These lights were known as Bengal Lights and were famous for burning very bright, very fast and very blue. They were in common use by armies and navies from the 1700's onwards.
Saltpeter is potassium nitrate - the stuff in our bacon and other preserved meats. It can be made with cow dung, cow urine, potato leaves and a few other household items. Your search engine will lead the way to a recipe. Your local black-powder shooter may know where to get some ready-made. Your local drug store may have it already.
Sublimed Sulfur is still used as a medical treatment for various skin complaints related to scabies and other parasites. It is sometimes known as milk of sulfur or flower of sulfur. Again, try your local drug store.
Antimony is going to be a bit more difficult to get hold of but it's in common use. Often as a flame retardant funny enough. It not safe to mess with so use it with extreme caution and do your research.
To make a Bengal Light:
"Take of nitrate of potassa ( saltpetre ), 8 parts; sublimed sulphur 4 parts, and antimony 1 part, and let them be well mixed in powder and beat firmly into a stout iron cup, and set on fire; and if a little camphor be added it is still more brilliant."
Don't take the word beat literally, what they mean is compress. Some forms of antimony have an explosive reaction to beating. You are unlikely to get your hands on those forms, but just the same... don't beat this stuff.
Powdered antimony, which this recipe calls for, is very bad for your health. Beating and pounding it is the perfect way to wind up breathing it. That would not be a good thing. Do your research.
Antimony was very common in the 1800's as an antimony pill, which was better known as the Everlasting Pill.
It was a pill of pure metallic antimony that was taken to relieve constipation and other bowel problems. Once it had gone through the digestive system it was retrieved and used again. And again. Entire families would share the same pill and they lasted for forever. They were often handed down as family heirlooms. So these everlasting antimony pills passed ( pardon the pun ) through many generations.
Going by period accounts, they worked too. Though it was speculated at the time that their success might have more to do with a lump of metal working through the intestines rather than any special properties of antimony. Luckily for the settlers, solid antimony is relatively safe.
But as with many of the how-to and DIY instructions from the period, this set of instructions for making a Bengal Light are quite dangerous. There are many reasons why people died young back then, and this is one of them. If you can't find an expert to help you do it safely, then just don't do it.
If you would like to find more benign projects based upon the how-to and DIY instructions of the 1800's, you can download the chapter this recipe comes from for free.
It has 98 pages of digitized do-it-yourself from one of the classic DIY books of the late 19th Century. It covers everything from medicine, to cosmetics, soaps, candy, herbal treatments, poisons for vermin, inks and about 300 other subjects.
If you find a DIY instruction that interests you let us know. Give it a try. Share it with us here at this blog. Anything that preserves this hard-earned knowledge is good for all of us.
Other chapters of historic DIY can be found at www.PioneerHandbooks.com.
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[Update: Anonymous has left a comment that these lights don't burn with a blue color, but burn white instead.]
Bengal lights were also known as blue lights, and did not burn with an intense blue color. The recipe listed here burns with a white flame. Other recipies, usually containing a copper compound, burned with a faint blue color. By the time of the American Civil War, the preferred recipe used by the US military was called "blue light" but any pretension to a blue color had been abandoned. The recipe includes an arsenic compound, either realgar or orpiment, which added to the brilliance of the white light.
ReplyDeleteExcellent! Thank you for the added information. I will update the post accordingly. Have you made Bengal lights or blue lights?
ReplyDeleteYes, I have made blue light according to the US Army's 1862 recipes: see YouTube videos entitled "Making Civil War-Era Blue Light" and "Burning Blue Light" to see what the signals look like.
ReplyDelete