Lanterns and Lighting in the 18th Century - With Townsends

hey welcome everyone to the nutmeg tavern this is a special candlelit edition hope you enjoy this we're going to have fun i am your host john townsend and um we're going to be talking about historical things today 18th century lighting and all that kind of fun stuff i am joined not behind the bar today uh ryan is still out he will be back next week but uh aaron is on the console hey everyone there he is i'm not gonna cut to me because uh you can't see me you you wouldn't be able to see him it's so dark over there so you just got to put up with me today it has been again an amazing week and uh just finished up an exciting cooking episode we are just oh that was going to be fun i spent a good amount of time prepping on this one and it's something to really enjoy and if you're a patreon supporter it's not posted yet but i will post it probably right after the live stream or later on this evening a special behind the scenes about uh today's episode so make sure to uh check that out if you're a patreon supporter ah let's get right to the topic lighting in the 18th century you know today we walk in the room flip on the light switch we don't think a thing about it i mean nothing right so our power goes out and then it's like the house is dead i mean the water doesn't work the heating's gone and no light you immediately see that our homes are designed to have artificial lighting in them or else it's just you can't i mean you can't function at all you can't find anything even during the daytime so uh lighting in the 18th century was really important um it's something that they had to think about and it changed the way they worked they changed their work day they just you know maybe they didn't do a lot after dark certainly it depends on the the economic level of the person so we're going to look at some paintings we're going to look at lighting devices i'm going to kind of walk you through all these different ones and then we're going to look at period ones that we sell here at townsends so we can kind of see some of these examples in real life at least as well as you can see them in this light so let's bring up the first slide um notice here this is a well to do family they've got food on the table there they're playing cards or some other game look like cards although they're kind of long and skinny whole families there with a guest and how is it lit one candle that's one single uh looks it doesn't even look like a fancy uh candle holder in comparison to the rest of the house it actually looks like a tin candle holder that has a sort of a movable stick so as it goes down you can move it up a little bit go ahead to the next one another just straight up candlestick love the painting here and this is a brass or a can or a um possibly pewter candlestick probably a brass candlestick uh cast in sand very very popular style in our 18th century time period he's got a big candle it's lighting him well luckily uh there are a whole host of artists in the 18th century who were loved playing with light and so we're going to see some of these ones where the lighting and candle lighting kind of is is the light of the picture and it makes it a very special illustration so this is a neat one go ahead this one is a painting this is just a piece of a very large uh or a very large image um this is uh 1813 i believe it's called the village politicians and we have a very you yeah so there's a tin candle lantern a punched tin candle lantern up there on the wall and there is a candlestick right there on the shelf on the wall this is right over the fireplace so that's where we're at there oh here we go um can't this is this image is from dieter's encyclopedia and it's showing a dark lantern and this is supposed to be happening at night and that you're like blinding your foe with with the candle lantern can you imagine oh i can't see anything they're kennel it's just blowing my eyes out uh anyway the um the i don't know probably the night watch here is the person with the lantern there are a lot of sort of um night watch uh people in paintings of this time period and they almost all have a lantern just like that um a dark lantern hey real quick um i don't have any music playing right now for this let me know in the chat if it's like you guys want a little music or not we're just kind of experimenting a little bit as always experimenting yeah this lantern is a fancy punch tin lantern and it's actually on a cord so you can lower it probably i believe that's what that cord is going on there this must not be at night because there's no light really coming from that lantern ah so here is a a ruckus uh out in the street with the different people they're the the uh the artistry is great here we've got these different gentlemen they're all wearing like watch cloaks and you can see how heavy and duffley the material is how it's held together check out the belt on these guys on the um on the right hand side i mean you can see just the thickness of the belt and how it was put together this it's just incredibly great detail here on the clothing the lantern check out this big he's got a big candle lantern there it's a tin one that's round it has glass or let's say transparent panes and you can see the holes up underneath that's where those candles have to breathe and so air has to come up from underneath the other gentleman there behind the i don't think that's actually a woman but behind the the character with the with the uh chaleli she's about to whack somebody with he's got another one of these lanterns a little bit different design but very very similar now go to the next slide and this is part of that same image this is somebody