46 Fun Facts About Candle

Paraffin wax, the most common candle wax, is a by-product of what?

Petroleum refining leaves paraffin wax behind when lubricating oil is purified, so the oil boom of the early 1900s turned candle wax into a cheap leftover.

Roman dipped candles were made from beeswax and which animal product?

Tallow is rendered beef or mutton fat, and it stayed the everyday candle fuel for centuries because it was cheap, even though it smoked and gave off a foul, acrid smell.

Which consumer-goods giant began in 1837 when a candlemaker and a soapmaker merged their businesses in Cincinnati?

Procter & Gamble made sense as one firm because candles and soap both start with animal fat, and the hog-butchering centre of Cincinnati had plenty of it.

Which flamboyant pianist made a candelabra on the piano his stage trademark?

Liberace took the idea from A Song to Remember, a 1945 film about Chopin in which a candelabra stands on the piano, and added one to his own act two years later.

What does a candle wick use to draw melted wax up into the flame?

Capillary action pulls the melted wax up the wick, where the heat turns it to vapour, and it is that vapour, not the wick itself, that actually burns.

Roughly how hot is a candle flame, on average?

About 1,000 °C is the average, and the yellow light comes from tiny carbon particles that are heated until they glow before they burn away.

Trick birthday candles relight after being blown out because the wick is laced with which metal?

Magnesium flecks in the wick catch from the ember that still glows after the flame is blown out, and they burn hot enough to relight the wax vapour.

Which harder, brighter-burning candle material did Chevreul patent in 1825 after separating it from animal fat?

Stearin made candles that were hard and burned cleanly, and it later rescued paraffin, which melted too easily until some was blended in.

Which SI unit of luminous intensity is roughly the light given off by one ordinary candle?

The candela takes its name from the Latin for candle, and when it was defined in 1948 it was sized so that an ordinary candle still gives out about one candela.

The Victorian unit 'candlepower' was defined by the light of a single pure candle made of what?

Spermaceti, a wax from the head of the sperm whale, became plentiful as whaling boomed in the late 1700s, and it burned brighter and stayed firmer in summer heat than any candle before it.

Which English king is said to have measured time with six marked candles that each burned for four hours?

Alfred the Great, his biographer Asser wrote, found that draughts made the candles burn down too fast, so he had a lantern built of wood and ox-horn shaved thin enough to see through.

Which Shakespeare character cries 'Out, out, brief candle!' on learning that his wife is dead?

Macbeth answers the news by calling life a walking shadow and a tale told by an idiot, 'full of sound and fury', the line that gave William Faulkner the title of a novel.

Elton John's original 1973 'Candle in the Wind' was a tribute to whom?

Marilyn Monroe is addressed in it by her birth name, Norma Jeane, though lyricist Bernie Taupin has said the song is really about fame and could as easily have been about James Dean.

Where did Elton John give his only public performance of 'Candle in the Wind 1997'?

Westminster Abbey heard it at Diana's funeral on 6 September 1997, and he never sang those words in public again, going back to the 1973 original at his concerts.

In which country do people float candlelit baskets called krathong on rivers each year?

Thailand's Loy Krathong means 'float a basket': the little raft carries a candle and flowers away downstream and, Thais believe, bad luck goes with it.

Candles on a birthday cake are traced to the 18th century in which country, also home of the Christmas tree?

Germany's Count Zinzendorf marked his birthday in 1746 with a cake as big as the oven would take, with holes cut in it for a candle per year of his age and one more in the middle.

By tradition, what makes a birthday wish come true?

All the candles go out in one breath, the superstition runs, and the wish has to stay secret, because telling anyone is supposed to stop it coming true.

How many branches does a Hanukkah menorah have?

Nine: one for each of the eight nights and a ninth for the candle that lights the others, which sets it apart from the seven-branched menorah of the ancient Temple.

What is the helper candle on a Hanukkah menorah called?

The shamash, Hebrew for 'helper' or 'servant', is set on a different level from the other eight, marking it out as the working candle that lights them rather than one of the night's lights.

In France, Candlemas is known as la Chandeleur and is traditionally celebrated by eating what?

Crêpes are flipped with a coin held in the other hand, since landing one cleanly is meant to bring a prosperous year, and their round golden shape is said to recall the returning sun.

Which American folk holiday grew out of a German Candlemas tradition?

Groundhog Day came over with German settlers in Pennsylvania, who believed a sunny Candlemas meant more winter and handed the forecasting job, a badger's back home, to the groundhog.

Which scientist's Christmas Lectures for young people were published as The Chemical History of a Candle?

Michael Faraday told his young audience there was no better open door into science than a burning candle, then used one to explain combustion, gases and even breathing.

Candlestick charts, now standard on stock-market screens, are credited to Japanese traders of which commodity?

Rice dealer Munehisa Homma, trading in the 1700s, usually gets the credit, though Steve Nison, who brought the charts to the West in 1991, thinks they took shape a century after him.

