Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [66]
Soon most would forget how to light a lamp and how to husband the flame. They would become a little afraid of it, and it was its obviousness that seemed dangerous: its smell, substance, and centuries of meaning. How could a simple flame hold a plea against electricity? Aggressive, unhindered electricity: "Let's Kill the Moonlight!" proclaimed the Italian futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, for he saw the natural world as irrelevant, canceled by the speed and brilliance of the modern. Giacomo Balla, in his 1909 oil painting Arc Lamp, seems to have done just that. Artificial light dominates everything; even the iron base of the streetlamp has relinquished its solidity. It's just a ghost, clouded by the sizzle of energy—circular, radiant, pulsing, full of hot color—flaring out from the arc. The light's sharp power and verve strike at soft, billowing, susceptible night. There is hardly any room left for the dark, which is trying to hold its own in small quarters at the corners of the painting. That's more than can be said for the pale crescent moon, helplessly obscured in the background—illuminated, but not radiant, captured, as it is, by human light.
11. Gleaming Things
THIS MUCH HAS ALWAYS been true: electricity can't be stored. It must be generated as needed and consumed within moments of its generation. The supply must continually adjust itself to fluctuating demand, and a power plant must have sufficient capacity to meet all its customers' needs at any given moment of the day. Maintaining this balance was especially fraught during the first tenuous decades of electrical expansion. Edward Hungerford, writing about the gas and electric plants of New York City in 1910, described how the smallest change in the skies could create a sudden spike in usage:
In days of old, watchers were stationed upon the high housetops of mediaeval cities, to give warning of the coming of an unexpected foe. In these days there are watchers upon the high housetops of the modern city. They go there whenever the barometer begins to spell uncertainty. With powerful glasses they skim the distant corners of the horizon. A distant black cloud—a seemingly harmless thing in the far-away sky, but a thing of magnificent potentialities close at hand—is seen. Its approach is closely noted.... The watcher of the skies gives quick warning over the telephone. The drone of lazy midday ceases instantly. [In the power house] men come out of their drowsy cat-naps. They rush to their positions, fresh fuel goes upon a hundred banked boilers[, and]...the 'chief operator,' who is king of the situation, orders additional engines and generators into service.... When the black clouds finally rest above the town and the myriad hands are reaching for desklights, the strain has been already met. The light ... burns as steadily and as brightly as it burned five minutes before, when less than one-fifth the quantity was the demand.
In Hungerford's time, it was also true that electric plants created black clouds of their own, for not all energy generation could be as clean as Niagara. Power plants in places far from any viable waterpower source often relied on coal-fired furnaces to heat water, which produced the steam that commonly rotated the turbines of the generators. And the predominance of alternating current meant that in a city like New York, the hundreds of small local plants that once pocked the city were now consolidated into a few huge generating stations. By 1910 the New York