Brilliant (13 page)

For some the new light stung. Robert Louis Stevenson, upon seeing the first electric arc lights in London, then Paris, wrote:

A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.

But many people didn't dismiss arc lights so quickly. All they'd wanted for so long was
more
light. Now that they might have it in profusion, they had to test the boundaries of brilliance, and small and large municipalities alike pushed forward with public arc light systems. In the United States, inventor Charles Brush, who'd refined an arc lamp at about the same time Jablochkoff was developing his candles, initially illuminated the centers of modest midwestern cities with his systems. The first was Wabash, Indiana, which at the time of Brush's installation had been illuminated by sixty-five gas lamps. Over the courthouse in the middle of town, Brush suspended four 3,ooo-candlepower arc lamps—the dynamo being driven by a threshing machine engine. On the gloomy, rainy night of March 31, 1880, the arcs were turned on: "Promptly as the courthouse clock struck eight, the thousands of eyes that were turned upward toward the inky darkness over the courthouse saw a shower of sparks emitted from a point above them, small steady spots of light, growing more brilliant until within a few seconds after the first sparks were seen, it was absolutely dazzling.... People stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural." Not only were the arc lights dazzling, but Brush offered more light for less money—a double strangeness, to have intensity no longer tied to cost: "The city's 65 gas lamps—deemed inadequate—cost $1,105 per year, not including repairs and maintenance. The Brush lights would light the same as 500 gas lamps equally distributed around the town for less than $800 a year."

The enthusiasm for Wabash's lighting system reached far beyond the city limits, and Brush and other manufacturers of arc lights quickly set up streetlights in Cleveland and other smaller American cities, some of which—Denver, San Jose, Flint, Minneapolis, and Detroit—eventually built towers topped with arc lights in their commercial centers. There was often nothing ornamental about them. For instance, San Jose's tower rose more than two hundred feet above the town. Its six arc lamps could emit a 24,000-candlepower umbrella of light over the commercial district. But the tower, constructed of steel tubes and straddling the intersection of two main thoroughfares, looked as if it belonged along the perimeter of a prison yard. The proponents of such lights saw them as more than a means of gaining security for citizens and increasing commerce. These were new cities establishing themselves in the hinterlands, and they had little history to give them a cosmopolitan air. Historian David Nye asserts that for such towns, "lighting ... emerged as a glamorous symbol of progress and cultural advancement."

But tower arc lights, Wolfgang Schivelbush suggests, were also more democratic:

Cities lit in this way were like living Utopias of equality. This was, in fact, one of the main arguments put forward in favour of this type of lighting. The city Council Committee of Flint (Michigan) justified its decision to introduce a tower lighting system by pointing out "that ... the light covers the entire space.... We claim for it that it may be justly called the poor man's light, for, by reason of its penetrating and far-reaching rays, the suburbs of the city will be equally well lighted with the more central portions ... and brilliant light will penetrate the most distant parts of the city."

Eventually, so much light proved to be too much. Certainly, bold, bright light would always have its allure—the gaudiness of Times Square, the coronation of a tsar—but it wasn't the light for everyday streets. Shadow life, people found, had its value, too. Municipalities that had embraced the tower arc lights decided to dismantle them and try for something more modest and traditional: lighting that would maintain hours distinct from day—navigable, but also mysterious and a bit hidden; a light that did not dominate them but inhabited the world along with them. They turned away not only from the arc lights but also from the functional appearance of the arc tower. In downtown Minneapolis, where Brush had erected an "electric moon"—a tall post comprising eight arc lamps—the city council "following the practice of many another progressive city, ... eliminated the ungainly post of iron ... and substituted therefor[e] upon all of her principal business streets an ornamental lamp post of splendid design with five lights." For added grace, the city installed hanging planters on its new lampposts.

Whereas the smaller cities may have overreached in a large way before drawing back, the life of arc lights in New York City had a slightly different trajectory. New Yorkers were accustomed to relatively bright light; even so, the brilliance of the arcs was startling and brought a bit of unease at first. Brush installed his first arc light system in late 1880, along a street that was illuminated with gaslight. His lampposts weren't commanding towers, but they did stand at twice the height of the gas lamps, a "single light alone being equal to 10 times that of the half-dozen coal gas burners below." The
New York Times
reported that

the moment the dazzling electric sparks appeared, there was a general turning from the shop windows to the lights. Exclamations of admiration and approval were heard on all sides, together with calculations as to the effect upon the gas companies.... Like all electric lights there was a certain intensity about the powerful white rays which, to unaccustomed gazers and persons with weak eyes, somewhat detracted from the pleasure of the illumination. This however will be modified by time and by constant use, while the possibilities of strengthening and softening the rays by the use of ground porcelain or colored glass are such that almost any effect may be produced. As it was last night, the eye, after resting for a time on the dazzling brilliancy of the fierce white jets turned with relief to the mellow golden color which the street lamps and shop windows assumed by contrast.

Over time, porcelain globes did mitigate the light, and in this more modest form, arc lights would illuminate city streets for decades to come. But arc lights had conditioned people to a new level of brightness. By comparison, the gas streetlights that had begun the century, and had once enthralled city dwellers with their soft brilliance and beauty, now appeared dull and ineffectual, much as oil lamps had seemed when gaslight was new. By the end of the nineteenth century, the New York City gaslights, which had in truth become brighter and more reliable over the years, would be perceived as the lights of other days. "Since the electric lamps have become so common in the streets there is scarcely a gas-lighted neighborhood that has not felt that it was being defrauded out of its proper amount of light," an 1898 newspaper article commented. "Occasionally complaints are heard that certain gas lamps are no better than kerosene oil lamps, and the complainants aver that the illuminating power of the gaslights is continually diminishing."

