Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [110]
Can a screen ever be a lamp? Will we take to light everywhere and centered nowhere? Light freed from the limits of the socket, the tube, and the filament? Or will we feel lost in the wash of abundance? Gaston Bachelard, who glorified the intimacy between a solitary soul and a slight, disciplined flame, valued the conversation between a thinker, a lamp, and a book because he saw the lamp as a "polestar" to the page: one reads, then looks at the flame and dreams. The dreaming and reading and thinking are intertwined, everything alive at once and encompassed within the reach of the flame. "The candle does not illuminate an empty room; it illuminates a book," he wrote, and both light and words possess their own distinct time: "The candle will burn out before the difficult book is understood."
If today one were to come upon a single light in a dark room, it would likely be the blue and white flickers emanating from a computer screen: our window, where the pages change and change again with the tap of a keystroke—the new sound of solitude—and the mind flickers along the jetsam of information—news, weather, work, a remark from a friend, advice, purchases. Tap, tap, tapping and gazing forward. There is no polestar to the page, for there is no distance between the light and the letters, both of which emanate from the screen.
Soon now, the faint tinkling of a broken filament will become another sound of another century. But for the moment, stubborn devotees of Edison's light remain: some are already hoarding incandescent bulbs; others are purchasing replicas of early electric lights. One lighting catalog, which offers a wide range of compact fluorescents and encourages energy efficiency, also offers for sale reproduction nineteenth-century bulbs. Their ornate carbon filaments—shaped like cages, or dipping and turning—are reminiscent of those the visitors to the Menlo Park lab might have encountered. They are as dim as all lights of the past: the 1890 Bulb and the Caged Bulb, 40 watts; the Victorian Bulb, 30 watts. And you will pay dearly for such small light. The advertising copy notes that carbon filament bulbs offer "the unique combination of ⅓ the light at 10 times the price of standard bulbs, but they make any fixture ethereally beautiful."
Such stubborn fondness for the age of incandescence is more than simply nostalgia. It's testimony to how much incandescent light has meant, and how perfectly suited it still seems to be, to modern life: the steady, brilliant light of a speeding century; light born of invention but also warm (or so it has come to seem), versatile, dependable, and economical (and in the end, democratic); light that brought with it an entirely new world full of gleaming things; light at a far remove from whaling ships toiling in frigid waters and the stink and fuss of kerosene. It's also true that unlike kerosene—which began as the oil people had dreamed of for centuries and, within a few decades, ended as a symbol of exclusion from the modern—"old-fashioned" bulbs still shed a more satisfactory light than anything yet developed to replace them. And perhaps they always will.
19. At the Mercy of Light
EVEN IF WE CONSTRUCT a more resilient, sustainable grid that can meet the ever-increasing demand for more electricity, and even if we fully trade incandescence for the equivalent illumination in LEDs, we will still need to reimagine the accumulated brilliance we now think of as ordinary, for it turns out that the sheer abundance of artificial light, whatever its source, has consequences for our physical and spiritual well-being. And more than