who's already been smacked in the head with that stick and his lantern has fallen on the ground and we can see the holes underneath and notice the uh the transparent pains there and how there's up a dark spot on that and you might say oh what's happened there is it's fallen down the candle's still burning and it's caused soot to get on the glass but as we'll i'll show you later i don't think that's glass at all and we'll talk about that as we go go ahead next one another almost very very similar round tin lantern with glass panes and it's got a door on the front so we can see a lot of the the detail on these these are very these are very um demanding pieces to make almost nobody makes a reproduction of these lanterns today in fact none that i know of especially with the the quality that we see in all these images go ahead yet another one he's got the door open on this one this is a night watchman he's looking at his pocket watch um and he's getting you know very very close to us so he can read it we also see in the background there are uh there's sort of like street lighting going on i'm not sure but i think these but back in the background are probably oil lamps that are in there they've got huge wicks you can imagine that they are creating a lot of soot they need to be cleaned all the time it's it's a very difficult thing to keep going for any any great period of time go ahead here this is a image from dita rose encyclopedia this is one of the candle making operations and there i mean we see this i mean we have everybody's seen sort of the candle molds that we see today we think about dipping but this is uh actually a pouring technique so it's sort of like dipping but instead you bring the wax up and you pour it over the top of these candles this the person there in front of the window they are rolling them out flat smashing the little bumps down because you always get all these little bumpies on it when you when you do a dipping process or pouring process like this but he's making a lot of candles even the person there in the on the other side on the right hand side i believe they're probably pulling wick through a bath of hot wax just to get wax on the wick ahead of time and wix wick is something special we'll again talk or at least hopefully i'll remember to talk about that uh in a little bit another d derose encyclopedia and this one is kind of important and it's definitely different than most of the other images you see of workshops in fact if we go back i slide go back a slide just for a second notice in this slide the only lighting that's going on in here is from the windows we can even see the shadow from the light coming directly in the windows there's this workshop isn't made to be used at night unless there's lighting that we can't see so go ahead no right here uh so this is a tin smith or somebody who's doing working in items like that possibly a brazier whoever they're making items out of sheet metal he's got big funnels there obviously this is a shop you can see it's made to be lit by the outside but he's also showing off his wares and if you were doing a lot of work at night and you wanted to light up this workshop a lot and you didn't want to use candles which were expensive you want to use an oil lamp with a lot of wicks so go to the next slide there's a close-up of the lighting device on the ceiling and it's sort of like a chandelier but it's not a chandelier for candles that's a chandelier that all those little triangles are actually little spouts that bring up wicks to burn oil so you pour oil in that thing and you'd have like 20 different flames coming from that that sounds dangerous doesn't it you don't want to hit your head on that and flying hot oil goes everywhere inflating it'd be great go ahead this is an image that we have looked at several times in the past one of those beautiful about 1770 images of a kitchen or a larger kitchen space where they're doing prep work and yes we have a lighting device go ahead to the next slide right there it is up there at the very top the birdcage is open the bird is out we know about that don't we and there is the candle lantern again almost seemingly pulled right out of one of these previous paintings even that idea that there's sort of this reinforcing wire that goes around about one third down that's just like one of the other images we see this kind of lantern oh aaron you're taking me all over a place again there we go there we go um one more slide and one more oh yeah this is one of those beautiful trying to help people in shadow yeah one of those beautiful um images where of course the the artist is just loving this sort of light now this is a paper lantern she's just got a candle and she's taken this paper it's got if we could see the image up close which unfortunately i didn't zoom way in on it you can see that it's been pinned together you can actually see the pin that pins this uh piece of paper all together and she is a ballad singer she's performing at night probably on the street just doing street entertainment and this is what she's using for her lighting device and we can see even you know the the um the weave of the cloth and everything else the artist is just amazing on this and i love the lighting device all by itself it's just great i like that one see it's very similar in fact it may be the same artist but this is somebody i think dawes did the the engraving cut on this this is a wooden lantern you don't see those very often in paintings but of course we have references to them and this one i believe actually has we can't tell it could have a candle in there i think from the look of the back of the lantern that it might have an oil lamp in it uh it's hard to say but