Brilliant (24 page)

I had gotten these beautiful wedding presents. An electric coffee maker, an electric toaster, and there they sat.... So the day the electric came in, I sat at my kitchen table. The electric coffee pot was plugged in, the toaster was plugged in, a bare light bulb hung above, and I sat there and waited.... And such a thrill, you have no idea. I had polished all my oil lamp globes. They were sitting in a nice neat little row. Never again would I have to polish those sooty old things. Never again would I have to fill the tank on them, never again would I have to trim the wicks. They sat there and I was glad.

Those who'd had battery-run radios before line electricity had had to mete out the listening time: "We had a large battery-powered radio in the front room that we used sparingly, and only at night, as we all sat around looking at it during 'Amos and Andy,' 'Fibber McGee and Molly,' 'Jack Benny,' or 'Little Orphan Annie,'" former president Jimmy Carter remembered. "When its power failed we would sometimes bring in the battery from the pickup truck to keep it playing for a special event." In the fully electric life, however, the sounds of other voices, music, applause, jokes, the weather, and farm reports could fill the air all the time. "The day we got our radio we put it in the kitchen window, aimed it out at the fields, and turned it on full blast," one woman recalled. "During the first week, the workers hated to be out of the sound of it." But there were also mild complaints from farm wives:

They report that their husbands are spending more time than ever in the barns experimenting with their electric milkers and coolers. A lot of men have put radios in their barns—for their own amusement, their women folks think—but the men tell me their cows give more milk to the strains of music than without it.... As a result of this modernization the wives of these farmers tell me that for the first time it is hard to get the men in to meals. They act like boys with new tool kits, always puttering around with new equipment.

For Carter's family and their neighbors, electricity changed their sense of themselves and their community. "I think the best day of my life—the one I remember most vividly with the possible exception of my wedding day—was the night they turned on the lights in our house," he recalled. "Also the bringing of the rural electric program to the farms of our Nation made it possible for us to stretch our hearts and stretch our minds to encompass public involvement in affairs that would not have been possible without the rural electric program." One Pennsylvania farmer remarked, "We felt like first-class American citizens." Another said, "Electricity changed the country way of living. That was the beginning of the change, right there. It put the country people more on a par with the city people."

Light may have been the least of it; certainly electric irons, washers, pumps, and milking machines would make a greater difference in their lives. But in the late 1930s and 1940s, when electricity finally came, it was the light they were waiting for. To see (and be seen) beyond the circumference of the kitchen table, to see into the corners of a room or into a husband's face in the evening, "was wonderful. Just like going from darkness into daylight." One farmer observed, "I'll never forget the day when they announced the electric was turned on. I waited till dark to do my chores. I had the barn all lit up like a Christmas tree. Oh, that seemed nice, especially the stable—you didn't have to look where you was goin'." The moment a house was supposed to be connected to the electric lines was known as "zero hour," and people would flip their switches on and off to make sure they didn't miss the instant of connection. The first thing some did once they were hooked up was to turn on every light and then drive down the road just to look back at their illuminated home.

For those in cities, electric light already possessed the bone-weary, jaded cast of Edward Hopper's diner in the small hours: the attendant, the couple, the lone man trapped within. How they arrived or how they will leave is a mystery. At the same time, rural men and women stood bewildered before the one bare bulb hanging from their kitchen ceilings. Some screwed corncobs into light sockets to keep "the juice" from leaking out, or they would not let go of the chain pull, believing that once they released it, the light would go out.

Sometimes people—parsimonious farm families—kept their lights on all night long: "That light in the kitchen came on, and that was the prettiest sight I ever saw. It was wonderful after all those years of oil lamps. I never expected to get it, unless I went away from here." And it was the light the linemen remembered. "Some of them wanted you to come and turn it on for them," one recalled. "They was a little afraid you know. They didn't know anything about it. So you go, there's nothin' to it, just turn the switch on and you've got it, see. And so I turned the light on, oh my gosh, look at that. We've never had it that way—you can see all around the room." Another said, "I've seen this happen—the lights come on—hundreds of places, and its an emotional situation you can't describe.... Something happens, lightning strikes them and they all at once are different. People prayed, they cried, they swore."

