Brilliant (31 page)

It's not only the grid that needs reimagining. Homes and businesses need to become more energy efficient, too, as does lighting itself, especially now that many of us use more—and brighter—lights than ever before. Illumination still accounts for 6 to 7 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. We can create almost any effect we want: Ambient light can be diffused throughout the room. Bulbs can be recessed, shielded, layered, activated by sensors, or gradually dimmed. Lighting within a room can change hour by hour, with mood, with purpose. But in American homes, all these many effects are still largely achieved with incandescent light.

The most efficient practical cold light remains fluorescent, and in some respects fluorescent's quality has vastly improved since being showcased at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The delay time is shorter, the buzzes and flickers have diminished, and compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) can fit into traditional incandescent sockets. But it's also true that the general quality of CFLs has been erratic, especially in recent years, as companies have attempted to lower the purchase price of them. And they still aren't as versatile as filament bulbs. Some CFLs can't be used with dimmer switches, and the life of others is diminished when they are used in confined places such as recessed ceiling fixtures, which tend to get quite warm.

But fluorescent light remains coolly efficient. A new 13-watt compact fluorescent produces as many lumens as a 60-watt incandescent bulb while using one-quarter of the electricity. Its use eliminates more than a thousand pounds of global warming pollution. Because of such efficiency, CFLs have gained favor in many countries over the past few decades. British lighting historian Brian Bowers notes, "From about 1990 [compact fluorescents] were readily available in high street shops, and by 1995 half the households in Britain were using at least one." By the mid-1990s, half of the households in Germany used CFLs, as did more than 80 percent of households in Japan. In Asian countries in general, compact fluorescents are often more common than incandescent bulbs. One recent traveler to Korea noted, "It took me almost two months of living in Korea before I saw my first incandescent ('old-fashioned') light bulb. All of the others were energy efficient CFLs...[which] are so common here, in fact, that only in one store have I ever actually seen old-fashioned bulbs for sale, and that was in a dollar-store of sorts."

Yet CFLs are still not an easy sell in the United States: "You wake up and you're kind of groggy, and then you see these curly light bulbs, and it's buzzing, and you're like—ugh." At best, compact fluorescents prompt a soldierly acquiescence, wrapped in the anxieties of the age: "No, the light quality isn't ideal, and in some you can hear a slight buzzing ... but I will have a hard time telling my children that I didn't do much to alleviate climate change because of aesthetics."

While developers of compact fluorescents continue to search for a more accommodating white light (read: closer to that of incandescence), the use of compact fluorescents has slowly accelerated in this country. In 2008 they constituted about 19 percent of all bulbs sold in the United States. Eventually, consumers may have little choice but to purchase them once new efficiency standards for illuminants imposed by Congress begin to take effect in 2012. These new standards will make the sale of most incandescent bulbs illegal. In response, researchers are currently developing more efficient incandescent lights, such as the Philips Halogená, but they are ten times more expensive than standard filament bulbs.

The efficiency of CFLs means that their use lowers mercury emissions at coal-fired generating plants, but CFLs themselves—like all fluorescents—contain mercury, a highly toxic metallic element that accumulates in the environment and can affect the nervous systems of living creatures. And at the moment, the disposal of compact fluorescents isn't regulated. Almost all compact fluorescents—and the mercury in them—end up in the trash, creating a considerable environmental problem of their own. In 2009 the state of Maine adopted the first extensive regulations concerning compact fluorescents, and once the law goes into effect, it will limit the amount of mercury manufacturers are allowed to use in the bulbs. The law also requires that a mandatory recycling program, paid for by bulb manufacturers, be established by 2011.