yeah she's doing oysters there this has got a couple of different lighting devices in it the boy has a candle stick and he's not holding it very well and then there's a lantern on the floor again oh just almost like the other ones boy that picture looks just like the ones we have anyways go ahead yeah this one's early uh 17th century and there is a a lantern all the way up there by the ceiling one like we've seen many times before again this is early early early what's interesting is this the lantern design goes goes way back and if we kept on going back another 100 years 150 years we looked at bosch or bruegel paintings we would find the same lantern showing up again and again also the gentleman there that's by the fire he's lighting his pipe look just over his pipe and that is an oil lamp i don't know what it's sitting on it looks like it's going to fall into the fireplace whatever that is whatever's going on there that is an oil lamp right there so there's multiple lighting devices hanging around here in this kitchen and are we close to the end oh uh yeah try one more to make it yeah yep we're through it there you go lots and lots of lighting devices candle oil we didn't have any paintings of rush lights that's another lighting device that you would have in that time period um it's amazing how how an item like that again we don't think about it we you know it's like well every room has lights duh they're in the ceiling or you know on the sides and you flip the switch and everything happens it's never like that in the 18th century and lighting is is an important part of you know everyday life and in this case almost all those paintings sort of like the light was part of the painting so it's they're thinking about it in a whole sort of different way and candles are amazing little devices here um and you know we even take our candles for granted most of the time we're using or let's see some kind of paraffin-based wax which is very very inexpensive compared to all these are beeswax candles they might have used tallow candles which is like the suet which melts really really easily not only do we take the wax part of the candle for granted but the wick the wicks that we have today are specially made they're they're braided and they're braided so they're just a little bit tighter on one side than the other so the candle wick automatically as it burns bur tips over and kind of goes down on itself and then automatically sort of takes care of itself we never have to think about going along and snuffing which is not putting out a candle but cleaning up the candle to make it so it doesn't gutter uh we never have to do that ever they had to do it all the time candles just didn't take care of themselves someone had to come along every 10 15 minutes and fuss with them so that's you know that's taking you know for granted our candles here's an oil lamp can you see it very well there you go uh an oil lamp and this is made very very specially it's similar say like in that one last painting where there was the it was a ceramic sort of like a cup with a little uh spout on one end and um it was ceramic so it can take the heat this one is made specially it's based off of an an example in the winston-salem historic winston-salem book it's probably early 19th century and it's especially made so that the instead of having that little that little spout on one side it's actually got a little tube and it's right off the edge doesn't actually touch the edge of the pottery here and that's so that as oil goes up and then it kind of drips off the end it goes back into the the little saucer here instead of flowing down the outside of the oil lamp which is not a very good design so you definitely want to make one like this and that's how the nice historic ones are are betty lamp boy this is black iron so it's really hard to see but this is made exactly the same way except out of iron there's a little internal spout where the wick comes up and that spout is not at the very edge but just inside the edge so that again oil doesn't drip around the outside edge of our oil lamp and just drip on the floor which they did all the time they had very very sometimes just very primitive uh cruisy lamps and other uh sorts of lamps which were really just sort of like a just a basin um with a little edge a little spot where you would put the wick and you just pour oil in there and it's dirty yeah i don't know if you can see this one you can see it it's like smoke is coming off of it it's it's a very dirty light because it it's well it's just the way oil burns when when you burn it in this sort of fashion and maybe if i fuss with a little bit again it's one of those you gotta fuss with everything yeah if we bring it so that it doesn't have so big of so much wick there there you go it's pretty nice um but again it's going to go out after a while it's going to burn away the wick and i'm going to have to you know fuss with it i'm going to have to keep moving it around so i'm going to take a break here for a minute i could talk about this stuff forever and a day i'm going to let aaron jump in get some uh yeah awesome donations um and a lot of them are candle related questions so if you can see what you're writing oh yes i can i can moonlight's coming in so i can i can see what i'm doing gotcha okay first off i want to welcome and namiyama to the mctavern members thank you so much for those who don't know that's a it's our youtube membership page basically it's a way to support us every month um you get emojis you get a tag by your name shows up in the chat if you can see people in chat you can see their names have a tag by him it's just a way to support us just a fun way to do so um carol haycock thank