What of kerosene, which for a brief time had seemed the democratic perfection of light? In memory, some children will fondly recall the oil lamp in the kitchen after supper or the lantern moving across the yard as their father returned from his chores, but few wish to return to those days. When one co-op in Pennsylvania finally strung their lines, they held a mock funeral for a kerosene lamp: "Buried here May 3, 1941 by the Adams Electric Cooperative as a symbol of the drudgery and toil which its member-families bore far longer than was necessary or right but which, with the energization of their own power system, are now abolished for all time." Mock funerals were held in other communities as well. Elsewhere, farmers and their wives were content simply to smash their lanterns on the ground.

Rural people were used to being self-sufficient—repairing their own plows, saving their own seed—but electricity was a mystery, and electricity manuals for farmers reflected the old bewilderment: "What is electricity?...No one today knows the exact answer. All that is actually known is that this powerful energy is present in the world, and that it has been 'harnessed' so it can be used as a safe, tireless and efficient servant of mankind." And now, like city people, they were tied to a vast network. When a quiet winter rain fell and the temperature dropped and ice built up on the wires—and on the tree limbs hanging over the wires—they'd hear the sound of cracking, like rifle shots, and catch the scent of pine, then darkness would overcome them once again. Their electric milking machines stood useless in the pitch-black barn; the heat was gone in the chicken coops and incubators. As one farmer observed, "All this pushbutton stuff. Well, it becomes a part of you. You can't cook a meal without it; you can't take a bath without it; you can't get a drink of water without it.... There you are, you're hooked.... [Before if] you had an Aladdin lamp you could light it and have a good light and go right on about your business, see, but you're hooked when the power goes off."

Electricity meant that the children of farmers would be different people. Not only would they do better in school once they began studying by electric light, but it would carry them into a different world: "To a farm girl who has been brought up with many electrical conveniences it is like listening to a fairy tale to be told that once rural homes did not have electricity."

Sometimes electricity did give a farm more possibilities. "I would never have believed what it has meant," said one farmer. "My boys who are just entering or about ready for high school are making their plans already about what they are going to do, in the country, when they grow up. It used to be they talked about what they were going to do when they grew up, seeming to have in mind everything else except farming." But it couldn't entirely staunch the departures: the number of farms and farm families continued to decline. Most rural children vanished into the glare of the modern world.

But the "liberty poles," it turned out, worked both ways. The extension of electricity into rural areas spurred the movement of city people to the countryside, bringing the "white-lighters" to the farmers' doors. The advancing electric lines, says sculptor John Bisbee, were like ferns uncurling, or so it seems in three aerial photographs of Dunbar Hill in Waitsfield, Vermont, the location of Bisbee's family farm. The photograph from the 1940s captures a world on the cusp of electrification: one simple road, three farmsteads. In the photo from the 1950s, the lines have made their way down the main road, and side roads—like nubby furled leaflets—are beginning to sprout on either side of the main. In the last photo, from the 1960s, those roads have opened further into the old wild, and farther along the main road are yet more nubs. To Bisbee, in the latest aerial shot, the houses and their clearings seem to shine from out of the wooded dark.

Practically every illuminant in use to-day is patterned after the sun and stars.... No artificial lamp is known but that gives off ample heat to be felt by the hand. It is all "hot light."

