The word "flambeau" means "torch" in French. The plural of flambeau is flambeaux.

A "domino" is a long, loose hooded cloak. New Orleans flambeau carriers wear dominoes.

A "link" was a hand-held torch made with pitch-pine or tow that was used to light a person's way through city streets before better lighting eventually became available. The word link entered the lexicon in the year 1526, and novels by Charles Dickens and others refer to "link boys" in London who clamored to be hired by carriage drivers. Iron cones were mounted near the front gates or doors of English houses to provide link carriers with a place to extinguish their torches before coming inside.

"Naphtha" is the label, first used in the year 1572, that was given to many different flammable hydrocarbon mixtures. The original source of these hydrocarbons was the tar pits and petroleum seeps which have dotted the world for millennia.

In 1783, when the Argand lamp was invented, a race began to replace vegetable oils, animal fats, and whale oil as lighting fuel. Aimé Argand was a Swiss physicist and chemist, and his new lamp was able to emit as much light as seven candles. We still know this lamp today, with its hollow wick and glass chimney, and it represented the first real advance in lighting technology in thousands of years.

The electric arc light, then powered by batteries, was invented in 1809 by Humphry Davy.

In 1823 James Caldwell brought "town gas" to New Orleans, making New Orleans the fourth city in the United States - after Baltimore, Boston and New York - to have gas street lights.

The "limelight" was invented in 1826, and it produced the brightest light then known. In a limelight an oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of lime (calcium carbonate) to produce a brilliant white light. The first uses of limelights included theatrical stage lighting and shipboard spotlights.

In 1834 a turpentine/alcohol mixture called "burning fluid" was invented. It became widely used even though it tended to explode in Argand lamps. In 1839 a more satisfactory turpentine derivative called Camphene was developed. Camphene was safer than "burning fluid," but it did not produce as bright a light.

In 1854 Kerosene was invented and the process of distilling it from coal was patented. The name "Kerosene" was selected because it sounded similar to Camphene and it was hoped that lighting fuel customers would rapidly switch to the new fuel. Kerosene also became known as "coal oil."

In 1856, a group originally organized in Mobile to parade on New Year's Day inspired the creation of the MIstick Krewe of Comus in New Orleans.

In 1857 the Comus organization coined the word "krewe" and staged the first formal Mardi Gras parade in New World. The parade was created as a night pageant, and the illumination of it was an essential creative element. The costumed members of the Mistick Krewe marched on foot, and the parade was illuminated by links.

The 1858 Comus parade included two carriages, one of which is shown in contemporary sketches to carry a spotlight. That spotlight may well have been a limelight or an electric arc light. Both of these lights would have been readily available in New Orleans, a great port city and then a theatrical center of America.

In 1859, two years after Comus first made its appearance on the streets, Edwin Drake, who was an agent for the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, drilled the world's first oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. George Bissell, the founder of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and the man who more than anybody else was responsible for the creation of the world's oil industry, spent several years in New Orleans and had been principal of a high school and then superintendent of public schools here until ill health forced him to head back to his home in the north in 1853.

Bissell's oil well ignited a decade of frantic activity by oil refiners to produce a lighting fuel which duplicated the desirable qualities of Kerosene. These refiners often dumped gasoline and other lighter, more flammable, petroleum fractions into creeks and rivers as waste. However, some of those highly-flammable and dangerous distillation fractions made their way to the lighting-fuel markets. By the end of the 1860s, unscrupulous lighting-fuel merchants had made the purchase of safe lighting fuel problematic, and, as in the days of "burning fluid," stories of exploding kitchen and parlor lamps setting fire to homes were not uncommon.

In 1870, to connote safety for the company's home lighting fuel in a market ridden with potentially explosive competing fuels, John D. Rockefeller chose "Standard Oil" as the name of his petroleum company.

Until the advent of Kerosene and its petroleum-based competitors, all liquid lighting fuels had been burned with a wick of some kind. The availability of the newer, more volatile fuels led to the invention of a new kind of burner that could be used for both illumination and food preparation. Called a "vapor burner," this new burner boiled the liquid fuel and burned a fuel/air mixture. The most well-known vapor burner still in use today is the Coleman stove burner.

In 1872, two inventors from Brooklyn, New York patented a vapor burner designed for use as a street light. Comus adapted these street light burners for use in its parades by fastening the burners, together with a fuel can and a reflector, to a carrying pole, and thus the New Orleans Carnival flambeau was born. Only months after the new burners were patented, the 1873 Comus parade used the new flambeaux.

In the mid-1870s Comus purchased another set of more technically advanced street light burners and upgraded its flambeaux. Then in 1881 the Krewe of Proteus purchased stove burners with which to make its flambeaux. All New Orleans vapor-burner flambeaux introduced since 1881 have been made with stove burners. And vapor burners are well known today to anyone who uses a liquid-fueled Coleman stove.

The search to develop more effective and affordable artificial light has been a continuing quest of mankind for thousands of years. The history of New Orleans Carnival parades has an interesting juxtaposition with the relatively recent rapid developments in artificial lighting. For more information about lighting technology and Carnival, see The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin and The Mistick Krewe: Chronicles of Comus and His Kin by Perry Young.

For more about Mardi Gras and flambeaux, click HERE.