you where did most of the candle molds come from max are cool thank you were there ghost stories told in the 18th century is that more of a 19th century thing a still jane thank you thank you for educating the masters here on this channel keep up the awesome content thank you appreciate that mike crook thank you any tech tips for wax cleanup all those candles make for some occasional wax drips i'm sure thanks for your how-to videos and tips on making candles that's a throwback that is macs are cool again thank you um was lighting usually was lighting usually using wax candles and tallow for fuel only did they also use read lights when did people start using whale oil nathan kirk thank you love the apple pie episode this week keep up the good work as always yeah that was a fun one yep it was um urosis arctos i guess sorry about that um was whale oil in much use during this time or was it used in later centuries welcome to kismeti sorry if i'm butchering that to the nutmeg taverns tavern members appreciate that i'm glad he has to read that ryan can't come back soon enough uh catherine bradley thank you did they use rush lights in colonial america and if so did they go out of use plain jane thank you loving the episode all is right in the world again now that i've caught the live stream keep it up hey erin howard were there her what were historical fire extinguishers like that's all i got for now and yeah everyone um let's let's light the stream let's get to a thousand that's a tradition that's right we gotta we got we have to do it here's one more yes just to get it speed and style tony yeah do they actually burn candles at both ends for more light or is that just the same uh both hands okay uh that's funny um so where did the candle molds from uh come from actually if we went back to that one dieter rosenstein dietero's image where the tin smith was working and he had the the oil lamp on the ceiling you could i believe you can see um other sorts of lamps and candle molds in that same sort of image so uh yeah that's it cannibals are being made usually out of tin sometimes you'll even have cast pewter molds made out made for casting candles um ghost stories so there's a question about did they tell ghost stories in the 18th century and actually actually was thinking about this because of monday's video which i don't want to give mondays a video can i do that yeah so i'm gonna spoil monday's video ah um also before i forget uh watch for a special special special halloween based live stream next week on wednesday maybe wednesday as of right now we're planning on a special wednesday um so be ready for that uh ghost stories so what's happening here is that there's the 18th century is one of the reasons why we study the 18th century is because certain things are happening in the 18th century that are very very sort of groundbreaking and or or it's the roots of groundbreaking right so 18th century is the classical age of enlightenment when there's this great change in ideas around scientific thought and empirical thinking and all this good stuff and these ideas of ghost stories and superstition is kind of being kind of driven out and suppressed at least from the top down by you know thinkers and colleges and all that good stuff so i think that you see that somewhat suppressed maybe in published works but i think still in day-to-day life that is um happening right it's it's certainly not being it's like disappearing and you almost see that sort of a resurgence of this romantic thought and these kinds of stories happening in the 19th century and even toward the end of the 18th century this idea of the gothic novel or gothic sort of stories start to show up in that late 18th century early 19th century and it's probably a reaction to all that enlightenment thinking so there's things happening you know societal wise philosophy wise that maybe we're not paying attention to all that much so ghost stories yeah and especially i think some of those things come through from the 17th century and they bleed on through and again that's something i'll probably talk about next week um wax cleanup yeah so obviously for like us today things like ice cubes work well on fabric where you can get it really cold and then you can flake the wax off other people probably have special fixes for cleaning up wax you know you put these guys in the in the oven and sort of you know very low temperature and melt it all and pour it off but that's kind of dangerous because you get all this molten wax in your oven so you want to put that on don't ask me for advice on wax cleanup that's all there is to it just don't do it lighting read lights someone else mentioned rush lights so rush lights are a thing in great britain in the 18th century uh and that's sort of a lamp that has a sort of this like this weighted pair of pliers that holds a reed usually a three-sided reed that you peel the the edges off of so it becomes a little bit more absorbent you dip those in oil and then you you know put them and they i don't have an example of we used to sell them but i don't have a one anymore that i can get my hands on right this second but anyway uh it's talk about i mean if this kind of oil lamp is inefficient and smoky and terrible brush lamps or reed lamps are horrible they're just terrible they don't last for very long and i've never seen it work out well and i don't think they ever really caught on in north america to any great extent um whale oil usually whale oil lamps the design of the lamp itself or the burning burner mechanisms very different from just standard oils and you can kind of tell the design and those typically show up in the early 19th century and in the mid-19th century much more common