Planet Money
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, William 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.
00:08:33 · William Nordhaus, Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum
[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. [00:08:49] S1: 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. [00:09:02] S7: I did this in my dining room. Where else? [00:09:06] S1: 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 facility sky at Yale, and he does some science. [00:09:16] S7: And I would just measure it and write it down just just the way you see in the in the old movies as some guy with... In his lab coat writing down the measurements. [00:09:25] S5: Jacob, odd little note here. I happen to be taking Nordhaus' 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. [00:09:40] S1: 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.
00:09:40 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum, William Nordhaus
[00:09:40] S1: 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. [00:09:50] S5: 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. [00:10:07] S7: Maybe ten minutes. It was really expensive. [00:10:11] S5: An entire day's wages got you the equivalent of ten 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, 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. [00:10:35] S1: 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.
00:10:35 · Jacob Goldstein, David Kestenbaum
[00:10:35] S1: 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. [00:10:58] S5: And for basically four thousand 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. [00:11:17] S1: 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 seventeen hundreds, 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.