In the meantime, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection is so concerned about mercury from bulbs leaking into the environment that it not only urges householders to carefully recycle compact fluorescents but has also posted a fourteen-point instruction sheet on how to clean up one broken bulb. It begins: "Do not use a vacuum cleaner to clean up the breakage. This will spread the mercury vapor and dust throughout the area and could potentially contaminate the vacuum. Keep people and pets away from the breakage area until the cleanup is complete. Ventilate the area by opening windows, and leave the area for 15 minutes before returning to begin the cleanup. Mercury vapor levels will be lower by then."

The environmental problems posed by the mercury in CFLs is disadvantageous enough to brand them as transitional lighting, eventually to be replaced, perhaps, by light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which are composed of miniature plastic bulbs illuminated by the movement of electrons in semiconductor material. There is no filament to burn out and no mercury to recycle. They are the coldest of lights. LEDs are already used widely for digital time displays, scoreboards, traffic signals, and Christmas and other decorative lights. In the past few years, as the technology has advanced, they've begun to be used for street lighting and, more rarely, for interior lighting, but the "white" light still has a bluish cast, and unlike traditional bulbs, LEDs shed light in one direction only. Although it's possible for LEDs to last decades, they are still quite expensive to purchase—generally more than ten times the cost of an incandescent bulb.

Major lighting companies such as General Electric and Philips are already looking beyond LEDs to organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which work by passing electricity through thin layers of organic semiconductor material that is sandwiched between charged substrates. OLED lighting is still in its research-and-development stage, but its champions have faith that it will last ten times longer and "burn" ten times more efficiently than incandescent lights. OLEDs, a true departure from the past, are flat and emit light over their entire surface, creating large areas of homogeneous illumination. Although in their current state they're rigid and look like a mirror when turned off, eventually the diodes will be embedded in bendable plastic substrates, which will be transparent when the light is off. The light itself will be flexible and will be able to change its form. It could cover an entire wall or ceiling, or be wrapped around a column.

Can a screen ever be a lamp? Will we take to light everywhere and centered nowhere? Light freed from the limits of the socket, the tube, and the filament? Or will we feel lost in the wash of abundance? Gaston Bachelard, who glorified the intimacy between a solitary soul and a slight, disciplined flame, valued the conversation between a thinker, a lamp, and a book because he saw the lamp as a "polestar" to the page: one reads, then looks at the flame and dreams. The dreaming and reading and thinking are intertwined, everything alive at once and encompassed within the reach of the flame. "The candle does not illuminate an empty room; it illuminates a book," he wrote, and both light and words possess their own distinct time: "The candle will burn out before the difficult book is understood."

If today one were to come upon a single light in a dark room, it would likely be the blue and white flickers emanating from a computer screen:
our
window, where the pages change and change again with the tap of a keystroke—the new sound of solitude—and the mind flickers along the jetsam of information—news, weather, work, a remark from a friend, advice, purchases. Tap, tap, tapping and gazing forward. There is no polestar to the page, for there is no distance between the light and the letters, both of which emanate from the screen.

Soon now, the faint tinkling of a broken filament will become another sound of another century. But for the moment, stubborn devotees of Edison's light remain: some are already hoarding incandescent bulbs; others are purchasing replicas of early electric lights. One lighting catalog, which offers a wide range of compact fluorescents and encourages energy efficiency, also offers for sale reproduction nineteenth-century bulbs. Their ornate carbon filaments—shaped like cages, or dipping and turning—are reminiscent of those the visitors to the Menlo Park lab might have encountered. They are as dim as all lights of the past: the 1890 Bulb and the Caged Bulb, 40 watts; the Victorian Bulb, 30 watts. And you will pay dearly for such small light. The advertising copy notes that carbon filament bulbs offer "the unique combination of ⅓ the light at 10 times the price of standard bulbs, but they make any fixture ethereally beautiful."