so i don't think you were seeing whale oil per se all that much in the 18th century i could be wrong on that one fire extinguisher if you've got a bucket of water or a bucket of sand that's your fire extinguisher and burning the candle at both ends that's just the same because you can't do it it doesn't work at all it's terrible i mean you turn the candle sideways and the wax drips out and no it's just a saying because it's something you can't do there we go before we go any further i wanted to grab the patreon names i missed them last week because sometimes i forget and we're shooting the video yeah that's right well we shot a video today but i remembered it today so uh patreon people i gotta fold in two weeks i'll read them fast but that doesn't mean i don't appreciate you guys uh patreon crossfade um i like that name kyle wayne three claude brown carrie greenwalt charles rose wingate uh my writing is bad um bowel claw i know i've i know i knew it it sounded right when i wrote it down and now it looks wrong uh shannon segovia paul wright d m rotate row talk or maybe that's the way it's supposed to be there um elrode the ninth vanessa wilkinson opus jano rockford uh catherine leach linda walsh scott void abby berg uh wow you guys are all brand new uh folks that support us on patreon a big thank you to you new people and all you from the past did you say something aaron i said thank you oh yes and thank you yes it is amazing how you guys help us out so again thank you patreon is one of those places where you can just sign up to help us out a little bit of a little bit per month and there's a link in the description section have any questions for me before i run on to more stuff so one that keeps popping up is carbon monoxide yeah at the time was that a thing with you know no ventilation and you're just constantly burning candles kind of like how this room is right now um i don't i don't think i've ever seen very many references to it and most likely because we're used to sort of very weather-tight houses they had very unweather-tight houses so i'm not sure that they had all that much problem with carbon monoxide because of the waves like open fireplaces they pull more air out of your house than heat they put in and you know it's pulling it through well there's nothing there's no wind there's no weather seals on your windows or doors or your walls or anything you're like living in a sieve so um no i don't think they had any problem with it i have more donations i guess we can do that yeah see where i leave off okay here we go denise maloney uh pierin thank you so much thank you love the candlelit live stream it's a little spooky in here yeah just a little bit uh blake morris thank you you've spoken before on regulations surrounding the quality of bread but were there any regulations at the time for how candles were made slash used to prevent big city destroying fires that's a cool question right um no lonnie no no i think seasonal mugs question mark the deer one we'll see about that yes yes go ahead david dinelli thank you great subject i love my candle mold from you guys i think this weekend i'll be making uh candles excellent right on i'm lvva thank you says thanks for the videos and wendy carr says thank you for making us all smile yeah thank you so glad you're enjoying the live stream i'm oh i always have fun and regulations about candles good question and quite likely but i don't know of any off the top of my head they certainly did have regulations though about things like fire in different places you can't build houses of wood you have to build them a brick london fire all that good stuff right that's true um and then there were things like fire insurance and and fire engines and that some of that is in benjamin franklin's work and his autobiography so yeah there's uh they're concerned about fire and what to do about that and the question about mugs not make tavern mugs the ones with the the stag um yes stay tuned things are coming soon um and this time we're gonna try our best to make sure they don't run out right away we really we're trying hard we're making those mug people work double that's like that mug of the month of the month club mug of the month so no matter what let me go back and try to touch on all these sort of lighting is one of those again it's got all these great little things you don't know about it little tricks like that you know the wick is special today and that's a 19th century thing it wasn't true in the 18th century so i uh alluded to the the glass in that one in that one candle lantern right so this is not glass but this is a sheet of transparent horn and this candle lantern here actually has a horn worn glass in it so what happens uh why would you have a lantern that used something like this instead of glass number one glass is expensive in this time frame and horn is well you can see that right horn is it's flexible it you don't it doesn't break if you dropped your lantern the horn wouldn't break at all and if you put it up against the flame if you put glass up there uh it would it would break because you'll get a thermal differential so the glass will expand where it's hot it won't expand everywhere else and then it breaks and then you've got broken glass which isn't very helpful so in a lantern glass isn't the best thing and so what will happen with this horn is if i left it over the flame for a long time yes so it would gather and it would start to actually burn this and this horn is is actually sort of condensed hair is what it is and so it'll start to smell like burning hair but it won't catch on fire and it um it will you know resist damage so uh horn is what's showing up in a lot of these lanterns it's also