A Madness of mine.
I made her of mustard
And mulberry wine.
Walt Kelly, "Lines Upon a Lunar Tune Arune." Songs of the Pogo, 1956. Online: https://curmudgeonlylibrarian.wordpress.com/tag/walt-kelly/
Are you afraid of the dark?
Most children are, at some point. It's considered harmless (even rational). People usually grow out of it. If it becomes pathological -- if it interferes with your daily (or nightly) activities, it's considered a phobia. And like most fearful things, it has lots of different names: achluophobia, scotophobia, lygophobia, and most commonly nyctophobia. Even if you're not a nyctophobe, darkness can be inconvenient. Sometimes you need to be able to see.
How can you see in the the dark? Easy: You turn on the lights. Something people have been doing, one way or another, for a very long time.
The earliest known artificial lighting was in the form of oil lamps, perhaps as early as 70,000 BCE.1
Stone age oil lamp from Katmai National Park and Preserve.
The earliest street lighting was probably in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia.2 The ancient Egyptians used floating wicks for their lamps,3 and the Chinese,4 Greeks and Romans certainly used lighting in their cities.5 According to Rossotti, "The first compulsory street-lighting seems to have been in 1367 in Paris," and "in 1415 every London householder was required to show one lighted window during the winter months."6 It is possible that London may have had some kind of street illumination as early as 1429.7
For centuries torches, oil lamps, and even open fires were used to light streets. The first gas lighting was introduced in the 18th century.8 The first electric street lighting was the "Yablochkov candle," named for its inventor, Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov (1847-1894). It was a kind of enclosed arc lamp (in an arc lamp two pieces of carbon are electrified and an electric arc is formed between them; the arc lamp was invented by Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) sometime between 1802 and 1809). Incandescent bulbs were first used for street lighting in 1879 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK,9 and of course incandescents remained the international standard for many years. Common street lighting systems in use today include high-intensity discharge lamps, induction lights, and LEDs.
But there are places where gas lighting is still used (visit New Orleans some time), and incandescents have some uses, too (especially in extremely cold climates -- see http://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/cut-your-heating-bill-half-heat-person-not-house-video.html).
And then there are arc lights.
Electric Arc Light over San Diego Barracks in 1886
The arc light was the first practical electric light. It wasn't pleasant (the light is blinding), but for industrial uses (factories, docks) it was considered a tremendous improvement. Arc lights are still used today in certain niche applications (carbon arc lights are still used to test colorfastness in fabrics).10 But arc lights were once used for street lights -- and a lot more often than you might expect.
I'm talking about Moonlight Towers.
Moonlight tower near Victory Grill, Austin Texas, c. 1946. https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/highsm/28200/28224v.jpg
These structures (which look amazingly like radio towers or oil derricks) were up to 300 feet (90 meters) tall, and could carry up to half a dozen arc lamps. The light was described as "about the same that would be expected from a half moon."11
The first city to put up a Tower seems to have been Paris in 1877.12 Wabash, Indiana, was apparently the first city in the United States to erect a Tower, in 1880.13 In 1881 San Jose, California erected a 237 foot (72 meters) Tower, which produced 24,000 candlepower (or about 300,000 lumens -- roughly the output of 200 old-style 100 watt incandescent light bulbs). By 1890 there were 235,000 arc lamps being used for street lighting in the US; by 1905 there were around 700,000.14
At first they were regarded as miraculous, and cities invested heavily. At its peak, Detroit had 122 Towers, illuminating 21 square miles (54 square kilometers) of the city. But there were problems. Towers:
"... it turned out, were neither entirely brilliant nor entirely successful. The problem with a singular light source is the singularity: The light comes, inevitably, at an angle. The powerful illumination ... could be easily blocked by anything that got in its way, be it a tree or a building or a human body. People complained about the disorienting shadows cast by the arc lights ... Some found the towers to be eyesores, each structure braced with a chaotic network of wires and posts... Animals ... were unaccustomed to the newly extended daytime. Chickens and geese, unable to sleep in this new state of omnipresent light, began to die of exhaustion. ... Humans, too, found the high-slung orbs to be as disorienting as they were ethereal.... Foggy evenings, combined with the air pollution of a newly industrialized America, could thrust all of [a city] into effective darkness ..." (Garber 2013).Maintenance costs were high, the area illuminated (except in ideal urban conditions -- flat, lower density towns without multistory buildings) inadequate. By the 1920s in most places the Moonlight Towers were being dismantled (or falling down, which they seem to have done a lot). But there was one noteworthy exception: Austin, Texas.
