Light!

Hey Guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about Light. Now, we've only recently discovered light, even though it's been around forever and a half. I mean, we've had fire since we actively became Homo Sapiens, but since we've now gone ahead with LEDs, and light bulbs, we've suddenly gotten to a point where we literally have 'light pollution' blocking out natural stars. So how did this come to happen? Why did we reinvent light?

While Fire was our main light source, our first attempt at controlling it was in Torches, so we could have mobile light and heat. But with the invention of Glass, the Egyptians could begin having Lamps. Then the Romans found out about it and it went everywhere, but that's another blog. And after having lamps in around 1300 BC, it just didn't advance from there. Then, in 200 AD, we discovered that wrapping tallow around a string resulted in a light source. It came with horrible smell and smoke, but most people lived with it. Then it stopped again. In 1200 AD, we have solid evidence that over seventy Chandlers were working in the  city of Parisian. However, most people who were farmers made them themselves.

So, what advanced us in our quest for light? I mean, even up to the 1700s, we were using the tallow candles and fireplaces to light our life, and we had two separate sleeps called 'First' and 'Second'. So what happened? It's a tale about a dark and stormy night, when an Nantucket Ship captained by a man named Hussey was blown way off course into the North Atlantic. While trying to find their way back, the crew spotted a weird creature, the Sperm Whale. This whale was harpooned majestically, according to Hussey. Some hold beliefs that it was merely washed ashore in the storm and Hussey claimed the find for him. However, when the locals cut apart the mammal for food and supplies, they discovered a cavity filled with a white, oily substance above it's cranium.

We still have no clue why it's there. Some argue that it's there for buoyancy, others that it's there for echolocation amplification. However, the New Englanders who now had access to over 5 hundred gallons of this stuff, needed to find uses for it, as Hussey refused to let any part of it go to waste. So an Chandler tried to make a candle out of it after thickening it. It turned out to be a candle with a whiter light, and next to no smoke. So, for either epicness or hubris, the captain Hussey had forced a town to create an amazing light source. Even Benjamin Franklin loved working with them, George Washington spent over 15,000 a year for these candles, and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were written under it's light.

However, a group of Chandlers combined forces under the Spermaceti Trust to make a monopoly over other chandlers and to force people who hunted these whales to go to them for creation, which made them able to put low selling prices and high buying prices. Despite that, it was still a very wealthy man who managed to bag one of these creatures, which boomed the sailing business. However, it was as dangerous as rewarding, resulting in thousands of lives and entire ships lost, as well as the sinking of the Essex, that gave the idea behind Moby Dick. And don't even start about getting the liquid out carefully. 8-13 year old children were lowered into a cut in the cranium to bucket out the liquid, which resulted in a horrible smell.

However, 300,000 sperm whales were lost, and it would have been possible for us to have wiped them out if it wasn't for the discovery of Oil in the 1850s, which resulted in gas lights which spared the beautiful creatures. Fossil Fuels, that we still use today, were easier to get your hands on and less likely to end up killing you. They were also up to 10 times brighter then the original candles and people began having enough light and time to read, resulting in a boom for the Magazine and Newspaper industries. However, it was still expensive, and only the High Class people could afford to have lights on all night every night.

But what about electric lights? 'Well, everyone knows that Thomas Edison created them.' Wrong. in the1879s, Edison had put in his patent for an Electric Lamp. The problem is, there are patents for around the same thing for over 80 years beforehand. Edison was also a jerk, using 'Vaporware' strategies to scare off competition. 'Vaporware' is simply: Oh, you're working on a thing? Well, we've already finished it, so why bother? An example of this can be found in his 'long lasting lightbulb', which could last up to weeks! The press were shuffled in and out so that every magazine could see this invention. And then we found out that Edison was switching out the light bulbs between visits. But it was already too late, and we now have his face plastered in every book.

So how did we get the amazing Neons associated with Las Vegas invented? Thank an actual inventor, George Claude. In discovering a system to make liquid air for mass production off pure oxygen and liquid nitrogen, he discovered a waste product from this intervention. Neon, as he named it, was the subject of his mad scientist hobby, and after passing electric current thru the isolated gas, he discovered it lit up red. He continue onward, lighting up things like Argon and Mercury. After discovering a wide variety of colors, he patented it as quickly as possible. As the growing demand of it surged, he built a company around it and soured up in the business.

But what about LV? It wasn't the insane city it is today, so how did the infamous signs get there? It's Tom Young's fault, a sign letterer who made words and shapes appear out of the electronic lamps.Tom was introduced to the Neon lights of Claude, and figured that building the glass in a certain shape would be easier then using trails of the one shape light bulbs. He built the YESCO company around this, and was soon building a sign for a obscure casino/hotel combo called the Boulders, which was in an obscurer city called Las Vegas.

And we slowly worked out way up from there.With movies and comics like Star Wars and Flash Gordon, a push from the Sci-Fi crowd worked its way up into the scientific community, because, who didn't want to see lasers become an reality? In the 1960s, we'd gotten Hughes Aircraft and Bell Labs working on creating these amazing heat rays of doom! So why didn't we get them? Because they weren't exactly 'doom'-y enough. But we still use these amazing things everyday. Where? In the supermarket. A Sci-Fi writer in the past's over powered weapon of then is now what you use when you buy a bottle of soda. It's how we check the bar code of the item without needing to manually do it.

That's Adventure Van, putting a light to it.