Extended history of wrought iron lighting

The wrought iron light fixture is a staple of many homes and has been for a very long time. Whether it’s the wrought iron pendant light, the wrought iron rustic chandelier, the wrought iron sconce or some wrought iron light fixture, it is a type of lighting that goes well with nearly any home and can provide many different kinds of light for many different situations. But, to better understand how wrought iron lighting might be good for your home today, let’s take a look at how it came to be and the sorts of developments that led to such sturdy lighting in homes. The wrought iron light fixture itself is a development hat started in the sixteenth century and really started to catch on in the nineteenth. By then, it had become the staple of many artistic homes everywhere and a lot of the nobility and other land owning classes had at least one wrought iron light fixture in their homes. But in actuality the wrought iron light fixture goes back a much longer way and has its roots in lighting developments that stemmed from much older sources. To better understand this, you have to try and take yourself back to a time much different than our own. For most of living and recorded human history, there was no such thing as being able to walk into a room and turn on an electric light. That is one incredibly recent development and it only followed on the tail of thousands of years of struggle. Struggle with what, you might ask? Darkness, of course. For most of our history, total darkness was simply the other half of the day and it was considered incredibly dangerous, much more dangerous than we give the night credit for today. In modern times, we mostly associate the night with nightlife and night jobs with a little crime occasionally mixed in. Our movies depict the night as a time for clandestine activities of some sorts but we’ve mostly lost the utter dread that night used to instill in people. The truth was that, for most of human history, when night came there was very little we could do to light it up. We were at the mercy of the great darkness and all of the terrible things we perceived might happen within it. It was the domain of chaos and dangerous elements, vicious animals and criminals who used it so that no one could capture them.
The advent of lighting in fighting the darkness
Thankfully, we weren’t alone in this fight much as it might have felt like it. From the very beginning, we humans had one thing to fight the night that vexed all of us. We had fire and all the ways we could harness fire to better light our way. At the very start, fire was quite literally all we had. We stationed ourselves around campires and slept in shifts, watching for dangerous elements in the wilderness that might prey on us. This lasted for many thousands of years until we came to a point in our development when we were able to build larger cities with much more sophisticated infrastructure. Critical among this infrastructure was public lighting that made many areas of the cities safer at night than they might have been otherwise. It wasn’t a foolproof system but it was the best we had. Inside of our homes, we mostly kept candles to keep the domestic darkness at bay. Richer families and groups in homes during this early classical period might have had lamps or lanterns but those weren’t readily available to most common peoples. It wasn’t until the start of the sixteenth century that we began to build wrought iron light fixtures that combined the tensile strength of metal with a large abundance of light giving materials, such as candles, to really begin the era of mass illumination. This was a huge development but it still took a few hundred years to catch on, slowly trickling into homes as it became more and more affordable. Today, many homes have wrought iron light fixtures that look beautiful and still help us fight the darkness like they did long ago.