Light 04: Hurricane Lamps

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

Though the distillation of kerosene was known as early as the 9th century in places like Persia, the oil lamps that used it were much the same as those hand-sized ones used as decorations at festivals like Diwali. The characteristic silhouette of the hurricane lamp, with the small air pipes running down the sides as shown by the rat model to the left, dates only to the late 19th century. It still sees use in poor, rural, or unsettled areas today, where kerosene is easier to come by than alternating current.

Hurricane lamps like that one were once a fact of life here in Boston. Being on the sea, and subject to the Atlantic hurricane season, a lamp that stayed lit in the howling wind -- and extinguished itself when blown over -- was a necessity. Many of the old houses here have what's called a "captain's walk" (or, more morbidly, a "widow's walk") on the roof, a flat surface with a wrought-iron railing. The traditional image is of a mariner's wife, in Victorian dress, standing vigil with one of these hurricane lamps, gazing out to sea and watching for her husband's ship to come home.

The design of a hurricane lamp is quite clever, and its development required us to first understand how combustion, and therefore how chimneys, really worked. Alec from Technology Connections has an extensive and entertaining examination of the mechanism, complete with him accidentally scorching the desk in the bloopers at the end.