6 ms·

I’d like to see some references that back up this claim. It doesn’t pass an initial sniff test. Our understanding is that mastering fire was one of the earlies

I’d like to see some references that back up this claim. It doesn’t pass an initial sniff test. Our understanding is that mastering fire was one of the earliest steps of humanity’s climb towards civilization. Even today, hardcore campers spend an hour chopping firewood that’ll sustain a fire overnight. It’s hard to believe that it’s been significantly harder to do this historically. Slightly related: I love this book “In praise of shadows” by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. He lived through Japan’s rapid modernization period and talks about how much darker everything was before electric lights, and how the darkness and dim firelight created a very different aesthetic that’s lost in the era of bright electric lights.

jml7c5 6y ago
It appears this is cost-per-lumen, not just cost-for-any-level-of-illumination. So it makes sense. The bottom of the page has this information: >Method: This project is a visualization of a 1990s paper[0] by William Nordhaus, wherein the economist assessed the amount of illumination that workers could purchase at various times in history. I’d recommend the paper even if you’re not a fan of academic writing; it’s approachable, and Nordhaus is the type of Nobel prize-winning overachiever who goes so far as recreating a Babylonian oil lantern to assess its illumination capacity. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  So it's like cost per gigaFLOPS, instead of cost of one unit of computing device, no matter whether it is an Apple II or a Mac Pro.
deleted 6y ago
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bryanlarsen 6y ago
Wood fires are great for heat, but really crappy for light. It's pretty hard to read by a camp fire. And you're either gathering dead fall or using a sharp steel axe. Dead fall is a limited resource, if you need some every day you'll run out close by soon. So soon you're spending more time traveling for wood than collecting. Eventually you'll have to use a stone axe. IIRC, it takes three days to chop down a tree with stone axes that would take an hour with a steel axe. You'll go through several axes chopping down one tree, so you spend much more time making and sharpening axes than chopping.
bodhiandphysics 6y ago
You don’t use wood for light... wood burns at too low a temperature to be good for illumination, since radiant energy goes as temperature ^4, so in general lamps are based on a wicked oil, which burns hotter, and produces far less smoke. I think the numbers may be a little high, though, for the price of oil.
- peteretep 6y ago
  > You don’t use wood for light Not for reading light, perhaps, but this starts with the contention that people had to go to bed when the sun set because you couldn’t see anything. Huddling around a fire into the night on the other hand is probably a human activity as old as fire itself.
  - bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
    obviously people stayed up at night before the invention of electric lighting (there is a reason we call it burning the midnight oil!). People generally however, didn't have open fires in their houses. For one thing, in the middle east, the southern mediterranian, India, and southern china, you don't need to burn fuel for heat. An open fire is also an inefficient way of heating a houser. People used enclosed ceramic or metal stoves, or put screens in front of open hearths to prevent energy from being lost as light. Also, while cutting wood isn't terribly time conusming, much of europe, particularly in the south and east, and almost all of central, southern, and western asia lacks good wood to burn for a fire! People, especially the poor, needed to conserve firewood for cold days, when they needed to be active, and couldn't bundle under covers
    - balfirevic 6y ago
      > to prevent energy from being lost as light. You don't lose any energy from fire just because it's emitted in visible spectrum.

jml7c5 6y ago

It appears this is cost-per-lumen, not just cost-for-any-level-of-illumination. So it makes sense. The bottom of the page has this information: >Method: This project is a visualization of a 1990s paper[0] by William Nordhaus, wherein the economist assessed the amount of illumination that workers could purchase at various times in history. I’d recommend the paper even if you’re not a fan of academic writing; it’s approachable, and Nordhaus is the type of Nobel prize-winning overachiever who goes so far as recreating a Babylonian oil lantern to assess its illumination capacity. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6064/c6064.pdf

smnrchrds 6y ago
So it's like cost per gigaFLOPS, instead of cost of one unit of computing device, no matter whether it is an Apple II or a Mac Pro.

deleted 6y ago

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bryanlarsen 6y ago

Wood fires are great for heat, but really crappy for light. It's pretty hard to read by a camp fire. And you're either gathering dead fall or using a sharp steel axe. Dead fall is a limited resource, if you need some every day you'll run out close by soon. So soon you're spending more time traveling for wood than collecting. Eventually you'll have to use a stone axe. IIRC, it takes three days to chop down a tree with stone axes that would take an hour with a steel axe. You'll go through several axes chopping down one tree, so you spend much more time making and sharpening axes than chopping.

bodhiandphysics 6y ago

You don’t use wood for light... wood burns at too low a temperature to be good for illumination, since radiant energy goes as temperature ^4, so in general lamps are based on a wicked oil, which burns hotter, and produces far less smoke. I think the numbers may be a little high, though, for the price of oil.

peteretep 6y ago
> You don’t use wood for light Not for reading light, perhaps, but this starts with the contention that people had to go to bed when the sun set because you couldn’t see anything. Huddling around a fire into the night on the other hand is probably a human activity as old as fire itself.
- bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
  obviously people stayed up at night before the invention of electric lighting (there is a reason we call it burning the midnight oil!). People generally however, didn't have open fires in their houses. For one thing, in the middle east, the southern mediterranian, India, and southern china, you don't need to burn fuel for heat. An open fire is also an inefficient way of heating a houser. People used enclosed ceramic or metal stoves, or put screens in front of open hearths to prevent energy from being lost as light. Also, while cutting wood isn't terribly time conusming, much of europe, particularly in the south and east, and almost all of central, southern, and western asia lacks good wood to burn for a fire! People, especially the poor, needed to conserve firewood for cold days, when they needed to be active, and couldn't bundle under covers
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    > to prevent energy from being lost as light. You don't lose any energy from fire just because it's emitted in visible spectrum.