Even amongst the many relatively recent inventions that we already take for granted today, things which many of us can

barely imagine life without, despite their having only been made available within the last

generation or two, artificial light is one of the most fundamental. Now that's not to say

that artificial light as a concept is new. We have evidence that our ancestors,

as far back as 400,000 BCE, were using rudimentary methods to achieve artificial light. In most cases,

this meant starting a controlled fire. But prehistoric people, as early as 15,000 years ago, had also begun

to use very basic lamps, made out of hollowed out rocks, shells, and animal horns, which were

filled with grease left over from cooking their meal. They would take the shell, fill it with

grease, pop a simple fiber wick into the grease,

and they would then light that with their fire. We also have evidence that some groups of our

prehistoric ancestors saved themselves a step, and instead of going through the trouble,

of making actual lamps, they would just thread a wick

through a particularly oily fish or bird that they'd killed, and light that.

Boom, instant fish lamp. For the majority of human history, that was pretty much the only option

when it came to creating artificial light. You burn something, either wood,

or parts of an animal, and if you were particularly clever, you figured out a way to make that

burning piece of whatever portable and longer lasting. This trend continued around the world

through the mid-19th century. At that point, whale oil, or more specifically,

a type of oil derived from the head cavity of sperm whales, was considered to be the gold standard

when it came to artificial light, as it burned clean in lamps and made resilient, long-lasting

candles that were in high demand by those who could afford such

things at the time. They smelled far less bad than all the other candles that had been invented

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