flexible so we can put it in that round lantern if we really want to we can you know put the pieces in there and it's made from cow horn that there's like white horn or transparent horn that we cut the horn open it sort of delaminates a little bit we boil in oil or we get it hot in some other method and then we can start to flex it and turn it into different things we can flatten it out into sheets we can turn it into horn combs we can make horn pains like this and of course you've heard of well the name lantern means the horn is actually in the word right so and something like a horn book you might have heard of a horn book which has a sheet of horn to protect the letters underneath so it's a little learning device that would have the abcs or some other learning thing and then it would have this little sheet of glass a sheet of horn over the top of it so it doesn't get messed up you might even be able to write on it and then rub it off i don't know so uh that this this horn materials is amazing stuff uh we do actually offer sheets just big enough to use in our lanterns so that's our barn lantern there this is a this is a normal one with a standard clear glass in it we don't offer it with the horn already in it um there's the uh tin lanterns which most of the lanterns there you saw were metal some of them were like this with punched tin in them let me put a candle in there there's one right back there very very very popular and one of the reasons why these guys are popular again they're very light very inexpensive and there's no glass to break they don't put out a whole lot of light unless you open up the door but they're very decorative even with the door closed you generally would keep these with the door open if you wanted to get any light out and also the candle will burn a little too rapidly if you have the door closed at least unless it's colder weather so most of the time you had the door open you'd only close it when you were walking or you know you were worried about wind blowing out or something they did yes well no i thought you were done no no i can talk for hours um glass fronted again similar design now remember the the crime uh picture where the the guy was you know they were sword fighting well there is your you can't see it very well because it's a very this is an old piece but it's a dark lantern this one was made i believe it's got yes it's got an oil lamp on the inside it's a little reflector so that it reflects the light forward this one has a magnifying lens in it which is typical of 19th century pieces if you go 18th century a lot of times this might just have plain glass in it and there's the dark slide in it so you can see that that way you can cover it up you're the night watchman you want to sneak up on somebody or maybe you're robbing someone and you want to sneak up on it and then you can open it up scare everybody with your super bright candle or in this case uh oil lamp this one is probably mid 19th century but very very similar to all the 18th century illustrations i mean right down to the handle in the back and you know the way this is i love that exactly though awesome yes so um that is that style lantern very hard to get to to make that here is a standard four-sided lantern this is the frontier laner so the very first thing the very first thing that that when my father started the company in 1973 he started it with lanterns and one of the first things that we offered that we made was a wooden candle lantern and this is the actual exactly the same design and for years and years they were made either by my grandfather my father and they would be signed on the bottom those don't exist anymore no not new ones um and for a while the company name was even frontier lanterns until it was changed to james townsend son and then then to townsend so lanterns that's something we've been studying for a long long time uh let's see that's what some people were asking about like oh what's like the logo and stuff is the lantern coming right from all that yeah the lantern was in the in the logo of the business from like the beginning for a while the sign looked a little different but then we changed the sign design um at some point i don't even remember where the you know the time how it was probably in the mid 80s when the sign design changed but there was a lantern on it even before that yep um let me see what i got here um sorry i've been trying to i'll keep talking while he is looking so here's another uh great it's kind of fun item you know it's like you think about you know you today we might pop a little flashlight in our pocket uh this is your your pocket uh candle lantern you know how am i what am i gonna do uh a little tin box has a little uh candle holder that folds in there we can put the candle in there and then uh shut it all up boy it just barely fits there you go pop it right in your pocket have light wherever you need to go you could probably definitely fit your flint and steel in there so that you can strike your own light maybe you know if it's dark 10 or 15 minutes later you'd have a candle going it's just that easy and we also have this isn't an item that we currently offer but we have unfortunately i most of the pieces in our collection are kind of packed away right now because we've moved them recently but this is um a reproduction of a betty lamp so again one of those where this is many times there would be a double version of this where you'd have exactly the same sort of pan that fit on the inside of this so again as the oil ran up the end here and dripped off the edge it would be caught by the pan underneath it but really typical hanging oil lamp here's something yes i i someone asked about this earlier and