Greatest Invention

One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest the wick. We don’t know who first realized, many thousand years ago, that fire could be isolated at the tip of a twisted piece of cloth and steadily fed, through capillary action, by a reservoir of wax or oil, but the discovery was, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in “Disenchanted Night,” “as revolutionary in the development of artificial lighting as the wheel in the history of transport.” The wick tamed fire, allowing it to be used with a precision and an efficiency far beyond what was possible with a wooden torch or bundle of twigs. In the process it helped domesticate us as well. It’s hard to imagine civilization progressing to where it is today by torchlight. ~ Page 231 Epilogue (The Big Switch - Nicholas Carr)