History of Lighting & Brass Candle Sticks

Ancient Lighting

• Archeological research from Lasceau, France, shows that prehistoric people around 12,000 B.C. used lamps hollowed from stones and filled with animal fat. In Ancient Eqypt and Greece, lamps filled with olive oil were used not only for illumination, but also for religious rituals.

  The National Altar Guild of the Episcopal Church says the date of the first candle is unknown but that a number of cultures developed them independently, including the Egyptians and Cretans, who were among the first to use beeswax. By the Middle Ages, European churches were incorporating pleasant-smelling beeswax candles into religious rituals. However, beeswax was expensive, so most people had to use foul-smelling tallow candles.

Early American Candlesticks

• In early Colonial America, it was rare to have candles and candlesticks. The only household illumination in the evening usually came from the fireplace, according to New Jersey's Bergen County Historical Society.

  The poorest people, who did not have enough animal fat to make tallow, rendered candle wax from bayberries. The few candlesticks that people did own were made of tin, pewter and iron. Similar to beeswax, brass was for the wealthy. An alloy of copper and zinc, brass was rarely produced in America until the mid-19th century.

18th and 19th Century Changes

• The Chinese had used whale oil for to make candles as early as 221 B.C. But its use wasn't widespread until the late 1700s. Spermaceti, the wax obtained by crystallizing the oil, became popular because the candles lasted longer and didn't smell bad. The early 19th century discovery of stearic-acid extraction from animal fats further improved the durability of candles.

  Candle-molding machinery introduced in the 1830s made candles easily affordable at the same time that American production of brass candlesticks increased. Paraffin wax, a petroleum byproduct first developed in the 1850s, made candles even more pleasant and economical.

  Gas lighting was another major change during the 1800s. First designed for streetlights, it spread to many homes by the end of the century when yet another technology was on the rise.

Electrical Lighting

• The popularity of candles and gas lighting declined at the end of the 19th century when Canadians Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans patented the light bulb in 1875. Four years later, Thomas Edison improved their invention, and gas lighting went into a permanent decline.

  But the gleam of candles and brass candlesticks never became obsolete. The National Candle Association notes that an "unprecedented surge in popularity" occurred in the 1990s and inspired the invention of renewable sources of candle making materials, including soybean wax.