i forgot about it but um match solutions um you know wood with molten sulfur hardened um what about that the idea of of uh obviously the strike on box matches yeah exactly so hold on a second this is getting a little crazy there the there were lucifers or wooden matches spirals and some other tools to move light around in that 18th century time period again matches per se not really i mean those i think are like 18 30s 1840s if i believe probably or relief i'm not sure about exactly how those surf sulfur matches worked or if they work to any great extent but they also would just use a sometimes what's termed a match in the 18th century is just a very very thin wooden stick that you would move flame from one spot to the other so it didn't have anything on the end at all you would just light it on you know in your fire in your fireplace or on another candle then you could go around and uh light things up so sometimes a match in that time period is just ustick that's all it is um someone was wondering about the idea of hold on let me see if i go find it again like uh alternative for candles like like on the frontier like if you didn't have you know the things you needed what would be a right well uh if you don't have candles which is i mean that's going to happen um a lot candles are expensive so again you're gonna use them as little as possible can you know candlelight or you know artificial light because well you know you're just gonna go to sleep when it gets dark but obviously there are times when you're going to want to light up your your location a lot of times they're in the house they're just dealing with whatever light comes out of the fireplace and you get used to being in the dark um we're not used to that but i've been in other places in the world where people just walked in the dark all the time and it didn't seem to bother them whatsoever and it's something that we said how can you i mean this is where people like going up and down a mountain without any sort of external light at all and there was hardly any moonlight and i was astounded didn't didn't even phase them you know so they probably may do it a lot less than we would consider you you know doable at whatsoever but if they do want to they're going to use some sort of an oil lamp so they're not going to use like lamp oil or whale oil or anything like that they're going to use animal fat you know bacon grease whatever that is left over in the house to light their their house now it might be smelly yes it might fill the place with smoke but they're used to smoke anyway coming out of their fireplace i can guarantee you they're used to smoking doesn't again doesn't phase them a bit but they're going to use leftover cooking grease someone was asking about if rush lights were still prominent yeah i talked about rush or reed lamps earlier and again i believe that's more of an english thing and that by the time that is coming over to north america just not very popular and i'm not sure whether our reads weren't as good or whether we just had other i just don't i don't know but that is what i believe is true uh even though there are 18th century examples of rush lamps you just don't see that many of them when did they use reeds soaked in grease again that's the the same that same idea and this uh these soaking the reed uh parts uh it's probably a 17th century thing and that's again a little bit out of the time our time period um and i don't have a lot of great references to it so it's one of those things that like i know about them question is do they really fit into our time period in our place um super good question yeah let's see what else we got um a couple donations just catch up um techkayla says you said it right the first time i don't know what to mean but thank you for the donation and then matthew h thank you any plans for an outhouse on the homestead you know i'm wondering about outhouses and uh homesteads in the time period and whether or not they actually use them oh you think that's not even a thing i think they just went out let's hope they went out i mean if you look at the dutch paintings from the 17th century it doesn't even look like they went out oh it's just like that any whatever right so it's like interesting um paintings um so yeah i don't um are we going to do one uh we should yes there yes as long as that was the easiest way to use it as long as no one's uses it yeah just for fun we can't be doing that boy he's just he's not really some people are not willing to get into the 18th century spirit ah not not in this way i like i like the cantaloupe room i'll go i'll go with that um let's see what else do we got um i saw something a second ago and then a lot of comments it slipped away oh here this this might be kind of interesting um did the native americans use candles often i don't think they ever used canvas and i think they were very much the kind of people that said why do we need all this artificial light the campfire does fine and if you can't live with that then you know i don't know there was a that when you when you read about how the native americans are reacting to what um you know the settlers their lifestyle their schooling they were very much you know well we've adapted ourselves to this this lifestyle and there's no reason that we would need to have these other things like candles or whatnot they of course they did say yes you know we want those brass and copper cooking pots yes we want steel knives and tomahawks but for the most part the rest of their living arrangement they were plenty happy with and really didn't have any any need for other things right where do people get their oil from merchants in the nearest town so most of the oil is just straight