Such stubborn fondness for the age of incandescence is more than simply nostalgia. It's testimony to how much incandescent light has meant, and how perfectly suited it still seems to be, to modern life: the steady, brilliant light of a speeding century; light born of invention but also warm (or so it has come to seem), versatile, dependable, and economical (and in the end, democratic); light that brought with it an entirely new world full of gleaming things; light at a far remove from whaling ships toiling in frigid waters and the stink and fuss of kerosene. It's also true that unlike kerosene—which began as the oil people had dreamed of for centuries and, within a few decades, ended as a symbol of exclusion from the modern—"old-fashioned" bulbs still shed a more satisfactory light than anything yet developed to replace them. And perhaps they always will.

E
VEN IF WE CONSTRUCT
a more resilient, sustainable grid that can meet the ever-increasing demand for more electricity, and even if we fully trade incandescence for the equivalent illumination in LEDs, we will still need to reimagine the accumulated brilliance we now think of as ordinary, for it turns out that the sheer abundance of artificial light, whatever its source, has consequences for our physical and spiritual well-being. And more than that: mammals, insects, birds, plants, and fish all find themselves at its mercy.

The understanding of the way artificial light adversely affects living things is still an unfolding mystery, but we do know that ubiquitous light wreaks havoc with our circadian rhythm—our daily cycle of variations in body temperature, hormone levels, heart rate, and sleep-wake times that is controlled by our biological clock. In humans, as in all mammals, the clock consists of a small cluster of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, which is cued by the varying levels of light that reach it from the retina. Having evolved in the absence of artificial light, it's broadly attuned to sunrise and sunset.

Researchers once believed that people living in modern industrial societies might have evolved away from the human biological clock as it functioned in earlier times, for the workings of our internal clock aren't always obvious, divorced as we are from the environmental constrictions of days, months, and years: we control our heat and light, and we no longer breed on a seasonal cycle. However, the experience of French geologist Michel Siffre, who in the summer of 1963 descended into the Scarasson Cave—a glaciated cavern under the French-Italian Maritime Alps—where he spent more than two months without sun, helped to confirm that our internal clock continues to keep time independent of our modern way of life.

Siffre set up camp alongside an underground glacier, surrounded by the corrosions and dissolutions of the cave, its dripping darkness and cold. Though he had one incandescent bulb to see by, he had no way of knowing the hour. "I wanted to investigate time," he explained, "that most inapprehensible and irreversible thing. I wanted to investigate that notion of time which has haunted humanity since its beginning." He reckoned his days by awakenings, recording each in a diary, and also telephoning scientists on the earth's surface, who registered the actual hour of his call, though in conversation they never told him what day it was or the time of day.

During his months alone in the dark, he had to cope with isolation and loneliness, and with the threats from the unstable walls and ceilings all around him. "This morning I was completely stunned," he wrote, after hearing a series of loud cave-ins of rock and ice. "My pulse was rapid, my mind full of dark thoughts. In such moments one realizes one's insignificance.... Birth, life, death, and then—nothing. No, no! Birth,
creativity,
and death—that sums up a man; the rest belongs to the animal kingdom. When I had partially recovered from my fright I looked at myself in the mirror: a pale and puffy face, with haggard eyes brimming with tears stared out of the glass."

The anxieties, confusion, and physical stress of those months would take their toll. "I emerged," he would say later, "as a half-crazed, disjointed marionette." Even so, he meticulously recorded his observation of time, and his diary is the record of a man who has lost all comprehension of duration:

Forty-second awakening:...I really seem to have no least idea of the passage of time. This morning, as an example, after telephoning to the surface and talking for a while, I wondered afterward how long the telephone conversation had lasted, and could not even hazard a guess.... Fifty-second awakening:...I am losing all notion of time.... When, for instance, I telephone the surface and indicate what time I think it is, thinking that only an hour has elapsed between my waking up and eating breakfast, it may well be that four or five hours have elapsed. And here is something hard to explain: the main thing, I believe, is the idea of time that I have at the very moment of telephoning. If I called an hour earlier, I would still have stated the same figure.... I am having great difficulty to recall what I have done today. It costs me a real intellectual effort to recall such things.