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Fluorescent light—developed between 1934 and 1938 at the General Electric laboratories in New York—unlike earlier discharge lamps in which the gas itself was an illuminant, requires a second conversion. For this purpose, the glass tube, which contains mercury and argon, is coated with a phosphor on the inside. An electric current vaporizes the mercury (the argon helps to start the electric arc), and the mercury gas then transports the current through the tube. As it does so, it produces ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye. The phosphor coating, however, glows—or fluoresces—in the presence of ultraviolet light and creates the light we see. Different phosphor coatings produce different shades of white, as well as some colors.

Even after researchers produced a technically successful fluorescent light, marketers at General Electric were unsure whether the public would take to something so different from an incandescent bulb. The shades of fluorescent white light all had a colder cast than that of incandescent light. The long tube was not only bulky and distributed light differently, but it also could not simply be plugged into a traditional socket or screwed into an incandescent fixture; it required specific fittings. And fluorescent fixtures would not allow for interchangeable lights: a fixture for a thirteen-inch tube could accommodate only that size light. Most at General Electric thought the fluorescent light would be used largely for decorative purposes, and when the company introduced fluorescent lights to the public at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where they accounted for one-third of all the exterior illumination, they did have a distinctly decorative slant.

The fair rose up out of the swamplands of Flushing Meadows, in the borough of Queens, New York, at a time when the United States was still mired in the Great Depression. Its theme, the World of Tomorrow, aimed to cast an affirmative eye on the future, the future being a 1960 of clean, orderly cities, surrounded by satellite villages—Pleasantvilles, each with a population of ten thousand—interspersed with modern farms (albeit farms where workers walked home in a sentimental dusk shouldering hoes and scythes) and tame, green open spaces. An interstate highway system would safely carry cars traveling a hundred miles an hour across the country, and television—also introduced at the fair—would bring a brave new visual world into homes. It was also a fair inundated with brand names—Eastman Kodak, General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse—as E. B. White clearly saw:

The road to Tomorrow leads through the chimney pots of Queens. It is a long familiar journey, through Mulsified Shampoo and Mobilgas, through Bliss Street, Kix, Astring-O-Sol, and the Majestic Auto Seat Covers ... through Musterole and the delicate pink blossoms on the fruit trees in the ever-hopeful back yards of the populous borough, past Zemo, Alka-Seltzer ... and the clothes that fly bravely on the line under the trees with the new little green leaves in Queens' incomparable springtime.

By 1939 lighting designers and architects were able to work with a variety of brilliant, durable lights, which they could employ to create natural fadeouts and highlights. Graduated shades and intensity of light created more sophisticated effects than those used at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, when architects relied on floodlighting façades or outlining buildings with bulbs that, for all their novelty and brilliance, diminished the apparent size of the buildings at night and muted the details and nuances of their surfaces. The more advanced lighting effects of 1939 not only enhanced and punctuated details of the buildings but also granted structures a distinct appearance at night, completely different from the way they appeared during the day. And architects could now design buildings constructed almost entirely of glass, which not only showed off interiors