Brilliant (25 page)

These beetles are the brightest of all luminous insects—the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, thought a flurry of them were the matchlocks of his enemies—and during nights of almost complete darkness, the beetles in any number must have seemed magical and spectacular, though they are actually less than two inches long (nowhere near the size of sparrows), and few of us today would think them bright enough to help us work or walk.

Steinmetz had put great store in Harvey's work on bioluminescence: "I think it is possible that twenty years from now it may be a thing of tremendous practical importance.... There is, of course, no absolutely cold light, but there are experiments on many which may be called comparatively cold.... There are none, however, which compare with that of Dr. Harvey, in its promise of working at low cost. All other kinds require coal or energy of some other kind to produce electrical power." Throughout his decades of research, Harvey succeeded in understanding more clearly the way bioluminescence works, and he was even able to diffuse enough luciferin in a flask of water to create a light steady enough to read a newspaper by. But neither he nor anyone else managed to turn it into a practical light for industrial society.

The nearest researchers came to cold light in the 1930s was the fluorescent tube, which uses about a quarter of the energy and emits a quarter of the heat of incandescent bulbs of the same strength. It's a descendant of nineteenth-century discharge lamps, which used various gases and combinations of gases to create different-colored lights: neon for red, argon for lavender, mercury and argon together for blue, and helium for yellow. All such lights eventually came to be popularly known as "neon lights," and although they proved to be ideal for signs and advertising, researchers were unable to find a gas alone or in combination that could produce a practical white light for workplaces or homes. Peter Cooper Hewitt came closest, just after the turn of the twentieth century. He fabricated a mercury vapor lamp—a four-foot-long tube that shone greenish blue—which could illuminate outdoor spaces and had some industrial applications, but its size and strange hue weren't fit for interiors.

Fluorescent light—developed between 1934 and 1938 at the General Electric laboratories in New York—unlike earlier discharge lamps in which the gas itself was an illuminant, requires a second conversion. For this purpose, the glass tube, which contains mercury and argon, is coated with a phosphor on the inside. An electric current vaporizes the mercury (the argon helps to start the electric arc), and the mercury gas then transports the current through the tube. As it does so, it produces ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye. The phosphor coating, however, glows—or fluoresces—in the presence of ultraviolet light and creates the light we see. Different phosphor coatings produce different shades of white, as well as some colors.

Even after researchers produced a technically successful fluorescent light, marketers at General Electric were unsure whether the public would take to something so different from an incandescent bulb. The shades of fluorescent white light all had a colder cast than that of incandescent light. The long tube was not only bulky and distributed light differently, but it also could not simply be plugged into a traditional socket or screwed into an incandescent fixture; it required specific fittings. And fluorescent fixtures would not allow for interchangeable lights: a fixture for a thirteen-inch tube could accommodate only that size light. Most at General Electric thought the fluorescent light would be used largely for decorative purposes, and when the company introduced fluorescent lights to the public at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where they accounted for one-third of all the exterior illumination, they did have a distinctly decorative slant.

The fair rose up out of the swamplands of Flushing Meadows, in the borough of Queens, New York, at a time when the United States was still mired in the Great Depression. Its theme, the World of Tomorrow, aimed to cast an affirmative eye on the future, the future being a 1960 of clean, orderly cities, surrounded by satellite villages—Pleasantvilles, each with a population of ten thousand—interspersed with modern farms (albeit farms where workers walked home in a sentimental dusk shouldering hoes and scythes) and tame, green open spaces. An interstate highway system would safely carry cars traveling a hundred miles an hour across the country, and television—also introduced at the fair—would bring a brave new visual world into homes. It was also a fair inundated with brand names—Eastman Kodak, General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse—as E. B. White clearly saw:

The road to Tomorrow leads through the chimney pots of Queens. It is a long familiar journey, through Mulsified Shampoo and Mobilgas, through Bliss Street, Kix, Astring-O-Sol, and the Majestic Auto Seat Covers ... through Musterole and the delicate pink blossoms on the fruit trees in the ever-hopeful back yards of the populous borough, past Zemo, Alka-Seltzer ... and the clothes that fly bravely on the line under the trees with the new little green leaves in Queens' incomparable springtime.

