Brilliant

by Jane Brox

  For the chapters on electricity, I'm grateful to Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Philip Dray, Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (New York: Random House, 2005); Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2004); Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and Pierre Berton, Niagara: A History of the Falls (New York: Kodansha International, 1997).

  For the chapters on early-twentieth-century light, I relied largely on Morris Llewellyn Cooke, ed., Giant Power: Large Scale Electrical Development as a Social Factor (Philadelphia: Academy of Political and Social Science, 1925); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Mary Ellen Romeo, Darkness to Daylight: An Oral History of Rural Electrification in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Rural Electric Association, 1986); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978); and Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny, TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982). Chapter 15, especially the section on the sounds of war, owes much to Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain, 1939–45 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).

  And for the final section of the book, I'm indebted to A. M. Rosenthal, ed., The Night the Lights Went Out (New York: New American Library, 1965); Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore, eds., Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006); and the International Dark-Sky Association website, http://www.darksky.org.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: THE EARTH AT NIGHT AS SEEN FROM SPACE

  [>] "one could not have put": Anton Chekhov, "Easter Eve," in The Bishop and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Ecco Press, 1985), p. 49.

  On a map of the earth: To view the map, see John Weier, "Bright Lights, Big City," http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lights. See also http://visibleearth.nasa.gov (both accessed April 5, 2007).

  [>] "We are almost certain": Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 55.

  PART I

  [>] "Of time that passes": Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, trans. Joni Caldwell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), p. 69.

  CHAPTER 1: LASCAUX: THE FIRST LAMP

  [>] In the chambers of Lascaux: The names of the chambers of the Lascaux Cave and the figures in them are from Norbert Aujoulat, Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time, trans. Martin Street (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 30.

  [>] "The iconography": Ibid., p. 194.

  "Achieving full and accurate": Sophie A. de Beaune and Randall White, "Ice Age Lamps," Scientific American, March 1993, p. 112.

  [>] "render to God": Asser's Life of King Alfred, trans. L. C. Jane (New York: Cooper Square, 1966), pp. 85–87.

  11 "an object like the ghost": Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 337.

  [>] "It was said that": Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House, 1993), p. 34.

  "a serious undertaking": Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People: Their Lives and Loves (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1878), p. 230.

  [>] "cut very small": Arthur H. Hayward, Colonial Lighting (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), pp. 84–85.

  "even the best-read people": Marshall B. Davidson, "Early American Lighting," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 3, no. 1 (Summer 1944): 30.

  [>] "There are several Ways": Jonathan Swift, "Directions to Servants," Directions to Servants and Miscellaneous Pieces, 1733–1742, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), pp. 14–15.

  "stinking tallow": William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1529.

  [>] "At the Court": William T. O'Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 37.

  "In the middle": Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 77.

  "Their fire sticks": Dr. A. S. Gatschet, quoted in Walter Hough, Fire as an Agent in Human Culture, Smithsonian Institution Bulletin, no. 139 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), p. 99.

  [>] "a cold dark frosty": The Tinder Box (London: William Marsh, 1832), quoted in O'Dea, The Social History of Lighting, p. 237.

  "About two o'clock": James Boswell, quoted in Molly Harrison, The Kitchen in History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), pp. 92–93.

  "unfortunate man staying": Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 107.

  [>] "The English dwell": Quoted in A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 48.

  "found it a matter": John Smeaton, quoted in O'Dea, The Social History of Lighting, p. 224.

  "A French Book of Trades'": Ekirch, At Day's Close, p. 156.

  "From Easter to Saint-Rémi": Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, p. 111.

  18 "A servant would have": Cyril of Jerusalem, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd. ser., 7 (New York: Christian Literature, 1894) p. 52.

  "And what [is] more": Ibid., pp. 52–53.

  "in orderly rows": Gertrude Whiting, Tools and Toys of Stitchery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), p. 253.

  CHAPTER 2: TIME OF DARK STREETS

  [>] "The light of the sun": Libanius, quoted in M. Luckiesh, Artificial Light: Its Influence upon Civilization (New York: Century, 1920), p. 153.

  "Hang-chou boasted": Yi-Fu Tuan, "The City: Its Distance from Nature," Geographical Review 68, no. 1 (January 1978): 9.

  "No oil lamps lighted": Jérôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire, ed. Henry T. Rowell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 47.

  [>] "About half a league": Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in A. Roger Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 63.

  "as if it were in tyme": Fynes Moryson, quoted ibid., p. 61.

