Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [89]
Perhaps their ubiquity in public spaces and workplaces made them seem doubly cold for the home, a place where people often wanted a relaxing, warm interior. But fluorescent light's failure to make domestic inroads could also be testimony to the particular place incandescence held in American life. By the time the World of Tomorrow opened, 90 percent of urban homes in the United States were electrified, and the incandescent bulb had worked its way fully into the imagination. Indeed, its shape floating in a thought bubble had become a metaphor for a bright idea—a tribute both to the revolutionary place of electric light itself and to the genius of Thomas Edison, whom almost everyone perceived as the sole inventor of the bulb. Not only was the race for cold light something of an abstraction to those outside the laboratory, but also nothing about the development of fluorescent light could match the public drama that unfolded at Menlo Park. Incandescent light—clean, bright, economical, instantly available with the flick of a switch—meant so much. Why would people want anything else?
15. Wartime: The Return of Old Night
The earth grew spangled with light-signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY,
Night Flight
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, while fairgoers in New York were marveling at the Perisphere, Nazi troops moved into Poland, and evacuations from London and other major British cities to the countryside began. At sunset of that day, the British government issued its first official blackout order. From the heavens, it was hoped, London would appear little different than an oak forest or a heath and so escape the fate of the city in the previous war. Across Europe during World War I, it was by their lights that people were betrayed, as airmen carried out strategic bombing of cities and towns at night. They could navigate by tracking human lights, but the planes attempting to intercept them could do little more than chase shadows. "Strategic" may be an overstatement, however.
Guidance equipment then was so rudimentary that except on clear nights with a full moon, the bombers often missed their intended marks. "Experience has shown that it is quite easy for five squadrons to set out to bomb a particular target," observed one British bomber pilot, "and for only one of those five ever to reach the objective; while the other four, in the honest belief that they have done so, have bombed four different villages which bore little, if any, resemblance to the one they desired to attack."
It was all so new—the first recorded instance of aerial bombardment dates to 1911, when an Italian pilot lobbed hand grenades over the side of his airplane as he flew over the oases outside Tripoli—that throughout the First World War, European cities had no real defense against attacks from the air. England alone endured about a hundred air raids and suffered more than fourteen hundred casualties from them. Those who survived knew that the next war would be even more perilous—there would be more light, better planes, and more sophisticated guidance systems.
After the end of hostilities in 1918, in addition to concentrating on building up its air fleet and increasing the sophistication of its bombs, the British government intermittently considered how best to protect its urban population from future aerial attacks, though it wasn't until 1936, with the heightened threat from Hitler's Germany, that officials began to formalize plans. Their strategies for survival included the creation of a public warning system, evacuation plans, the construction of shelters, the digging of trenches, and—what would prove to be the most difficult to endure—preparations to hide or douse all artificial lights. The blackout, unlike an air