By 1939 lighting designers and architects were able to work with a variety of brilliant, durable lights, which they could employ to create natural fadeouts and highlights. Graduated shades and intensity of light created more sophisticated effects than those used at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, when architects relied on floodlighting façades or outlining buildings with bulbs that, for all their novelty and brilliance, diminished the apparent size of the buildings at night and muted the details and nuances of their surfaces. The more advanced lighting effects of 1939 not only enhanced and punctuated details of the buildings but also granted structures a distinct appearance at night, completely different from the way they appeared during the day. And architects could now design buildings constructed almost entirely of glass, which not only showed off interiors at night but also made interior light integral to exterior illumination.

One reporter at the fair observed: "Only selected parts of the buildings glow.... The solid architectural structure of the daytime is set aside for an immaterial structure of light. It is not the intention that the Fair by night shall be the same Fair that was seen by day. After dark it is changed into a lightscape." Nowhere was this clearer than at the center of the World of Tomorrow, where there stood stark white modernist versions of a spire and a dome: the 61o-foot-high, three-sided obelisk called the Trylon and the 180-foot-diameter sphere built of steel and cement stucco called the Perisphere. The sphere's eight supporting steel columns were masked by a ring of fountains, so that from a distance it appeared to be floating on water. The severity of the daytime architecture turned magical in the dark: "As night fell, the globe was bathed in colored lights—first amber, then deep red, and finally an intense blue—on which were superimposed moving white lights (filtered through mica) in irregular patterns." The results, one historian attests, "bore an uncanny resemblance to the views of Earth which would be taken from Apollo spacecraft some thirty years later."

Throughout the grounds, white fluorescent tubes—encircling the midsections of tall flagpoles, cinching them like a belt—lit pathways. Colored fluorescent lights backlit murals, illuminated signs, and highlighted walls. Whether concealed, recessed, or ghosting structural details, they created sleek, striking effects:

Even the drabbest and most monochromatic of buildings sprang to life under the influence of creative lighting techniques. By day, the only touch of color that relieved the honest metallic finish of the U.S. Steel dome was the minimal application of blue paint to the external ribs that acted as its structural supports. But by night the ribs glowed a bright azure that the shiny steel surface reflected and the entire dome gleamed with a cool radiance.... One of the most spectacular applications was the design of the Petroleum Building, a triangular-plan structure featuring fins of corrugated steel ascending its outer surface in four concave strips. Behind each strip a trough containing blue fluorescent tubes produced indirect illumination that made the building's horizontal segments seem to float independently in space.

The use of fluorescent light in such spectacular ways helped make illumination at the fair a great success, but it didn't settle the questions marketers at General Electric had concerning them. Would people be persuaded to adopt them for the ordinary light of their homes? Fluorescent lights buzzed. They flickered and hummed. There was a delay when you turned them on. They grew dimmer and less efficient over time. Although they eventually gave more light for less cost, above and beyond the special requirements for their installation, they were more expensive to purchase. And they
were
cold: they cast a white light unbecoming to faces and surroundings.

The General Electric advertising campaigns for fluorescent lights emphasized their utility, suggesting how and where to place the bulbs, especially in kitchens—over sinks, stoves, and countertops—to most effectively illuminate tasks and reduce fatigue for the eyes. One ad announced: "It's easy to see into pots and pans. Easy to measure ingredients. Easy to see whether dishes are clean." And what success fluorescent lights had in homes was largely functional. Beyond kitchens, they illuminated bathrooms and work areas in cellars, but few found their way into living rooms and bedrooms.

Still, fluorescent light offered an efficient, economical way to illuminate the large interiors of offices, factories, and department stores, and in the years after the New York World's Fair, they became ubiquitous above assembly lines, in cubicles and doctors' offices, on manufacturing floors, and in warehouses. They even inspired the construction of some window-less factories. Colored fluorescents lit theaters and restaurants and were used for display and advertising. General Electric sold 21 million fluorescent lamps in 1941, and by mid-century more than half the interior lighting in the United States would be fluorescent.

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?

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

O
N 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 raid warning, would not be intermittent. It would last, to one degree or another, for the duration of the war. Such preparations required years of planning, for all that had advanced from the single lights on the sills of village houses in the seventeenth century—the second and third shifts in factories; the evening hours in shops and stores; the freedom light lent to the hours after dark; all the leisure, buoyancy, energy, and ideas that countered the limits and fear of the old long nights—would have to be concealed.