The problem with a singular light source is that singularity: The light comes, inevitably, at an angle. One visitor from Chicago described Aurora's citizens to be "in a state of delighted enthusiasm over the splendid practical results." The moonlight towers, he declared, were a "most brilliant success."īut the towers, it turned out, were neither entirely brilliant nor entirely successful. In comparison with this display of power, the old gas lamps lining the streets below the towers began to look quaint - "more decorative," Freeberg writes, "than useful." Light was, suddenly, everywhere, even and especially where nature had not intended it to be. They also, Freeberg writes, "bathed the surrounding fields and 'lonely outskirts' of the city with something like 'full summer moonlight.'" Brush installed his enormous lights, Freeberg notes, via six iron towers studded across Aurora - structures "rising like gigantic pencils over the city's rooftops." Stretching high above the skyline, Brush arc lamps provided intense light to the areas directly below them. In his wonderful book The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, Ernest Freeberg describes what it's like to be a town lit, suddenly, by imitation moons. The town contracted with Charles Francis Brush, an inventor and an entrepreneur and one of Edison's chief competitors in the race to electrify America. They meant pockets of bright light punctuated, where the lamps failed to reach, by complementary swaths of darkness.Īurora, Illinois - ironically named only in retrospect - was one of the early places to experiment with artificial moonlight. Street lamps were also investment-intensive: Towns needed a lot of them to provide the bright light that people found themselves craving. At best, this was an inconvenience, at worst, a deadly danger. But street lights required wires, which, when hastily assembled, had an annoying tendency to disentangle themselves and fall into the streets below. A grid of electric lamps, studded throughout towns - a system that mimicked and often repurposed the infrastructure of gas lamps - was the early and obvious method. What they were less sure of, though, was how they would get that light. ![]() In the early years of electricity - a time when steady illumination was new and expensive and unwieldy - Americans knew one thing clearly: They wanted light, and lots of it, and as quickly as possible, please. A New Orleans levee, lighted from above (Harper's Weekly, 1883 via Library of Congress)
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