Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [99]
The true quiet of the world felt strange, "as if the darkness had somehow smudged away the horns and the other noises of the traffic." Electrical sounds, like Pythagoras's music of the spheres, had always been in people's ears and were what they took for silence. In the relative hush, suddenly a million little things were in danger of perishing. Damp glass greenhouses began to cool down. At the Bronx and Central Park zoos, "the men, working without sleep, stuffed blankets between the bars in the small-mammals house, where diminutive, heat-sensitive lemurs, flying squirrels, and small monkeys began their nocturnal peregrinations. The reptile house presented a difficult problem, since no one was willing to try to wrap a cobra in a blanket. Small portable propane gas heaters were taken in to warm the cold-blooded vipers, anacondas, iguanas, caymans, crocodiles and their ilk." It may have been too cold for iguanas, but the temperature outside was perfect for storing blood—between 38 and 41 degrees—so hospitals and blood banks took their supplies to the roofs for keeping.
Night was truly night again, just as in the Middle Ages, and, also as in the Middle Ages, light became precious once more. People struck match after match to light their way down flights of stairs: "Two matches, carefully tended, were enough to light the distance between one floor and the next. Walking down eighteen flights to the lobby, we used exactly thirty-six matches." People shared candles with one another, and gougers sold them on the streets. Tapers stuck in beer and wine bottles or tea lights set on saucers illuminated cold meals in homes, restaurants, and coffee shops, as well as a banquet in the Astor Ballroom. They flickered alongside pool games and across the faces of actors preparing for a performance—the lights, after all, could come back on at any time. They burned in newsrooms and at newsstands, in firehouses and police stations, on the mayor's desk and beside card games on trains. Wax dripped onto tabletops and onto floors; days later newspapers would publish instructions on how to remove it from surfaces.
Just as the lights went out, the moon, a day after full, was rising:
The moonlight lay on the streets like thick snow, and we had a curious, persistent feeling that we were leaving footprints in it. Something was odd about buildings and corners in this beautiful light. The city presented a tilted aspect, and even our fellow-pedestrians, chattering with implacable cheerfulness, appeared foreshortened as they passed; they made us think of people running downhill. It was a block more before we understood: The shadows, for once, all fell in the same direction—away from the easterly, all-illuminating moon.... We were in a night forest, and, for a change, home lay not merely uptown but north.
Without that moon, the night of November 9, 1965, would have been very different. Air tragedy, it was said, had been averted because its light, along with that made possible by auxiliary power in the main control towers at the airports, was enough for pilots already in descent to see by. The previous night, rainstorms had soaked the region, and clouds had covered the moon and stars. Had the lights gone out then, there surely would have been more than one disaster. As it was, emergency rooms filled with people who'd been hit by cars or tripped on the sidewalks. There were pockets of looting, but by dawn there would be less crime reported than on an ordinary November night.
Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves—simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth