Paleolithic nights were long and dark. It took our ancestors a while to figure things out, but eventually, they figured out a way to master fire, and banish darkness and cold forever.

Thagg and Grok Light Up the Night

In many parts of Africa and Europe, archeologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of caveman campfires. Near those buried rings of charred wood, they have unearthed the bones of people who lived so long ago that they predate modern human beings. So, it looks like our not-quite-human ancestors began taming fire as long as a million years ago! Although cavemen and women most likely did not have the brainpower to kindle fire, they did, it seems, have smarts enough to capture fire from, say, lightning strikes, tend it, and preserve it for long periods of time.

For Thagg and Grok, our cave-dwelling friends, campfires were important, not only for warmth and cooking, but also for light. Having a way to produce light was important for keeping away wild animals and other dangers at night, and it also allowed people to explore dark places where sunlight had never reached.

About 20,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, Stone Age humans painted images that were surprisingly beautiful. Even more surprising is where they were drawn—deep within long, winding caves in Western Europe. The best-known location of these rock paintings is the Lascaux caves in southwestern France (Figure 1-1). Narrow and deep, these caves are completely dark after the first few feet, so it must have been impossible for the artists who painted there to see anything without some source of artificial light.

So, how did Thagg and Grok paint their pictures? Many modern experts believe that these primitive Picassos placed a few lumps of animal fat on a stone that had a natural indentation, and then lit the fat with a burning straw from their campfire, which was kept under perpetual watch not far away.

In other words, in order to produce the hundreds of pictures that are now considered some of the world’s oldest artwork, these ancient makers made some of the world’s first lamps.

The ability to build a lamp and find fuel for it was a huge advance, not just for the Lascaux cave dwellers but for their descendants as well. After this point, lamps were made from all sorts of materials, including shells, bone, stone, and chalk, and were fueled by whatever naturally burning, organic substance was locally available.

What sorts of fuels were used? In parts of the Middle East, especially in the area that stretched from what is northwestern Iran today north to Azerbaijan, many people were, no doubt, very pleased to find that burnable oil bubbled up naturally from the ground. The people who lived in this region filled their lamps with gooey petroleum such as liquid asphalt and naphtha, which they carefully collected from the tarry pools of dark ooze.

Evidently, there was a lot of it. The great 14th century explorer Marco Polo wrote about an extraordinary geyser that spewed up great jets of oil from the earth. He awed his readers when he described a place in the present-day Eurasian country of Georgia where a spring of oil released so much petroleum from the ground that local merchants used caravans of camels to cart it away. This oil, Polo wrote, “is not for the purpose of food, but as a medicine for men and cattle and it is also good for burning in lamps. People come from distant parts to procure it.”

But what did people burn in places where there was no petroleum? In places where whales were common, such as Norway, Greenland, and Japan, the natives cut blubber into strips and then boiled them. This resulted in a large quantity of waxy oil that turned out to be an excellent fuel for home lamps. Catching and killing whales was hard and dangerous work, but the value of the meat and oil made it worth the bother.

Still, in most of the ancient world, whale oil and petroleum were rare commodities. Instead, most of the lamps used in those times burned animal fat or, where possible, olive oil. Olive trees have been cultivated for more than 4,000 years, and it’s a fairly easy process to obtain oil from the olive fruits. Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa were just a few of the places where olives were an important crop. In each of these places, people designed lamps to bring together olive oil and a wick in order to provide a device that would light up their dark, long nights.

African and Middle Eastern lamps were open on top and often hung on chains from the ceiling. Later, great numbers of Roman lamps were manufactured using molds instead of hand-forming techniques. These were among the earliest examples of mass-produced housewares.

Unlike those from Africa and the Middle East, Roman lamps had covers, and sometimes they had multiple spouts and wicks that provided considerable light. The idea of a lamp with a cover was a big step forward in lamp technology because the cover prevented messy oil spills. In addition, the cover kept rats and mice from drinking the oil and prevented insects, attracted by the light, from falling into the oil.

It was in the orange-red glow of covered olive-oil burning lamps that people like Sophocles wrote, Socrates philosophized, and Archimedes invented.

Designing and fabricating a simple olive oil lamp is easy and fun, and, quite possibly, useful. But best of all, when you do it, you form a real, hands-on connection with the technology of the past. And not just the recent past, but much further back, to the earliest times of human civilization. What your smart phone is to you, the oil lamp may well have been to the cave dweller.

Making an Olive Oil Lamp

Basically, an oil lamp is just a container for oil with a support that holds the wick upright. That’s the big deal that Thagg figured out—he built a device that can hold a wick upright so that one end soaks in oil and the other holds a flame.

Building a lamp is easy and you can make one from clay, plaster, or any other nonflammable material as long you can make a place for a wick and possibly have a separate hole into which you can add the oil. Making a lamp on a potter’s wheel is a simple task because you need only throw a simple bowl and then pinch the wet clay to form a spout for the wick. But don’t worry about finding a potter’s wheel. You can make a decent lamp with just your hands.

Here are a couple ways to make a lamp.

The Simple Saucer Lamp

To make the lamp, follow these steps:

1. In a disposable cup or bowl, mix 3 ounces or so of water putty or Plaster of Paris (the exact amount you need depends upon the size you want your lamp to be) with water according to the label directions.
2. Use the second disposable cup or bowl as a form for the putty. Once you place the putty or Plaster of Paris into the second disposable cup or bowl, work quickly, using gloved fingers or a spoon to make a depression in the putty so that it too becomes bowl-shaped. Then, still working quickly, make an indentation in one side of the bowl to hold the wick upright.
3. Let your bowl lamp dry.
4. Remove the lamp from the disposable bowl.
5. Once your lamp is completely dry, paint on a couple coats of waterproof varnish on the interior to prevent the oil from soaking into the water putty or plaster.
6. Let the varnish dry.

