Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [42]
Early arc lights ran on batteries and on small steam-driven generators, but this, as Wolfgang Schivelbush notes, was a step back from gaslight, because there was no possibility of widespread interconnected lighting. Their use was limited to outdoor work yards and lighthouse towers, or for special display and spectacle, as at the coronation of Tsar Alexander II in 1856, when "the city of Moscow was lighted by numbers of electric lamps suspended in the old bell-tower of the Kremlin, a thousand gilded domes glittering in the unearthly radiance, in happy contrast with the quaint arches of the old cathedral close at hand, while the river Moskva was transmuted into a stream of liquid silver."
By the late 1870s, Russian inventor Paul Jablochkoff had made major improvements to the arc lamp. In his design, the carbons, separated by gypsum insulation, stood upright and were set side by side; his "candles" were lit at the top and burned down. Jablochkoff bundled four of them under a glass globe—much more efficient than burning in open air—and devised a regulator so that as one extinguished itself (it could last for about two hours), the next automatically began to burn. The lights ran on the improved generators of the time—by then, Belgian Zénobe Gramme had built a steam-driven dynamo powerful enough to drive a series of streetlights. Jablochkoff's "candles" first lit public halls and department stores, then in 1878 the first arc streetlamps appeared in London and along the Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris, where, being considerably brighter than the traditional gas lamps—perhaps 800 candlepower apiece—they were set about 150 feet apart. Each one replaced up to six gas fixtures.
Until the advent of arcs, street lighting had inched forward, the greasy candles in windows giving way to lanterns, then gaslight, and with each modest improvement—deemed remarkable—life filled up the new space given it in the night. Old light retreated into the far streets and the lesser-known neighborhoods, disregarded and disparaged in relation to the new. But always streetlamps had been light vessels, following the pattern of the streets, and each post cast its own halo that gradually diminished into shadow. People moved in and out of illumination, and streetlamps were an integral part of the streetscape: lamps on the street were in conversation with lamps in homes, cafés, and restaurants; in conversation with the dusk, then the night.
Arc lights fundamentally changed all that. They were exponentially brighter than any previous light—ranging from 500 to 3,000 candlepower. But also the very quality of the light was different. Even under the most efficient oil and gas lamps, as is usual in the dark, the eye saw with its retinal rods. Yet arc lights were so similar to daylight that the human eye worked as it did during the day, using its retinal cones. These lights were so intense that they had to be hung considerably higher than the existing gas and oil streetlamps, above the direct line of human vision, and the light poured down over large areas. The streets no longer appeared as avenues lined with distinct lamps, with "spark lining up with spark." Rather, the light hit off walls and entered houses and was so bright it was claimed that one could see the flies on the walls and read a newspaper streets away from the source. Men and women "suddenly found themselves bathed in a flood of light that was as bright as the sun. One could in fact have believed that the sun had risen. This illusion was so strong that birds, woken out of their sleep began singing.... Ladies opened up their umbrellas ... in order to protect themselves from the rays of this mysterious new sun."
For some the