up animal based i mean sometimes you'll they'll talk about sweet oil which is olive oil in the time period so that's being imported obviously and not growing any olives here but you're gonna not you're definitely gonna relegate that to something like cooking and eating using it as a salad oil so the oil that you're using here is just waste animal fat oil so you're going to be using muscle fats again bacon grease the other oils that come off of you know excess oils from cooking not very many plant-based oils really are showing up to any great extent so today we have all this like soybean oil or corn oil or all that but that is extracted in very very modern methods they didn't have anything like that at all and sometimes you'll see references to coal oil so oil just basically seeping up out of the ground and they would you know it would might come up onto a pool of water and they would absorb that and and you know take it off you don't hear about it you're being used too much though um a couple donations and we probably start wrapping it up um midwest minuteman thank you says uh i think we need to have a nutmeg tavern fan convention captivity 91 thank you was kerosene used in lanterns that early in the early 18th century thank you for the donations a convention well we'll see what happens with the whole world we've definitely we could do with the virtual convention there we go yeah we've talked about a little bit you know after that yeah the pandemic yeah big meetup or something happened right um definitely on the in our mind space and what was that second one uh oh yeah kerosenes yeah so kerosene uh is definitely a petroleum-based thing and again 18th century that's 1700's oil is a 19th century thing especially petroleum oil is what i meant to say petroleum oil stuff and kerosene that's all like you know mid 19th century and later again if you want early 19th century the the replacement there is whale oil and then of course less expensive um maybe not better but less expensive kerosene shows up and that's what people are going to be moving through and they keep you know moving to that next technology so it's like oh we're you know burning animal fats now we're burning whale oil again animal fats now we're burning kerosene now we're burning gas you know coal gas or whatever where they would like cook coal and then you know off gases burning natural gases so we have these all this different stepping stones to technology uh and they keep replacing each other just like today you know incandescent lamps and then new kind of light bulbs and a new kind of light bulbs who knows what we'll be lighting our world with next like uh shocking um uh fireflies or something who knows who knows what okay so two things before we head out we are about 50 likes away from a thousand likes let's make it happen yeah end the week on a high note and uh then i have one more donation john talley does the thank you does the fireplace light up the whole cabin was dark outside or would you need more lighting if you were reading the fire we had today yes it lit the whole thing i had poor john sitting next to the fireplace almost caught on fire it was i was probably five feet away from the fire and i could feel it depends on how big the fire is yeah if you depends on what you were doing but yeah you would get used to reading from uh something like that it's not it's not that difficult until you get old like me and then you can't read in dim light anymore so uh remember again thanks patreon people uh make sure to watch that patreon feed in the next hour or two and i'll try to get that special thing posted um watch all you folks watch next week let's say watch out for a wednesday we'll try to you know give you a community post a heads up post it early a special live stream very different very different and it sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun so watch out for that one and we'll do our standard friday one monday's cooking episode should be great yep you'll see that huge fire outside yeah so that ought to be a fun one so lots of stuff in the pipeline uh we're always just doing wild and crazy stuff one more donation cdk says ha thought you were done see that kind of trick on me maybe next time i won't read it good good thank you for doing that to aaron for me because he couldn't even didn't even turn the camera on himself so you know i have to i have to do the whole thing right here but i love it it's been a great time in the nutmeg tavern by the candlelight and uh it's uh we always have fun coming into the the tavern calming down a little bit you know the rest of the world forget it let's just sit down have a nice drink and enjoy history and just the little things sometimes you know this little things bring it to life candlelight is one of those things thank you for coming along today with us as we enjoy the nutmeg tavern i hope you have a tremendous weekend again i want to thank you for all your amazing support if you just watch our videos commenting liking them right or whether you support us with patreon super chat merch whatever buying mugs all those things they make it possible for us to continue making videos i wouldn't make them unless you were there watching them so again thank you for all you do and have a great weekend [Music] do [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Townsends

Views: 341,574

Keywords: Nutmeg Tavern, townsends, history, historical food, 18th century, colonial, jon townsend, john townsend, historic site, historical lifestyle, colonial lifestyle, food storage, candles, beeswax candles, lanterns, oil lamps, colonial lighting

Id: Q_qUYM4Oc_4

Length: 58min 8sec (3488 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020