Austin bought 31 of Detroit's Towers in 1894. Seventeen of them survive, and they are going to be around for quite some time. In 1993 Austin restored the Towers at a cost of $1.3 million and celebrated in 1995 with a festival. They're listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Austin loves its Towers.
There is supposed to be a historical marker at the base of the Tower at the corner of West 9th and Guadalupe Street in Austin, but the most recent Google Streetview (May 2016) only shows where a plaque might have been mounted. I haven't found any photographs, Apparently it said:
This is one of 17 that remain out of 31 towers erected 1894-95 and in continuous use since. Their carbon arc lights then illuminated the entire city. Now mercury vapor lamps provide beacons for many miles on roads and airway, from dusk to dawn. Austin is said to be unique in this dramatic method of lighting.
The site of the missing plaque? Note the two short concrete "legs" that apparently once supported a historical marker. The pole to the left is the base of the Tower. Source: https://www.google.com/maps/place/30%C2%B016'18.5%22N+97%C2%B044'42.8%22W/@30.2717621,-97.7452816,3a,15y,117.8h,82.71t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1srejfmFvU59ATowxEzUSgpA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DrejfmFvU59ATowxEzUSgpA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D57.807529%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d30.2718!4d-97.7452333
This whole topic leaves me with so many questions. What usage, traffic, and housing patterns did the Moonlight Towers create? Are they still visible? Were there changes -- pre-Tower, Tower, post-Tower -- in how people interacted with their environment? And were those chickens really dying of artificial moonlight?
Technology changes, and that's to be expected. But it's disturbing to realize that whole areas, whole urban geographies were modified by a technology that is now almost completely obsolete -- and hardly anybody knows about it.
1 http://www.epalladioartworkshop.com/OILLAMPS/HISTORY/index.htm
2 George, A.R. April 2015. The Isum and Hendursanga: Night Watchmen and Street-lighting in Babylonia. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 74(1): 1-8. Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/19705/1/JNES74_1_8.pdf
3 https://mandoxegypt.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/the-menorah-its-origins-in-ancient-egyptian-temple-lamps/. See also Rossotti, Hazel. Fire: Servant, Scourge, and Enigma. Mineola NY: Dover Publications, p. 59.
4 Needham, Joseph and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. 1985. Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing. Cambridge University Press.
5 It's often said that Roman cities had no street lights. However, there were certainly night-time processions, and there are architectural features (niches built into walls, in particular) that would have provided at least some light in urban areas. The Romans even had a special term, "lanternarius" for the slave whose job it was to keep oil lamps lit in front of a villa. See Rossotti, Hazel. Fire: Servant, Scourge, and Enigma. Mineola NY: Dover Publications, p. 59.
6 Rossotti, Hazel. Fire: Servant, Scourge, and Enigma. Mineola NY: Dover Publications, p. 59.
7 http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/member/barton-henry-1435
8 Thomson, Janet. 2003. The Scot Who Lit the World: The Story of William Murdoch, Inventor of Gas Lighting. Janet Thomson (self published).
9 http://www.nhsn.ncl.ac.uk/resources/archive/naturalists-of-the-north-east/john-hancock/correspondance/letter-802/
10 http://www.edisontechcenter.org/ArcLamps.html
11 Moonlight towers: light pollution in the 1800s. Online: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/01/moonlight-towers-light-pollution-in-the-1800s.html
12 Ibid.
13 http://www.chronicle-tribune.com/archives/wabashplaindealer/wabash-lighted-the-way-years-ago/article_58063626-6584-579d-986c-16582a93175d.html
14 Moonlight towers: light pollution in the 1800s. Online: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/01/moonlight-towers-light-pollution-in-the-1800s.html; see also Garber, Megan. Tower of Light: When Electricity Was New, People Used It to Mimic the Moon. The Atlantic (March 6, 2013). Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/tower-of-light-when-electricity-was-new-people-used-it-to-mimic-the-moon/273445/
It does suggest interesting ideas for plotlines of mysteries set in the region/time frame, or changes by way of larger-scale investments made in alt history ideas.
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