From the l400s on, candle lanterns were used to light streets at night. The town crier, whose job it was to attend the candles, would call out the hour, “Ten o'clock and all's well,” to advise the populace the streetlights revealed no threat to their safety. Before these candle streetlights were invented and installed, people stayed indoors after dark for fear of assault, robbery, or attack. Only the brave, the aristocracy (who could afford candlelit carriages and servants to carry lighted candles ahead of them if they walked), and the criminally intent went out.

The First Candle Molds by M. J. Abadie

The first use of molds for candle making of which we are aware was in fifteenth century, in Paris, which was a center of wax chandlering at the time. In fact, the Parisian wax chandlers were the first to form their own guild.

However, these wooden candle molds could only be used to make tallow candles. Beeswax, when melted, is very sticky, and it couldn't be got out of the molds. Therefore, beeswax candles, made only for churches and the homes of the rich, continued to be made totally by hand. This labor-intensive process added much to the already expensive raw material. Even today, beeswax candles are expensive to purchase, which is a good reason to make your own!

Candle-molding machinery has been improved since it was developed in the nineteenth century. Rows of molds in a metal tank are alternately heated and cooled. After the molds are cooled, the candles are ejected by pistons. Spools of wicking material from the bottom of the machine are threaded through the pistons, by which they are inserted into the candle molds. As the cooled candles come out of the machine, the wicks are trimmed to proper length. Voilà!

All the World's a Stage by M. J. Abadie

Candles weren't just for churches, homes, and the outdoors. During the sixteenth century in Italy, theatrical performances — pageants and tableaux and musical events — began to be held indoors. These events were sponsored by the Italian aristocracy. Palladio's indoor theater in Italy used the common everyday light sources, including tallow candles. In England at the end of the sixteenth century, winter performances of Shakespeare's plays were performed in the enclosed Blackfriars Theatre, which was lighted mainly by candles.

Early Footlights

The earliest known definite description of stagelighting is by Joseph Furtenbach (l628), of Sienna. He describes the use of oil lamps and candles set in a row along the front edge of the stage, out of the audience's sight. Tallow candles were the common source of this light. Old prints show them affixed to crude hoop-shaped chandeliers (a word, incidentally, derived from “chandler,” or candlemaker). These could be hoisted aloft on pulleys from where they hung in lighted but dripping and smelly splendor. Theater designers applied gold decorations to the interior spaces to catch the reflections and make them glitter, thus giving us the contemporary non-word “glitterati” to describe theater and movie celebrities.

In l545, the Italian architect, Serlio, wrote a treatise in which he discussed the creation of lighting effects for the theater. One of his recommendations was to place candles behind flasks filled with colored water.

The Drury Lane Theatre

In Britain's famous Drury Lane Theatre, David Garrick masked the candle-footlights with screens in l765. By l784, when Richard Brinsley Sheridan was its manager, the Drury Lane's candle-lighting system was completely invisible to the audience, hidden by now familiar wings and borders.

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