—
E. NEWTON HARVEY
, 1931

O
VER DECADES, INCANDESCENT BULBS
had grown far stronger and more dependable than those first assembled in Edison's factories. The quality and strength of the glass had improved, as had the efficiency of the vacuum. Most important, the filament had evolved from carbon to tungsten and finally ductile tungsten (tungsten alone is quite brittle and therefore fragile). By 1922 renowned General Electric scientist Charles Steinmetz could claim, "Today we are producing ... sixty-eight times as much light as we could produce with the lights in use fifteen years ago." The greater brilliance required greater heat, of course, and ductile tungsten filaments are hot: "A 60-watt bulb operates at a temperature twice as high as that of molten steel in a blast furnace. Asbestos or fire brick would melt like wax at such a heat. Yet the tiny filament wire in the lamp measures less than 2/1,000 inch in diameter—finer than a human hair." While such heat had its practical uses—to incubate chicks and keep piglets warm—in homes, offices, and factories, it largely went to waste. This was acknowledged even by Tesla, Edison, and others in the incipient years of incandescence. As early as 1894, one
New York Times
reporter exclaimed, "What a preposterous dissipation there must be of the energy stored in a lump of coal between its first liberation by combustion and its final emergence in the form of electric light!"

By the 1930s, coal powered much of the growing electric grid, and government officials had become concerned about the stress the ever-increasing use of electricity was exerting on known coal reserves. Additionally, labor strife in the mines sometimes affected the supply of fuel to power stations, so the development of a less wasteful illuminant—a practical "cold light"—had great appeal. Toward such an end, physicist E. Newton Harvey undertook extensive studies of bioluminescence in the natural world—glowworms, the gills of mushrooms, jellyfish, foxfire, beetles, fireflies—in an attempt to reproduce its effects for practical human light. Harvey had great hopes for bioluminescence because the reaction between the chemical compound luciferin and the enzyme luciferase, which produces bioluminescence, is extremely efficient: virtually all the energy generated goes toward creating light; almost none is lost as heat. Additionally, the reaction is reversible. As Harvey noted, "Here you have an animal that makes its fuel and burns it and produces light ... and then it takes the combustion product and reconverts it into fuel again, and the fuel is ready to be burned a second time. The firefly is able to un-burn its candle."

Humans have historically used bioluminescence to see in the dark, and not only as a last resort, the way pitmen used glowing, rotting fish to work in the fiery Tyne mines. For centuries throughout Southeast Asia, people gathered fireflies and released them into tight wooden cages or perforated, hollowed-out gourds so as to have light in the evening. Sometimes they let them loose into the trees to illuminate tea gardens and pathways. In nineteenth-century Japan, capturing fireflies was a gainful means of employment:

At sunset the firefly hunter starts forth with a long bamboo pole and a bag of mosquito netting. On reaching a suitable growth of willows near water he makes ready his net and strikes the branches twinkling with the insects with his pole. This jars them to the ground where they are easily gathered up.... But this must be done very rapidly, before they recover themselves enough to fly.... His work lasts till about 2 o'clock in the morning, when the insects leave the trees for the dewy soil. He then changes his method. He brushes the surface of the ground with a light broom to startle the insects into light; then he gathers them as before. An expert has been known to gather 3,000 in one night.

Even a few fireflies might provide enough light by which to see. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the Smithsonian Institution light collection, there was a dark lantern said to have been used by a thief in Java. The shallow wooden bowl had been fashioned with a pivoting lid that could be used to hide the light in a hurry. The thief lined the cup of the lantern with pitch and stuck several fireflies to it. When one firefly perished, he replaced it with another from a store he kept in a capped cane stalk.

In the southern regions of the Western Hemisphere, people sometimes saw by the glow of a bioluminescent click beetle,
Pyrophorous noctilucus,
which emits a constant green light. A history of Hispaniola written in 1725 attests:

There were at first found a sort of vermin, like great beetles, somewhat smaller than sparrows, having two stars close by their eyes and two more under their wings, which gave so great a light that by it they could spin, weave, write, and paint; and the Spaniards went by night to hunt the Utias, or little rabbits of that country ... carrying those animals tied to their great toes or thumbs.... They took [the beetles] in the night with firebrands because they made to the light and came when called by their name, and they are so unwieldly
[sic]
that when they fall they can not rise again; and the men stroaking
[sic]
their faces and hands with a sort of moisture that is in those stars, seemed to be afire as long as it lasted.