The price of light has fallen by more than 99.9 percent since 1700
the gist
Light used to be one of the most expensive things a household could buy. Before modern electricity, people relied on candles, oil lamps and fires, which needed constant fuel and produced smoke and little light. Over the last two centuries the cost of artificial lighting dropped drastically, first with gas lamps, then with kerosene, incandescent bulbs and finally LEDs. Economic historians who have tracked the price of lighting in terms of the hours of work needed to pay for a given amount of light find an enormous decline. Measured this way, the price has fallen by more than 99.9 percent since 1700. The shift made evenings productive, reduced fire risk and changed when and how people lived and worked. It is a striking example of how a single technology can transform the cost of something we now take for granted.
so what
It puts everyday electricity in historical perspective, showing how much human effort used to go into basic illumination. The collapse in cost also helps explain why modern societies can afford to light their cities, homes and workplaces around the clock.
fun fact
Before gas and electric lighting, many households relied on tallow candles, which smelled and smoked.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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