• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.

But many people didn't dismiss arc lights so quickly. All they'd wanted for so long was more light. Now that they might have it in profusion, they had to test the boundaries of brilliance, and small and large municipalities alike pushed forward with public arc light systems. In the United States, inventor Charles Brush, who'd refined an arc lamp at about the same time Jablochkoff was developing his candles, initially illuminated the centers of modest midwestern cities with his systems. The first was Wabash, Indiana, which at the time of Brush's installation had been illuminated by sixty-five gas lamps. Over the courthouse in the middle of town, Brush suspended four 3,ooo-candlepower arc lamps—the dynamo being driven by a threshing machine engine. On the gloomy, rainy night of March 31, 1880, the arcs were turned on: "Promptly as the courthouse clock struck eight, the thousands of eyes that were turned upward toward the inky darkness over the courthouse saw a shower of sparks emitted from a point above them, small steady spots of light, growing more brilliant until within a few seconds after the first sparks were seen, it was absolutely dazzling.... People stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural." Not only were the arc lights dazzling, but Brush offered more light for less money—a double strangeness, to have intensity no longer tied to cost: "The city's 65 gas lamps—deemed inadequate—cost $1,105 per year, not including repairs and maintenance. The Brush lights would light the same as 500 gas lamps equally distributed around the town for less than $800 a year."

The enthusiasm for Wabash's lighting system reached far beyond the city limits, and Brush and other manufacturers of arc lights quickly set up streetlights in Cleveland and other smaller American cities, some of which—Denver, San Jose, Flint, Minneapolis, and Detroit—eventually built towers topped with arc lights in their commercial centers. There was often nothing ornamental about them. For instance, San Jose's tower rose more than two hundred feet above the town. Its six arc lamps could emit a 24,000-candlepower umbrella of light over the commercial district. But the tower, constructed of steel tubes and straddling the intersection of two main thoroughfares, looked as if it belonged along the perimeter of a prison yard. The proponents of such lights saw them as more than a means of gaining security for citizens and increasing commerce. These were new cities establishing themselves in the hinterlands, and they had little history to give them a cosmopolitan air. Historian David Nye asserts that for such towns, "lighting ... emerged as a glamorous symbol of progress and cultural advancement."

But tower arc lights, Wolfgang Schivelbush suggests, were also more democratic:

Cities lit in this way were like living Utopias of equality. This was, in fact, one of the main arguments put forward in favour of this type of lighting. The city Council Committee of Flint (Michigan) justified its decision to introduce a tower lighting system by pointing out "that ... the light covers the entire space.... We claim for it that it may be justly called the poor man's light, for, by reason of its penetrating and far-reaching rays, the suburbs of the city will be equally well lighted with the more central portions ... and brilliant light will penetrate the most distant parts of the city."