Sonya Boyce, age 15, of Gadsden, Ala., for her question:
WHEN WAS THE FIRST LAMP INVENTED?
An American inventor named Thomas A. Edison developed the first practical lamp in 1879. Then electric lamps came into widespread use during the early 1900s and have replaced other types of fat, gas or oil lamps for almost every purpose.
The first lamps, which prehistoric man made from sea shells or hollowed out stones, were fat lamps. He used pieces of grass like plants called rushes as wicks and burned animal fat as fuel in his lamps.
Ancient Egyptians made stone lamps but they burned oil and had cotton wicks. Then the ancient Greeks and Romans came along with bronze and pottery lamps. The early Greeks had lamps that looked like saucers and burned olive oil or the oil of other plants.
Candles are a type of fat lamp. The earliest candles were made by coating a wick with wax and pitch. Later, candlemakers used tallow, a waxy substance obtained from animal fat. The best candles consisted of beeswax or paraffin, a wax obtained from petroleum.
An oil lamp called the cruise lamp appeared during the Middle ages. This lamp consisted of an iron pan that had a trough sticking out from it. The trough held the wick. The American colonists made cruises called Betty lamps. The colonists usually burned fish oil or whale oil in these lamps.
Through the years, people added reflectors to lamps to diffuse or concentrate light.
Gas lamps produced light by one or more small gas flames. A Scottish engineer named William Murdock developed the first commercially important gas lamps in 1792. Then in the early 1800s, gas lamps came into use as street lamps in London and other cities.
In the late 1800s, a device called a mantle was added to the gas lamp. This was a iooosely woven cloth bag soaked with a chemical substance. The cloth quickly burns away in the lamp and the chemical glows steadily as the gas burns around it.
An important development in the fat and oil lamps came in 1780 when a Swiss chemist named Aime Argand invented a lamp with the wick bent into the shape of a hollow cylinder. Such a wick allowed air to reach the center of the flame. As a result, the Argand lamp produced a brighter light than did other lamps of the period.
Later, one of Argand's assistants made another improvement after discovering that a flame burns brighter inside a glass tube. His discovery led to the invention of the lamp chimney, a clear glass tube that surrounds the flame.
During this period, whale oil and colza oil, an oil from the rape plant, became important fuels for lamps. The birth of the oil industry in the mid 1800s led to the widespread use of kerosene, a petroleum product, as lamp fuel.
Today, most modern gas lamps, including the portable gas and liquid fuel lamps used by campers, have mantle.