improving the lighting on City streets might have been seen as serving a wider
social purpose and to have been a response to broader needs that (unlike the
Corporation’s financial difficulties) were anything but temporary. These
broader purposes, along with the profit to be made, ensured that what began as
a modest scheme in 1694 to help solve a short-term financial problem not only
continued long after that problem was solved but expanded considerably. Over
the following decades, the provision of street lighting in the City was signifi-
cantly transformed, as it was to be in other parts of the metropolis and indeed in
cities and towns all over the country.^139
The full story of the various street lighting devices that gained patents in the
late seventeenth century and the conflicts, mergers, and rivalries formed
around their exploitation in the City of London is too complex to recount in
detail.^140 In the 1670 s and 1680 s several patents were obtained on a variety of glass
reflectors to be used with candles, but the important improvements involved
new oil-burning lamps. Richard Reeves was apparently the first in the field, ob-
taining a patent in 1675 for a glass reflector that could be used with either
candles or an oil-burning wick. Anthony Vernatty claimed much later that he
had first suggested the possibility oflighting the streets with oil lamps. He took
out a patent on a ‘new sort’ of lamp in 1682 , and over the next seven years sought
royal patronage and the interest of the City by setting up tests ofhis ‘glass lights’
in royal palaces, and in Piccadilly and Cornhill. In James II’s reign he pro-
posed a scheme under which he would light all the City streets and pay half the
profits to the benefit of the Orphans’ Fund, but his ambitions were frustrated by
the Revolution, when, as a Catholic sympathizer ofJames II, he thought it
prudent to leave the country for a few years. He was to return and pursue his
lighting schemes, though never successfully—no doubt more as a result of his
politics than the quality of his lamps.^141 Several other inventors and groups
of projectors entered the field at about the same time as Vernatty. In 1684
Edward Wyndam was granted a patent for a new oil lamp, though its inventor
was probably Samuel Hutchinson. Another patent was granted in 1684 to
Hutchinson himselffor a lamp with a convex lens—a bull’s eye glass that had
the effect of concentrating the light—and he attracted a group of backers. Yet
another group formed around Edmund Hemings, who had developed what
212 Policing the Night Streets
(^139) For the adoption of oil lighting in other places throughout the country, see Falkus, ‘Lighting’,
257 – 71.
(^140) See De Beer, ‘Early History’, 315 – 21 ; Falkus, ‘Lighting’, 255 – 7 ; Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, iii.
52 – 60. There is a great deal of material bearing on the negotiations over the lighting contract in 1694 in
the journal of the Common Council, the repertories of the Court of Aldermen, and the minute book of
the committee of Common Council appointed to ‘improve the revenue and estate belonging to this
City’, 1692 – 6 (CLRO, 2 vols.). The conflict for and against lamps, and for and against particular lamps,
was also carried on via a flurry of broadsides. See, for example, A Proposal for Enlightening the Streets in Lon-
don and Westminster, according to a bill prepared for that Purpose(n.d.); The Case of the Convex Lights(n.d.); Proposals
about lights for the City(n.d.); Reasons... against the passing of a Bill for the sole use of Convex Lights(n.d.); Petition
[with respect to the lights] (n.d). Most are among the collection of broadsides in the Guildhall Library.
(^141) Jor 56 , fos. 199 – 200.