Promoting 'liquid fire': gaslight and the American imagination
Date
1995
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
"Promoting ’Liquid Fire'" is an essay about gaslight, and about how nineteenth-century Americans made sense of it. The essay maintains, above all, that making sense of gaslight proved a greater challenge to consumers than historians have recognized. The innovation reconstituted abiding notions of perception, but it did so gradually rather than rapidly; its adoption was nothing if not uneven. And anxiety remained a palpable presence within individual households, long after gaslight had been invited indoors. ☐ For the simple reason that technology nearly always manifests itself in objects, the essay seeks connections between the idea of gaslight and the conductors of gaslight, gas chandeliers or gasoliers. These may well be said to have eased America's transition to gaslight. Gasoliers embodied style and functioned as domestic art forms. Precisely how they were marketed by manufacturers and portrayed by observers is pivotal to any discussion of gaslight that aims to judge the nature of its arrival on American doorsteps. ☐ Taken together, the artifacts and written accounts make plain that gaslight generated physical as well as psychological discomfort. Still, the larger point is not merely that innovation disrupts ways of being in the world, but rather refashions them altogether. More often than not, it does so in places and upon artifacts that remain, mystifyingly, unexamined.