Fuel
Fuels used for oil lamps depend on such variables as the location, time period and perhaps the reason for the lamp's use; ceremonial use of lamps for instance may require a particular oil or fragrance to be used. The main fuel in Western nations was olive oil in ancient Mediterranean cultures, though extracts from fish, crude fish oil, nuts, and cheese were also used. In much later times whale oil was favoured for its cleaner burning flame. Oozing crude petroleum was also used. The fuel was poured into the fuel reservoir via the pouring hole in the discus.
Castor oil was used by the ancient Egyptians. In Africa, carrot oil, peanut oil, mustard oil and nettle oil are used. Indian lamps, especially for use in puja, almost exclusively use ghee as fuel.
Among other fuels used have been coal oil and paraffin/kerosene in paraffin lamps (also called kerosene lamps and coal oil lamps). Oil lamps can use many other fuels including jathropa seed oil and biodiesel along with waste vegetable oil, soybean oil, canola oil, hemp seed oil, sunflower seed oil, and olive oil.
Lamps were usually put in lamp holders when in use, partly to avoid the risk of fire. They might be fastened to a wall by a nail or a wooden wedge, hung suspended from brackets, placed in a candelabra, placed in niches in the wall, put on lamp stands of different shapes, or carved as part of stone lamp pillars.
Read more about this topic: Oil Lamp
Famous quotes containing the word fuel:
“Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)