  "maintained more than": Ekirch, At Day's Close, p. 64.

  "At night all houses": Quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 81.

  [>] "whose feet in many towns": Jean Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, trans. George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 85.

  [>] "no man [may] walke": Quoted in G. T. Salusbury-Jones, Street Life in Medieval England (Sussex, Eng.: Harvester Press, 1975), p. 139.

  "Let no one be so bold": Quoted in Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, p. 80.

  [>] "It has been said": Luckiesh, Artificial Light, p. 153.

  [>] "On the twenty-sixth day": Quoted in Verdon, Night in the Middle Ages, p. 124.

  "A man would thincke": Quoted in Ekirch, At Day's Close, p. 71.

  [>] "a lamp that waits": Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, trans. Joni Caldwell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), pp. 71–72.

  "On 1 December": Quoted in Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, pp. 90–91.

  "the magistrates": Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 111.

  28 "totally inadequate to dispel": William Sidney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century: Chapters in the Social History of the Times, vol. 1 (London: Ward & Downey, 1892), p. 15.

  [>] "The light, such as it was": Ibid., pp 14–15.

  "greasy clodhopping fellows": Ibid., p. 15.

  "Another thing; they might": Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), p. 43.

  "Cautious citizens in Birmingham": Tuan, "The City," p. 10.

  "that as the fear": Ibid.

  [>] "in Vienna in 1688": Craig Koslofsky, "Court Culture and Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Europe," Journal of Urban History 28, no. 6 (September 2002): 760.

  "the streets after ten": Mercier, Panorama of Paris, p. 132.

  [>] "was an undertaking": Sidney, England and the English, p. 15.

  "a custom, both in ancient": Leone di Somi, Dialogues on Stage Affairs, quoted in Frederick Penzel, Theatre Lighting Before Electricity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 7.

  [>] "Until he himself": William J. Lawrence, Old Theatre Days and Ways (New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1968), p. 130.

  "These beautiful lights": Johannes Neiner, quoted in Koslofsky,

  "Court Culture and Street Lighting," p. 751.

  "Night falls": Mercier, Panorama of Paris, p. 95.

  [>] "In the old days": Ibid., p. 41.

  "I have known fogs": Ibid., pp. 133–34.

  "The darkness that spread": Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, p. 106.

  [>] "the clanking of its huge axe": Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 625.

  "In the summer of 1789": Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, p. 100.

  "Originally, this word": Mercier, quoted ibid.

  "the gaunt scarecrows": Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Signet, 1997), p. 39.

  "not infrequently, the hapless": Quoted in Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, pp. 90–91.

  "whirled across the Place": Carlyle, The French Revolution, p. 164.

  35 "the order of nature": Philip Balthasar Sinold, quoted in Koslofsky, "Court Culture and Street Lighting," p. 746.

  "now [opened] hardly": Friedrich Justin Bertuch, quoted in Koslofsky, "Court Culture and Street Lighting," p. 744.

  [>] "The city lives": Richard Eder, "New York," in "Cities in Winter," Saturday Review, January 8, 1977, p. 25.

  "not a small New York": Elizabeth Hardwick, "Boston," in A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 151.

  CHAPTER 3: LANTERNS AT SEA

  [>] "more scarce than": Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 466.

  "The oil is hissing": J. Ross Browne, quoted in Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 198.

  [>] "When the flesh": From Arrian's description of the conquests of Alexander the Great, quoted ibid., p. 33.

  [>] "When they come within": Levi Whitman, quoted in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), p. 248.

  "The respiratory canal": William Davis, Nimrod of the Sea, quoted in Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1989), p. 157.

  "carpet a room": Ibid., p. 156.

  [>] "The lips and throat": Ibid., p. 157.

  "subsists wholly on mist": The King's Mirror, trans. Laurence Marcellus Larson (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1917), p. 123.

  "that wondrous Venetian blind": Melville, Moby Dick, p. 297.

  "It is as if": Ibid., p. 461.

  [>] "the unmelted skin": Ellis, Men and Whales, p. 198.

  "like the left wing": Melville, Moby Dick, p. 462.

  [>] "'Bible leaves!'": Ibid., p. 460.

  "There they lay": Ibid., p. 466.

  [>] "a new kind of Candles": The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Richard C. Kugler, The Whale Oil Trade, 1750–1775 (New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1980), p. 13n. 44 "In the great Sperm Whale": Melville, Moby Dick, p. 379.

  46 "whether Leviathan": Ibid., p. 501.

