The 19th century opened in the flicker of tallow candles and closed in the glare of Edison’s electric lamp. Between those two events inventors and manufacturers developed a wonderful assortment of progressively more efficient lighting devices, burning a variety of fuels. Loris Russell records with scientific attention to detail - backed up by nearly 200 illustrations - how these lamps were made and used. His text is interspersed with accounts of his own experiments with the fuels and mechanisms of earlier generations. Russell drew on his own large collection of lighting devices and on the collections of museums and other individuals for his study, and documented his research with Canadian and United States patent papers, trade catalogues, newspapers, magazines, memoirs and books. This is a detailed story of that technological revolution in North America and while told in the setting of the Canadian home, the developing technology of lighting was common to both sides of the border. A Heritage of Light is of equal importance to collectors and historians in the United States and Canada.