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Introducing
Bill Kovarik
Bill
Kovarik, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at
Radford University in the Blue Ridge Mountains of
Virginia. He teaches communications history,
media law, Web design and science writing. He
earned his Ph.D. in Communications, with a
cognate in history of technology and the
environment, at the University of Maryland in
1993. Kovarik has worked with a number of news
organizations over the past 25 years, including
the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun, the
Charleston (SC) Post-Courier, the New York Times
and Time Magazine. He has taught science writing
at Radford, Virginia Tech and the University of
Maryland. He was also a writing coach in the
Chemical Engineering Dept. at Virginia Tech and
an instructor for a course in Energy Resources at
the University of Maryland's Dept. of Geography.
His books
include Mass Media and Environmental Conflict:
America's Green Crusades, published in 1996. The
book was named one of the best academic books of
the year by the American Library Association in
1997. He also publishes the Environmental History
Timeline on the Web. http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/hist
He is also
working on a broader global history of
environmental conflict called "Green
Crusades."
Dr.
Kovarik has also served as an expert witness in
legal cases on behalf of Peter Angelos of
Baltimore, Lloyds of London and others concerned
with environmental history.
He is
currently working on a history of auto fuel
technology for Chemcases, a Kennesaw State
University chemistry curriculum development
project funded by the National Science
Foundation.
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Lamps for the Night The story of auto fuels and
air pollution begins with lamp fuel. Long before recorded
history, people found comfort by a firelight and ways to
light up the dark, Cave paintings dating back 60,000
years were probably created by the light of torches. Oil
lamps from around 6,000 B.C. have been found in the
earliest Babylonian cities.
Archaeologists
have found a wide variety of lamps and lanterns made
during the Classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece,
Rome, India and China. The lamps burned vegetable
oils or animal fat and usually had a spout or a wick.
Decorative lanterns held candles made from beeswax or
fat.
The designs for
these devices didn’t change much over the ages.
Anyone from a Classical civilization could have easily
used the kinds of lamps and lanterns that were typical
thousands of years later in 18th century
Europe and America. People still read by the weak light
of candles and oil lamps that used the same vegetable
oils. One new development was whale oil, which was
harvested and traded on an industrial scale in Europe in
the mid-18th century and the U.S. in the early
19th century.
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Oil lamps and
candles tended to be expensive. For example,
whale oil sold for $1.50 to $2.50 a gallon around
1850, while lard oil sold for 90 cents a gallon.
The light from oil and candles were also too weak
for large public places. |
Demand
for better lighting came in the 19th century
with the growth of literacy, industry and urban life.
People were reading more, partly because there were more
publications and also because of the democratization of
political life. Lighting was needed to extend the work
day for industrial operations like mining and factory
work. Police wanted better lighting for city streets. And
theaters needed safer lighting systems to lower insurance
premiums.
New
lighting systems would be developed and the fuels for
these, in turn, would be the fuels that automotive
inventors used in their early cars.
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