   While the varnish is drying, it’s time to make the wick. Choose one of the following options.

7. To make the simplest wick, cut a small piece of cotton cloth so it is roughly ¾ of an inch wide and about 4 inches long (the exact length depends on the size of your lamp). Then roll it up and insert it into the indentation you made in the reservoir of your lamp.

   Alternatively, you can make a slightly better wick from a 3-inch piece of ¹/₈-inch-thick, all-cotton twine or yarn that has been dipped in molten wax.

8. Now fill the bowl of your lamp with olive oil.

   After a few minutes, the oil will have been absorbed into the wick. Your lamp is ready to use!

Covered Lamp

Figure 1-3 shows an oil lamp assembly diagram, which will help you figure out how to make your own lamp. You can use almost any shape as long as it holds oil without leaking or spilling.

In the previous example, you made a simple saucer lamp with a single opening on top in which you inserted both the fuel and the wick. In this example, you’ll make a more advanced covered lamp with separate holes for pouring in fuel and holding the wick.

This style of lamp is more sophisticated. Historically speaking, the saucer lamp was superseded by the covered lamp starting around 400 BCE. The covered lamp had several advantages. Covered lamps were less likely to spill and usually had molded handles that made them easier and safer to transport.

Making your coiled lamp is easy! Just follow these steps:

1. First, carefully examine Figure 1-3. Now that you’ve seen where you are heading, it’s time to begin!
2. Make a base by flattening a piece of clay until it is about ¼-inch thick; then use a knife to cut it out into your desired shape.
3. Next, roll out several pencil-thick coils of moist clay, each one about the circumference of your lamp in length.
4. Press the first coil firmly onto the base.
5. Then, gradually build up the lamp walls by adding layers of coils to the first one in the shape you desire.
6. When your lamp shape looks right, smooth the coils inside and outside the lamp using a spoon or your finger.
7. With your finger or a spoon, form a spout on the rim of the lamp for the wick.
8. Roll out a piece of ¼-inch-thick clay and cut out the shape for your cover. Attach a clay knob in the middle so you can lift it off the lamp.
9. Let the clay pieces dry and harden.
10. Once your lamp is dry, you’ll need to varnish the interior so the oil doesn’t soak through the clay. Make sure to read and follow the manufacturer’s directions that appear on the varnish container.
11. Insert the wick into the wick hole.
12. Light the wick and enjoy the warm, soft light (Figure 1-4)!

    

13. (Optional) Add detail to your lamp with scribes or knives; you can also drill it or sand it if you want to. Historically, lamps were often decorated, and several themes were common. Motifs included mythology, animal and plant life, and repeating abstract designs.

    For a different look, add an interesting pattern to the lamp by poking small holes through the walls of the lamp, above the oil fill level, with your scribe. If you do this, you’ll find that the flickering flame inside the lamp makes wonderful light-play through the holes.

The Wonder of Wicks

All simple oil lamps, whether they are ceramic, clay, or terra cotta, are pretty much the same. The lamp body is a container that holds the fuel. On the top of the lamp body are one or two holes: one for refilling the fuel, and another for containing the wick. (As already noted, in very simple lamps, there is only one opening for both purposes.) The wick is a fiber cord or string that holds the flame.

Although a wick looks simple (and indeed, it is merely a piece of twisted cotton), the chemical processes that are going on inside it at the molecular level are amazing (see Figure 1-5). At the microscopic level, the molecules in the oil are absorbed into the cotton wick and they move up to the flame via a phenomenon called capillary action. The upward drawing motion of capillary action is due to surface tension, or the attraction of one molecule to another molecule of a similar kind. Once this wicking process starts, it continues until the oil runs out; the oil molecules follow one another up the wick like ants marching up a log. At the top of the wick, the hydrocarbon molecules in the oil combine with the oxygen in the air, or, put a bit more scientifically, they oxidize, in a high-temperature, self-sustaining, and light-producing chemical reaction.

If you want to go even deeper into the science behind surface tension, here’s what’s happening: capillary action occurs because of sub-microscopic processes known as cohesion and adhesion.

Cohesion describes the attraction of molecules in liquids to molecules of similar kind. This is the atomic-level mechanism that causes oil molecules to follow one another, seemingly defying gravity, up the wick.

But cohesion isn’t enough to keep your candle flame lit. There’s a second process, called adhesion, at work as well. Adhesion is the molecular attraction between molecules of different types. Adhesion is the reason why oil is attracted to the fibers of the wick in the first place. Together, these two processes make up capillary action.

In an oil lamp wick, the burnable oil molecules are attracted to the fibers of the cotton, which are mostly made of cellulose. Cellulose naturally attracts oil. (A chemist would say that cellulose is a lipophilic, or oil-loving, material.) When the oil lamp is lighted, a few oil molecules more or less randomly begin to crawl up the surface of the cotton fibers of the wick string, and they drag even more oil molecules along with them as they go up the wick. As long as the flame burns, the chemical transport of oil molecules through the wick to the burning flame continues. It’s hard to believe the complex chemical processes that are going on inside what looks like a simple piece of string!