The candlestick is one of the six original weapons in which 1949 board game?

Cluedo, sold as Clue in North America, was devised by Anthony Pratt at home in Birmingham during wartime air raids, when he recalled the murder-mystery games played at parties.

In which US state was candlepin bowling, with its tall thin pins, invented in 1880?

Justin White's Worcester game gives three balls a frame, and nobody has ever bowled a sanctioned 300; the record is 245.

The oily candlefish was traded along 'grease trails' by peoples of which region?

The Pacific Northwest's coastal peoples boiled the fish, the eulachon, down into a rich grease so prized inland that the trade routes it travelled were named after it.

Karl Duncker's 'candle problem' asks you to fix a candle to a wall using matches and a box of what?

Thumbtacks are almost a decoy: the answer is to empty their box and tack that to the wall as a shelf for the candle, which most people miss because they see the box only as a container.

What did Glucksberg's 1962 version of the candle problem find about offering cash prizes?

They made people perform worse: the group racing for cash took longer on average, and the usual explanation is that a reward narrows the focus just when a fresh idea is needed.

What does a Roman candle firework do?

Ejects a series of stars from a tube because the tube is packed in layers: each star sits on its own small propellant charge, and a slow-burning fuse works its way down the stack.

On 13 December, girls in Sweden wear a crown of candles in honour of which martyr?

Lucia, legend says, carried food to the poor through dark tunnels during the Roman persecutions with candles on her head to light the way, which is why the girl chosen to play her wears the crown.

A Paschal candle's five grains of incense stand for what?

Christ's wounds are recalled by the five grains, set in the shape of a cross and pressed in at the Easter Vigil just before the candle is lit from newly blessed fire.

On an Advent wreath, what colour is the candle lit on Gaudete Sunday?

Rose marks the third Sunday, Gaudete, Latin for 'rejoice': a pause in a penitential season, when even the organ music and flowers given up for the rest of Advent were allowed back.

Johann Hinrich Wichern's first Advent wreath was built from what?

An old cartwheel gave him a ready-made ring: he fixed on a candle for every day until Christmas Eve, because the children in his care kept asking when Christmas would come.

The Kwanzaa candle holder, which carries one black, three red and three green candles, is called what?

A kinara takes its name from the Swahili for candle holder, and in Kwanzaa's symbolism it stands for roots: the African ancestors from whom those celebrating descend.

Which poet's 1920 poem 'First Fig' popularised the image of a candle burning at both ends?

It opened her collection A Few Figs from Thistles, a scandal in its day for its frankness about female desire.

A popular legend credits which Protestant reformer with first putting lighted candles on a Christmas tree?

Martin Luther, the story goes, was walking home one winter evening when he saw stars twinkling through the evergreens, and wired candles to a tree to show his family the sight.

Edward Johnson, who first put electric lights on a Christmas tree in 1882, was which inventor's business partner?

Thomas Edison's partner wired 80 red, white and blue bulbs to the tree by hand, and the whole tree revolved as they shone.

What has research shown the residue from 'ear candling' actually to be?

Candle wax and soot are all it is: testers who burned an ear candle in the open air, nowhere near an ear, cut it open and found exactly the same residue inside.

From 1990 to 2019, an annual June 4 vigil in Hong Kong's Victoria Park remembered the victims of what?

The Tiananmen Square crackdown of 4 June 1989 was marked there by a sea of candles every year until 2020, when police banned the vigil for the first time in 30 years, citing the coronavirus.

A chandler was originally a candle maker; which trader is still commonly called a chandler today?

A ship's supplier kept the name because candle dealers had branched out into oil, soap and paint, the very stores a vessel needed, and the word came to mean a dealer in provisions.

What was the Church's 'bell, book and candle' ceremony for?

Excommunicating a sinner was its purpose: a bishop and twelve priests held lighted candles while the sentence was read, then dashed them to the ground.

The word 'candle' goes back to a Latin verb meaning what?

To shine, in Latin candere, also lies behind the word 'candidate', because Romans running for office wore togas whitened until they gleamed.

Which zone of a candle flame is the hottest?

The near-invisible outer veil is hottest because there the wax vapour meets fresh air directly and burns completely; the bright yellow zone is starved of oxygen.

What mainly determines the height of a candle flame?

The diameter of the wick sets how much melted wax reaches the flame, which is why a tealight's thin wick gives a tiny flame and an oversized wick gives one that is too tall and flickers.

Roughly how much light does a typical modern paraffin candle give out?

About 13 lumens: an old 60-watt incandescent bulb gives roughly 800, so it would take around sixty candles to match a single light bulb.

Which metal was once used as a core in candle wicks to keep them upright, until health fears ended the practice?

Lead cores were given up by American candle makers under a voluntary agreement in the 1970s, but they kept turning up in cheap imports until the US banned them outright in 2003.