The history of lighting from the early times to today.
Lighting is an important part in our life, and also were one of the oldest ways for humankind to communicate with each other during the night without lighted. The aim of this article is start with oil lamps which were used more than 4500 years ago by Mesopotamian people, I’ll explain the most important lamps from early times, also about candle and how they were made, then I’ll explain the invention of electricity and tell you how our lighting system improving day by day.
Before writing this article I did some research on Wikipedia to find information about development of lighting for humans. It has been said that oil lamp was one of the first lighted from which humans started to use artificial illumination.
First oil lamps were made from stone or clay, then some discoveries lead human kind to make new lamp using metal. Early lighting also had a lot of problems such as fires and smoky rooms , but years later new improvements on lamps led them to be more popular and some rooms even had special lamps made from metal or glass.
Early oil lamps were made from clay and stone, which were the only materials people could use for working with fire at that time. The oldest one was found in Kuwait (Mesopotamia) dated to 4500 B.C. it’s easy to imagine how many houses caught fire by oil lamps. Even though stone and clay are not suitable for using with fire, people kept using these kind of lamps because they were cheap(not so expensive) and easy to make.
A new way to make lamp was to use metal which gave different results compared to early ones made from stone or clay. Metal doesn’t catch fire as easy as stone and clay, but it took a long time before people can use them because heating metal to melting point was hard for that time. Some discoveries lead metalsmiths to make various vessels using metal , also lamps made from copper were used in the middle east during the Bronze Age between 1900-1500 B.C.
