For generations the candle held supreme place, though its cost made it something of a luxury; doubly so if wax was substituted for tallow in its composition. But toward the close of the eighteenth century, when the action of combustion had begun to be better understood, attempts were made to improve the wicks and burners of oil lamps. In 1783, an inventor named Leger, of Paris, produced a burner using a broad, flat, ribbonlike wick in which practically every part of the oil supply was brought into contact with the air, producing, therefore, a steady flame relatively free from smoke. The flame, while broad, was extremely thin, and its light was consequently radiated very unevenly. Portions of a room lying in the direction of the long axis of the flame were but poorly lighted. To overcome this difficulty, a curved form of burner was adopted; and this led eventually to the invention of the circular Argand burner, the prototype of the best modern lamp-burners. TALLOW CANDLE AND PERFECTED OIL LAMP Stated in scientific terms, the problem of the ideal lamp-wick resolves itself into a question of how to supply oxygen to every portion of the flame in sufficient quantities to bring all the carbon particles to a temperature at which they are luminous. It occurred to Argand that this could be done by giving the wick a circular form like a cylindrical tube, giving the air free access to the centre of the tube as well as to its outer surface. In his lamp the reservoir of oil was placed at a little distance from, and slightly above, the tube holding the burner, connected with it by a small tube much as the tank of the modern "student lamp" connects with the burner. In this manner a fairly good lamp was produced,--a decided improvement over any made heretofore,--and when, in 1765, Quinquet added a glass chimney to this lamp a new epoch of artificial lighting was inaugurated. "This date is of as much importance in artificial lighting as is 1789 in politics," says one writer. "Between the ancient lamps and the lamps of Quinquet there is as much difference as between the chimney-place of our parlors and the fireplaces of our original Aryan ancestors, formed by a hole dug in the ground in the centre of their cabins." A little later Carcel still further improved the Quinquet lamp by adapting a clock movement that forced the oil to rise to the wick, so that it was no longer necessary to have the burner and the reservoir separated by a tube. This was still further improved upon by substituting a spring for the clockwork, the result being a lamp of great simplicity, yet one which gave such results that it replaced the candle as a unit for measuring the illuminating power of different sources of light.