Yes, our Industrial Revolution was powered by coal (which also produced gas) but I thought America had a good coal industry too? Various kinds of oils were used for lighting from early times. The Romans used olive oil and beeswax, sesame oil and nut oil have also been used. Leviticus 24:1 contains a reference to olive oil lamps. A kerosene lamp was invented in 1849 and by 1857 seems to have overtaken the place of whale oil in America.
fanuzzir wrote:
Where did England get the energy for the world's first industrial economy? I think the reason that there were less English whalers than American is that England had a coal industry.
Choisya wrote:
I don't know what the figures are about the number of whales caught respectively by the English and Americans Pmath, although we whaled in different waters - the North Sea and Arctic oceans so that would also account for the lack of meetings on the high seas. Brits are definitely more 'reserved' than the Americans, the more so in times gone by and I would imagine that our superiority, if that was the case, would have been due to the centuries of naval supremacy which the UK had in the world. The British navy is the oldest in the world (and still has the most tonnage) and ruled the seas at this time. This presumably was the reason behind the 'metropolitan superiority' of British seaman. When Melville wrote MD America had not reached the dizzy heights of power and wealth which it has today and the UK still ruled 25 per cent of the world so I guess that Brits did feel superior to these American upstarts, and most other nations too. The times they have a-changed
pmath wrote:
Choisya, what do you think of this passage?Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
