:36] S3: No. No. I don't carry that. No. [00:01:38] S4: Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you. [00:01:42] S1: Hi. Do you sell fat, [00:01:45] S5: like beef [00:01:45] S1: sell any of that. Suet? No. Okay. Okay. Thanks very much. Tzuszitos. Yeah. Hi. Do you sell beef fat? [00:01:54] S3: Yeah. That we have all the time. [00:01:55] S1: How much is that? [00:01:55] S3: $2.98 a pound. [00:01:57] S4: Okay. Great. Thanks very much. [00:01:58] S3: You're welcome. Bye. [00:02:00] S1: 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. God. It's a little it's a little harder to chop than you might think. Kinda sticks to itself. I put the fat on the stove. It's pretty melted. It smells really nasty. 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 or so of dipping. Dip. Dip. I got kinda dip crazy in there. Dip. Yep. After hours of work, not counting raising the cow or killing the cow or making the twine, I had six tiny, crooked, smelly candles. Candles. Hello, I and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
00:02:00 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, S6
[00:02:00] S1: 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. God. It's a little it's a little harder to chop than you might think. Kinda sticks to itself. I put the fat on the stove. It's pretty melted. It smells really nasty. 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 or so of dipping. Dip. Dip. I got kinda dip crazy in there. Dip. Yep. After hours of work, not counting raising the cow or killing the cow or making the twine, I had six tiny, crooked, smelly candles. Candles. Hello, I and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jacob Goldstein. [00:03:14] S5: 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. [00:03:50] S6: Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
00:03:50 · S6, S0, David Kestenbaum, Jacob Goldstein
[00:03:50] S6: Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. [00:03:54] S0: This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Host Thanksgiving with industry leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from three sixty five brand, and all their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want only at Whole Foods Market. [00:04:20] S6: This message comes from Ethos. It's easy to put off getting life insurance until something unexpected happens. That makes you realize your family needs you covered. Ethos makes it easy. It's a 100% online. No medical exam, just a few health questions. Apply in minutes and get same day coverage up to 3,000,000. Get your free quote today at ethos dot com slash money. That's ethos.com/money. Application times and rates may vary. [00:04:48] S0: This message comes from Integrative Therapeutics, makers of Cortisol Manager, named best overall ashwagandha supplement by Vogue. Use code stress twenty twenty six for 20% off of Cortisol Manager on amazon.com. [00:05:02] S5: Jacob, you brought these scraggly little candles in the office. I'm holding them up here. They look they look a little marled. [00:05:12] S1: They're definitely not straight, and they're not, like, sleek.
00:05:12 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, Jane Brox
[00:05:12] S1: They're definitely not straight, and they're not, like, sleek. [00:05:15] S5: No. It looks like some mold has grown on a On a string. 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. [00:05:31] S1: So I made a few different candles. I tried... Oh, look. They're beautiful. I tried them beautiful. You've been a total disaster. [00:05:41] S2: In the in the olden days. If a 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. [00:05:52] S5: 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. [00:06:01] S1: I was afraid we weren't gonna be able to light them at all. I mean, it's just beef fat and twine, but we pulled out a lighter. [00:06:09] S2: Oh, we have we have light. That's not too bad. Should we see how long it lasts? [00:06:17] S5: It's not pretty, but I'm very impressed. [00:06:19] S2: It's it's a beautiful color. Look at the nice yellow flame, wouldn't you say? [00:06:24] S5: Dude, you made a candle. [00:06:26] S1: 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.
00:06:26 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, Jane Brox
[00:06:26] S1: 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. [00:06:33] S5: 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. [00:06:48] S2: The storm petrel in the 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. [00:07:03] S5: Just carry around a dead bird? [00:07:05] S2: Well, would be on a table. And I would imagine they'd have a little storage area with a lot of dead storm petrols. Martha, we need another petrol. The petrol supply is getting low. [00:07:22] S1: 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.
00:07:22 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, Bill Nordhaus
[00:07:22] S1: 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. [00:07:38] S5: I mean, think about it. You gotta get a cow. You gotta raise the cow. You gotta have food to feed the cow. You gotta kill the cow. You gotta get the fat out of the cow. You gotta put the fat in your Cuisinart. Which isn't gonna be invented for a hundred years. From an economic perspective, if you wanna 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. [00:08:33] S7: 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 four four thousand years ago.