The evolution of artificial light and of the means of producing it constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of our race.  Primeval man knew fire.  He learned in some way how to kindle fire.  The lowest barbarian may be defined as a fire-producing animal.  The cave men of ancient Europe kindled fires in their dark caverns.  The lake dwellers had fires, both on shore and in their huts over the water.  Wherever there was a fire there was artificial light.  The primitive barbarian walked around the embers of his fire and saw his shadow stretching out into the gloom of the surrounding night.

With the slow oncoming of a better estate, the early philosophers of mankind invented lamps.  Very rude indeed were the first products in this kind of art.  Note the character of the lamps that have survived to us from the age of stone.  Still they are capable of holding oil and retaining a wick.  Further on we have lamps from the age of bronze, and at last from the age of iron.  Polite antiquity had its silver lamps, its copper lamps, and in a few instances its lamps of gold.  The palaces of kings were sometimes lighted from golden reservoirs of oil.  Such may be seen among the relics preserved to us from the civilizations of Western Asia.  The palace of Priam, if we mistake not, had lamps of gold.

The Great Greeks were the makers of beautiful lamps.  In the age of the Grecian ascendancy the streets of Athens and of some other Hellenic cities were lighted by night.  The material of such illumination was oil derived either from animals or from vegetable products, such as the olive.  In the forms of Greek lamps we have an example of artistic beauty not surpassed or equaled in modern time; but the mechanical contrivance for producing the light was poor and clumsy.

Rome lighted herself artificially.  She had her lamps and her torches and her chandeliers, as we see in the relics of Herculaneum and Pompeii.  A Roman procession by night was not wanting in brilliancy and picturesqueness.  The quality of the light, however was poor, and there was always a cloud of smoke as well as of dust hovering about Roman processions and triumphs.

The earlier Middle Ages improved not at all; but with the Renaissance there was an added elegance in the apparatus of illumination.  Chandeliers were made in Italy, notably in Venice, that might rival in their elegance anything of the present age.  The art of such products was superior; but the old barbaric clumsiness was perpetuated in the mechanical part.  With the rise of scientific investigation under the influence of inductive philosophy, all kinds of contrivances for the production of artificial light were improved.  The ingenuity of man was now turned to the mechanical part, and one invention followed another with a constant development in the power of illumination.