TRI DUC ENGLISH - First Headlamps TRI DUC ENGLISH Reading Practice: First Headlamps A Before electricity, light was tricky business. Flames cast limited light, are vulnerable to winds and weather, and can lead to disaster. Making fire portable and dependable was so difficult that lights on moving vehicles were hardly ever considered. B The early trains traveled only during the day. The tracks were too dangerous during the dark of night, and passengers wanted to see where they were traveling anyway. In the late 1830s, railroad traffic became heavy enough for freight trains to delay passenger trains. To avoid these delays, railroads started running freight trains at night. Horatio Allen’s 1831 innovation, the “Track illuminator,” was suddenly in demand. It was a pile of pine knots burning in an iron grate that sat in a box of sand on a platform car. The car was pushed ahead of the locomotive. The illuminator did not cast much light, but it warned of the approaching train and was the best technology available. C In 1841, some trains used an oil lamp backed by a curved reflector, an improvement, but oil lamps blew out easily in the wind, including the wind generated by the movement of the train. At about the same time, Schenectady and Troy Railroad trains displayed a whale oil lamp positioned between a reflector and a lens about twelve inches high; it threw light up to 100 feet ahead of the train. Although this was an improvement, the braking distance the trains required was more than the 100 feet of track that were illuminated. In 1849, a calcium lamp was developed that threw light 1,000 feet and lasted four hours; however, the only railroad company to use it was Camden and Amboy. Limelights, which were used to light theater stages on both sides of the Atlantic, were considered too intense for trains. Eventually, acetylene, which did not extinguish in the wind, repl...