Brilliant

by Jane Brox

  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.

  14. Cold Light

  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

  OVER 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.

  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 an
yone 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 efficien
t, 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?