Industrialized societies freed themselves from reliance on the sun, moonlight, and open fires for illumination. Tremendous, social, economic, and environmental consequences resulted from these changes. The energy historians Roger Fouquet and Peter J.G. Pearson explored these issues in their investigation of the price of lighting services in the United Kingdom over seven centuries (1300-2000).1,2
Lighting service is defined in terms of the lumen, a measure of the total amount of light visible to the human eye. The price of a lighting service is a function of the cost of the energy source (kerosene, electricity) and the efficiency of the device (candle, lamp, lightbulb) that converts the energy into visible light.
Apart from central light generated by the fireplace for cooking and heating, candles provided the main source of artificial lighting in the United Kingdom through the nineteenth century. Most candles were made from tallow (rendered animal, fat), and the abundant supply of animal fat enabled the price of tallow to decline from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.
A dramatic and extended decline in the cost of lighting services that began in the 19th century was due to several self-reinforcing factors. By then new fuels (town gas, kerosene, and then electricity) were used for lighting. In the early 1800s, town gas was more expensive than tallow candles, but twice as efficient at converting the fuel into lighting By 1850, town gas was half the price of tallow candles, per unit of energy, and far more efficient. In the second half of the nineteenth century, kerosene, produced by refining crude petroleum, was used for lighting. By 1900, the price of oil had fallen sixfold and remained comparatively stable for more than fifty years. This was coupled with a significant increase in the efficiency of kerosene lamps.
The substitution of electricity for gas and kerosene continued the downward trend in the cost of lighting services throughout the 20th century. By the mid-1890s most towns had an electricity supplier, although at first, only a small proportion of houses were lit by electricity. By the 1930s a rapid shift was occurring from town gas to electricity. Electricity initially was five times as expensive as gas, but electric lighting was ten times more efficient, so the price of the service itself declined. Technological improvements in electricity generation produced steep drops in electricity prices in the early decades of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the efficiency of the electric lamp increased fivefold from 1879 to 1913. Declining electricity prices in rising technical efficiency led to the observed dramatic fall in the cost of electric lighting services.
The history of lighting in the United Kingdom is dominated by the shift to higher quality fuels and dramatic improvements in the efficiency of energy conversion that generated dramatic declines in the long-run cost of lighting services to households and industry. From 1300 to 2000, the price of fuel and electricity declined 10-fold and the efficiency of lighting increased nearly 1400-fold. The result was a nearly 12,000-fold decline in the price of lighting services. Declining prices combined with a growing population and rising affluence produced a 37,000-fold increase in the consumption of light per capita from 1700 to 2000.
1 Fouquet, Roger. “Divergences in Long-Run Trends in the Prices of Energy and Energy Services.” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 5, no. 2 (July 2011): 196–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rer008
2 Fouquet, Roger, and Peter J. G. Pearson. “Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300-2000).” Energy Journal 27, no. 1 (January 2006): 139–77.https://doi.org/10.5547/ISSN0195-6574-EJ-Vol27-No1-8.
