Currently reading a novel from the 1800s and it occurred to me that every indoor event described at night is lit by only candlelight/fire of some kind. Are we to assume our eyesight would have been much much better in the dark before electricity? And has evolved to be worse in recent times? I’m thinking of things like a ballroom scene at a party. My minds eye pictures like the Pride and Prejudice movie where every thing is lit like it would be today. But in reality a room lit by candles (even if it’s a chandelier) seems still so dark. Maybe it’s a simple thought, but just thinking about how much darker life must have been then and yet it seems like there was plenty of night life happening regardless. Thanks!
Comments
It’s funny you use the word ‘nightlife’ because that makes me think of clubs, which are very poorly lit, and people still enjoy going there.
It’s difficult to read by candlelight but things like oil lamps existed and are surprisingly good. We hunted a lot of whales for lamp oil.
Candles were actually expensive for most of human history. So you would have a lot more oil lanterns and most light would just come from a fireplace.
Even in modern times, humans don’t actually need that much light to see. Our night vision is fairly poor by mammal standards but still far from terrible. And people back then would be more used to maneuvering with less visual information.
Yes.
We live in societies with a lot of light pollution and our eyes are adjusted for brightly lit scenes.
If you go outside at night in the city and look up, you can hardly see any stars because of how much light pollution there is. Also, just trying to see anything in the dark is a real pain.
But you head out somewhere rural away from any artificial light source, give your eyes time to adjust, and at night, on a clear sky, there’s enough starlight and moonlight to let you actually see reasonably well for it being night time.
However, this doesn’t mean you can see remarkably well at night. Just that our night sight was better before because we had less light pollution then so our eyes were more specifically adjusted for low light conditions. Today, we use so many displays, and have lights on everywhere we go, during the day and night, that our eyes are now adjusted for very high light scenes.
The ability to see in the dark in the middle of nowhere was better in generations past than it is today.
I’m pretty sure our night vision is functionally the same now as it was then, but you might be underestimating the value of candles if you use enough of them. A lot of interiors of the time were painted glossy white, and with chandeliers and candelabras, it would be light enough for a modern person to get around. Not to mention that gas lighting (unrelated to the psychological manipulation) started appearing around the year 1800 if not earlier, so they did have brighter options in limited cases too.
If you weren’t staring at a screen all the time, you’d realize your night vision is pretty damn good unless it’s a new moon.
Your eyes can adapt to some pretty dark conditions, it just takes a while. If you didn’t have access to a light source at all other than the sun, the gradual setting of the sun and darkness of night wouldn’t be as devastating as you think. I recall that fully adapting to darkness could take up to 30 minutes if you’re just dropped into it. But if it happened gradually it should be a better experience. With access to light sources at all times today, we don’t really go into that.
HOW you light a room matters. When I’m using a flashlight (a phone is fine) a night, I like to point the light at the ceiling. If it’s painted white (which is common) it’ll reflect the light really well and help light up a whole room at once, rather than just pointing it forward and seeing a bit of what’s in front of you while everything else is black. It’s less light blasting back at your eyes which are adapted to the dark already, and the whole area is better lit which is just more convenient.
Watch the Stanley Kubrick period movie Barry Lyndon. It’s set in the 18th century and Kubrick went to great lengths to reproduce what you’re talking about visually. There is virtually no artificial lighting used in the filming. He even borrowed some ultra-fast (usable in extremely low light situations) lenses from NASA for filming candlelit scenes.
That isn’t how evolution works. It takes thousands of years for evolutionary pressure to be felt for enough of a population to die before passing on their genes, thus preserving the survival of the fittest characteristics.
Being better able to see at night didn’t make humans more capable of reproducing. In organised societies, with individuals choosing their partners irrespective of their eyesight, we will not evolve to preserve specific vision characteristics. Just look at the sheer number of people who are short-sighted and require glasses. If we were individualistic creatures, the hunters with bad eyesight would have long since died out before reproducing, but in human society where food can be obtained without having to hunt, people with bad eyesight will still thrive and pass on their genes.
To answer your question, our night vision today is very much the same as people in the past.
We can perceive objects quite well in low light. We’re not as good at it as other mammals, but even a partial moonlit night is quite bright. A candlelit room is plenty of light to see, especially when the rooms are designed to be open spaces that can reflect lots of light, as opposed to narrow rooms with lots of alcoves and corners that block light. The chandeliers are an excellent example of a method of illuminating a room.