At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Fires in public places became a great worry, too, especially after the development of a now-forgotten but lively form of illumination known as the Drummond light, named for a Thomas Drummond of Britain’s Royal Engineers, who was popularly but wrongly credited with its invention in the early 1820s. It was in fact invented by a Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a fellow engineer and an inventor of considerable talent. Drummond merely popularized the light and never claimed to have invented it, but somehow the credit became attached to him and has remained there ever since. The Drummond light, or calcium light as it was also called, was based on a phenomenon that had been known about for a long time—that if you took a lump of lime or magnesia and burned it in a really hot flame, it would glow with an intense white light. Using a flame made from a rich blend of oxygen and alcohol, Gurney could heat a ball of lime no bigger than a child’s marble so efficiently that its light could be seen sixty miles away. The device was successfully put to use in lighthouses, but it was also taken up by theaters. The light not only was perfect and steady but also could be focused into a beam and cast onto selected performers—which is where the phrase in the limelight comes from. The downside was that the intense heat of limelight caused a lot of fires. In one decade in America, more than four hundred theaters burned down. Over the nineteenth century as a whole, nearly ten thousand people were killed in ...