Before Electricity, Canadian Winter Nights Started Before Five — How Did People Live After Dark?

Subscribe to the channel    / @dominionnotes   In December 1946, an Alberta farm woman lit a coal-oil lantern at 4:15 and carried it into a barn full of hay. The sun was already down. So who decided when the dark would finally lift for families like hers, and what did it end up costing you? The story starts with tallow candles made from the autumn butchering, and a Nova Scotia doctor named Abraham Gesner lighting a new kind of lamp in Charlottetown in 1846. It runs through a crowded theatre and a show made entirely of light. It passes the gas lamps that lit Toronto's streets for the people who could pay for them. And it reaches an October night in 1910, when 8,000 people stood in the dark in a small Ontario town, waiting for one man to press a button. For most Canadian farms, the wait went on for decades after that. How the light finally reached them is only half the story. The other half is printed on your power bill. Canada's taxes, banks, mortgages and power lines all have histories stranger than they first appear. Subscribe to Dominion Notes as we uncover how the systems modern Canada takes for granted were actually built. #CanadianHistory #CanadianElectricity #historyofmoney