Forum: Author Hangout

Before kerosene or whale oil, the oil would have been olive oil in olive-producing countries, and animal fats like lard or tallow everywhere else. Lard smells like cooking bacon.

If you couldn't afford lamps or candles, the only indoor light would come from the fire.

The benefit of beeswax candles is that the candles would burn differently, so with a normal candle, you'd often have to pour out the hot wax, or refill the candles periodically, where with the beeswax, there's more air than wax, making that issue virtually non-existent (i.e. meaning there are fewer accidental fires or candles simply going out where there was too much wax.

So the beeswax were actually vastly superior in the long-term, as you can always write during the daylight hours (different candles for different times of the day). Even today, we have candles of all different dimensions, tall thin ones held in antique metal braces, so you could easily carry them through a house, antique brash ship's lanterns, so you could easily read the compass at any hour of the day or night, which also gave off a LOT of light, since they were SO big, and wider candles, where you could again tip and simply pour off any excess liquid wax, to replenish the other candles which had already burned down.

Kerosene was a primary lighting source until it was displaced by electric lamps.

Fun fact — it was primarily due to kerosene ('coil oil') that JD Rockefeller's Standard Oil was declared a monopoly.

They controlled something like 90% of kerosene production, and had vertical integration in exploration, refining, and distribution. They used this advantage to control much of the rest of the petroleum industry.

Ohio went after them first, and Standard of Ohio (SOHIO) was split off from Standard Oil in 1892 as a result of legal action in Ohio. The final blow came in 1911 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the trust busters in the Federal Government.

Out of that came Esso, Amoco, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, Penzoil and others. THAT is how big Standard Oil was.

Fun fact, kerosene was only made from coal tar for about a decade.

Fully aware, but I included that because it was mentioned above.

That's why "Coal oil" was synonymous with kerosene among the old folks.

oyster

They stopped making it from coal tar before the Civil War. I rather doubt that there's anyone still alive who actually used Kerosene made from coal tar.

Yes, of course. But I used it because it was still used when Ohio sued Standard Oil in 1892. Heck, it was still used in 1921, ten years after Standard Oil was broken up by the government. [Source]

It was a name used when I was a kid by my grandparents. It might've not been made from coal, but the name stuck, rather like 'Kleenex' or 'Coke'.

oyster

It was a name used when I was a kid by my grandparents. It might've not been made from coal, but the name stuck, rather like 'Kleenex' or 'Coke'.

In the UK you can still get coal tar soap.

AJ

In the UK you can still get coal tar soap.

That's wright....

I strongly suspect "coal oil" was so widely used, because it replaced the often terrible coal used in most fires. It would burn longer, but put off a terrible smelling smoke, and a mostly flickering, unsteady light, making reading virtually impossible. It would also frequently cause a wide variety of breathing issues, as we'd often have to stumbled outside, coughing and hacking, just to regain our breaths.

So they'd call it 'coal oil' as it replaced replaced the use of those
obnoxious coal fires (in the fireplaces, instead of burning actual wood). But coal fires were also dramatically much cooler than a regular fireplace of fireplace stove would be. So coal was helpful, yet more problematic all around.

I spent a LOT of time in the dark when young, actually having to use lanterns simply to find the old wooden outhouses in the older homes (mostly in the north), as the copper commodes of that day were largely impractical (as they couldn't be used to defecate), just pee.

By the way, in the Hamptons, De Coonings, the famous artist of the time, painted the outhouse bathroom of the home he was temporarily staying in (1980s?), so the value of the outhouse, was actually more valuable than the modern home it was attached to.

Absent government force keeping new competitors from entering the market, a monopoly that charges too much risks a flood of new competitors entering the market.

Or the quick development of something to compete with it.

Simple example that can be seen fairly recently is calculators. I am old enough to remember when even a basic 8 digit calculator that only did simple math functions was over $100. That was the cost of my first pocket calculator, almost $900 when adjusted for inflation today.

And companies like TI and HP in that era made bank. But within a couple of years, similar products started coming out of Japan and the prices dropped.

a monopoly that charges too much risks a flood of new competitors entering the market.

Has that ever actually happened?

AJ

The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for exploiting monopolies.

IIRC from my newspaper, a batch of insulin costing $10 to manufacture was priced at $1,500 until the US government introduced a $100 price cap, which Trump has now binned.

AJ

I do not believe that you remember correctly. Either that, or your newspaper reported incorrect information.

That's the question. In my defence, I remember the article as being strongly anti-Trump.

According to the internet, Trump hasn't changed the price cap on insulin.

A typical route to an exploitative monopoly might be a drug with only a small market that's reached the end of its patent. The creator sells the drug to another company because it's getting a low return on investment. The new company ramps up the price and gets away with it because it's not worth the while for other companies to go through time and expense of the approval process when they're only going to get a share of an already small market.

AJ

No, the normal tactic for a profitable drug with a patent about to expire is to get a new patent for a marginally different formulation.

That's if it's a big seller like antacids, but not for drugs with a small clientele.

AJ

Sadly, my persistent storage isn't large enough for my LLM to hold that level of detail.

I've just had a frustrating time trying to get Google to tell me but all it will give me with high profit margins are relatively new cancer drugs which still have plenty of patent protection.

I'll try to remember to scan my newspapers' medical sections because it's revealed as a 'new' scandal every few years.

AJ

Just to illustrate, even today, our family has several kerosene lamps scattered throughout the house, due to frequent power outages during hurricanes. They finally buried those power cables and, after repeated failures, so it's mostly a thing of the past now, yet we must have spent 50 years having those lamps at the ready, and even now, those are much easier to locate and access than the various flashlights we keep in dark closets, which are impossible to find in the dark.

But more importantly, both oil and Kerosene lamps were mainly used in either navigating large homes or when composing lettings or writing (as in novels) for MOST of history, as the flickering of candles makes them worthless for anything other than the bright light of day.

Something to remember when writing historical fiction. But adjusting the light was a simple matter, as they'd have a large dial, which you'd turn to raise and lower the wick, which determined their burn rate. Bright meant shorter periods of light, while lower meant longer periods with light. After all, who wants to be refilling kerosene lights when it's pitch black inside. But with judicious use, they could easily several weeks at a time.