A
RC LIGHTS, EVEN WITH SHADES,
shone far too intensely to illuminate domestic interiors, and they could not be made less powerful—nineteenth-century scientists would say they were "indivisible." How, then, to make electric illumination intimate enough for the home, equal to the 10 to 20 candlepower of a gaslight fixture? It was a challenge little different in kind from the one Ice Age humans faced when they tamed their hearth fires by fashioning fat-burning lamps such as the ones found at Lascaux.

Working scientists took almost eighty years to "subdivide" electric light. Dozens of experimenters in Germany, England, France, Russia, and the United States worked on the development of an incandescent bulb in the decades after Sir Humphry Davy momentarily made a platinum filament glow at the Royal Institution in 1802, but they encountered seemingly insurmountable problems with the filaments they fashioned out of carbon, a platinum-iridium alloy, or asbestos, which they enclosed in vacuums or sometimes surrounded with nitrogen. Carbon, in all the experiments, quickly destroyed itself. Platinum, which resisted oxidation, tended to fuse when heated to incandescence, and it was expensive. Several experimenters managed to make a short-lived light from platinum in an evacuated bulb, the most lasting being William Grove's, which in 1840 illuminated an English theater for the length of a performance, though the light was dim and costly.

By the 1870s, all the problems scientists had encountered with incandescence throughout the century persisted, and the field was crowded with those who were still trying to adequately evacuate bulbs and craft enduring filaments. Among them were Hiram Maxim, Moses Farmer, William Sawyer, and Albon Man in the United States and St. George Lane-Fox and Joseph Swan in England. Swan had been attempting to make a filament lamp for thirty years, and the transactions of the December 1878 meeting of the Newcastle Chemical Society note that he "described an experiment he had recently performed on the production of light, by passing a current of electricity through a slender rod of carbon enclosed in an exhausted globe.... The rod became heated to such an intense degree as to cause it to glow with great splendour." Still, Swan's light was only momentary, and the glass bulb quickly became coated with soot.

Thomas Edison joined the fray in the late summer of 1878. "It was all before me," he was to later say. "I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance. I saw that what had been done had never been made practically useful. The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses." Edison knew he not only had to find a durable material and an ideal shape for the filament, but he also had to produce an adequate insulating material and figure out how to quickly, efficiently, and completely evacuate the air from a glass bulb. He had to create an effective delivery system for electricity—which meant developing workable switches and wiring—and an efficient dynamo. The dynamo was a particular challenge (earlier electric devices, such as telegraphs and telephones, could run on batteries), and he found the solution to this problem during a trip to engineer William Wallace's factory in Connecticut, where Wallace manufactured both arc lamps and dynamos. There Edison encountered Wallace's "telemachon," a dynamo powerful enough to illuminate eight arc lamps simultaneously. The machine utterly inspired him. A
New York Sun
reporter who'd accompanied Edison on the trip noted that Edison "ran from the instrument to the lights and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the
SIMPLICITY OF A CHILD,
and made all kinds of calculations. He estimated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing." Edison himself remarked, "Now that I have a machine (Wallace's) to make the electricity, I can experiment as much as I please."

The challenges Edison faced were not only technical. Everything concerning the system needed to be cost-effective, practical enough for general use, and familiar enough to old forms to be easily adopted by the public, which meant being cleaner, more efficient, and more economical than the dominant late-nineteenth-century type of urban indoor lighting: gas. As Edison's mathematician, Francis Upton, was to write, "A mistaken idea has been afloat that this new light was intended to be a rival of the sun, rather than what it really is,—a rival of gas." But Edison saw gas as a model as well as a rival. In early installations, he threaded his wires through existing household gas lines and adapted existing gas fixtures for use with his light. He developed a way to determine the cost of electricity per household based on the gas meters of the time, and he envisioned a system, as for gas, linked to adjoining sites all fed by a central station, which meant it would depend on density—a high volume of use in a small area—for its cost-effectiveness.

From the beginning, Edison understood his system to be an urban one, and he—backed by New York money and followed most closely by the New York press—saw New York City as the foremost testing ground for his work: he planned to install his first commercial central lighting system in Manhattan. In clear weather, he could see the city on the horizon, thirty or so miles away from his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he carried out his first electric light experiments. Menlo Park had been a failed real estate venture—no more than a handful of modest houses on a hill and a whistle stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad line—when Edison, feeling cramped and crowded in his Newark laboratory, began looking for a new site. At Menlo Park, he found isolation and plenty of inexpensive land on which to build his compound.

At first glance, you feel a sense of seclusion and of quiet containment when you encounter R. F. Outcault's painting of the laboratory and its surroundings in the winter of 1880–1881. It might be a farm settled into its yearly sleep, for it is laid out nearly the same. The compound, standing squarely in the midst of open fields, is surrounded by a picket fence. A road running alongside disappears into woodlands at the rim of the horizon. The library/office in the foreground resembles a modest two-story clapboard house, and the clapboard laboratory behind it, other than having small porches on each floor, could be an elongated barn. Off to the side is a shed with a ladder propped against it.

But it was, for all its traditional appearance and apparent modesty, the largest private laboratory in the United States. The picture also includes a red brick machine shop with a smokestack at the rear of the site, telegraph poles strung with wires across the near field, and a train parked at the whistle stop on the far side of the road. What went on there was new and bewildering to any outside observer. "When I was a boy," David Trumbull Marshall remembers,