How much time do you need to work in order to have light in your house for one hour? It’s not something I’ve really thought about before, but a long quote from the book “Enlightenment Now” put it in very interesting terms.
“A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.”
Can you imagine having to work for fifty hours just to get enough oil to burn a single lamp for one hour? It’s so hard to comprehend.
It reminds me a lot of how Stephen Fry consistently worked “calories” into his Great Leaps Years podcast (which you should absolutely listen to if you haven’t already). In his case, he talked about the effort required to gain a single calorie, and how it’s grown incredibly easier over the years. We think of calories in terms of food, which is very important, but they can be broken down to essentially signify a unit energy, as in “how many calories is my computer using right now?”.
As light has become cheaper to use, so have calories become far cheaper to acquire and consume. Take a look at the lights around you right now, and be thankful for how little work it took for you to be able to power them up.
