Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [102]
In writing of it later, no one waxed poetic about the moon on the buildings. It was the looting that dominated people's thoughts. "We are in much worse trouble than we thought," commented a writer for The New Yorker. "In the blindness of that night, New York and America could see rage. We've been put on notice again. We may continue to ignore the terrible problems of poverty and race, but we must do so aware of the risks to both justice and peace."
The size of the machine that had become us had grown to be almost incalculable—some would say it was the largest machine in the world. Yet when it failed, societies were pervaded by the same feeling that those who had experienced the loss of gaslight in the nineteenth century had: of being vulnerable, of having given over control of our life. Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times after the 1965 blackout, imagined the ultimate fragility of the electric grid:
The end came on Sept. 17, 1973. It had been forecast by an M.I.T. undergraduate who had been running the law of probability through his computer.... The chain of events on that last day began at Shea Stadium at 4:43 P.M. when the Mets finished a scoreless ninth inning against the Mexico City Braves, thus becoming the first team in history to lose 155 games in a single baseball season.... Two minutes later, Irma Amstadt, a Bronx housewife, turned on the kitchen faucet and noticed that there was no water. Going to the telephone, she dialed her plumber, not knowing that at that very moment, in defiance of probability, 6,732,548 other persons in New York were simultaneously dialing telephone numbers.... Mrs. Amstadt's call was the one that broke the system's back.
The grid can be as fragile as Baker imagined it to be. In August 2003, during hot weather and high demand, transmission lines—as transmission lines will do when they heat up—expanded and sagged all over the grid. In Walton Hills, Ohio, sagging wires touched some overgrown trees beneath them, which began a chain of events that plunged 50 million people in the eastern United States into the dark. It was the largest blackout in American history.
18. Imagining the Next Grid
BY 1965, THE SAME YEAR as the Northeast blackout, New York artist Dan Flavin had turned to fluorescent light as the sole medium for his work. "Regard the light and you are fascinated—inhibited from grasping its limits at each end," he wrote in December of that year.
While the tube itself has an actual length of eight feet, its shadow, cast by the supporting pan, has none but an illusion dissolving at its ends. This waning shadow cannot really be measured without resisting its visual effect and breaking the poetry.... Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if you press an eight foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can destroy that corner by glare and double shadow. A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall.
For the next thirty years, Flavin used standard fluorescents in the available colors of blue, green, pink, red, yellow, and four kinds of white to explore everything about light save for its utility: the interplay of light and space, light and solids; the way colors mingled; the way glare and shadows dispersed solidity. He understood light as an endless and intricate medium for his work, yet he also knew that without the stability of infinite electrical connections, his works—like our own ordinary lights—were no more than heavy, inanimate objects made of glass and metal. "Permanence just defies everything," he once said. "There's no such thing.... I would rather see [my work] all disappear into the