  [>] "They think that at best": Ibid., pp. 118–19.

  [>] "The only danger": Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley, vol. 6 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1858) p. 339.

  [>] "was to drive": D. Alan Stevenson, The World's Lighthouses Before 1820 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. xxiv.

  "Many coastal villages": Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 26.

  "The rust-colored gneiss": Ibid., p. 54.

  [>] "At midsummer the party": Stevenson, The World's Lighthouses, p. 115.

  [>] "Quickly the fire": Ibid., p. 121.

  "Fenders fixed": Ibid., p. 124.

  [>] "very strong and bright": John Smeaton, quoted ibid., pp. 125–26.

  [>] "So long as the air": Samuel Williams, quoted in Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, ed. James Bryant Conant, case 2, The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory: The Chemical Revolution of 1775–1789 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 15.

  "As soon as the Air": Ibid., pp. 15–16.

  [>] "very white": Quoted in Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 28. "as the light emitted": A.F.M. Willich, The Domestic Encyclopaedia, or A Dictionary of Facts, and Useful Knowledge, vol. 3 (London: B. McMillan, 1802), s.v. "lamp," http://chestofbooks.com/reference/The-Domestic-Encyclopaedia-Vol3/Lamp.html (accessed June 29, 2009).

  [>] "Being 'the thing'": Marshall B. Davidson, "Early American Lighting," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 3, no. 1 (Summer 1944): 37.

  "The modest versions": Ibid.

  "the single most powerful": Stevenson, The World's Lighthouses, p. xix.

  [>] "Every night they go": Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), p. 128.

  57 "There has just been": Ibid., pp. 116–17, 121.

  CHAPTER 4: GASLIGHT

  [>] "It seldom needs": Thomas Cooper, Some Information Concerning Gas Lights (Philadelphia: John Conrad, 1816), p. 23.

  "The inflammable gas": Philippe Lebon, quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 23.

  [>] "All factories": M. E. Falkus, "The Early Development of the British Gas Industry, 1790–1815," Economic History Review, n.s., 35, no. 2 (May 1982): 219.

  [>] "It was estimated": Ibid., p. 223.

  "Suppose it were required": Cooper, Some Information Concerning Gas Lights, p. 12.

  [>] "The burners were simply": William T. O'Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 115.

  "Clean and orderly": Quoted in Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London: Noel Carrington, 1947), p. 111.

  [>] "This spire increases": John Buddle, quoted in'T. S. Ashton and Joseph Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), p. 44n.

  "Clad from head to foot": Ibid., pp. 44–45.

  [>] "Everything in the way": Quoted ibid., p. 42n.

  "were about three hundred": Quoted ibid., p. 49n.

  [>] "work was continued": T. E. Forster, "Historical Notes on Wallsend Colliery," Transactions of the Institution of Mining Engineers 15 (1897–1898), http://www.dmm-gallery.org.uk/transime/u15f-01.htm (accessed February 1, 2009).

  "sometimes tried to carry on": Ashton and Sykes, The Coal Industry, p. 51.

  [>] "had provided the miner": Ibid., p. 53.

  "if it were intended": Sir
Humphry Davy, quoted in Samuel Clegg Jr., Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Distribution of Coal-Gas (London: John Weale, 1841), p. 17.

  "Winsor was not": Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, pp. 26–27.

  67 "a brightness clear": Quoted in Clegg, Practical Treatise, pp. 20–21.

  "I foresee in this": Charles Dickens, The Lamplighter: A Farce (London: Printed from a Manuscript in the Forster Collection at the South Kensington Museum, 1879), p. 10.

  [>] "It was strangely believed": Clegg, Practical Treatise, p. 17.

  [>] "Wherever a gas-factory": Quoted in Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 94.

  "Mr. Arabin, deposed": Cooper, Some Information Concerning Gas Lights, p. 131.

  [>] "When the effluvia": Ibid., p. 133.

  "Thomas Edgely is": Ibid., pp. 134–35.

  "at present it is": Quoted in Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night, p. 35.

  [>] "In 1821 no town": Steven J. Goldfarb, "A Regency Gas Burner," Technology and Culture 12, no. 3 (July 1971): 476.

  "Paris was illuminated": Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 565.

  "The work of Prometheus": Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Plea for Gas Lamps," in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893), p. 274.

  [>] "Paris will be": Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, letter 550, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, vol. 3 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1959), p. 75.

  "The whole of Paris": Andreas Bluhm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age, 1750–1900 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 182.