Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  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.

  To cut the main power supply, it was argued, would be such a severe burden on the populace that the British government's first plans involved darkening the city by other means. It was imagined that those in charge of public lighting might keep large staffs on standby who were prepared go through the neighborhoods removing bulbs from streetlamps one by one. Within a single district of London, this could take six hours. (Ultimately, almost all streetlights would be darkened for the duration of the war.) Factories and industrial complexes not only would have to screen windows and eliminate external lights, but they also would have to contend with the glow from the fires in clay works and glassworks, the fires in blast furnaces and coke ovens, and the burning slag heaps. Those in the steel industry estimated that it would take three years to screen their furnaces and that the cost of dealing with coke ovens alone would cost £300,000. Shops and stores would have their hours of business restricted and would not be allowed to illuminate their signs or their plate glass windows. Cinemas and theaters would not only have to darken their marquees; they would have to close: large gatherings, officials feared, would offer bombers an effective target. Churches and cathedrals—built for the glory of light—found it almost impossible to obscure their windows, so they planned to hold their evening services in the afternoon.

  Railroad officials confronted ways to cut the light in marshaling yards and in the interiors of trains, to eliminate the arcing of electric trains, and to hide signal and train lights. Headlights on ambulances, trucks, and buses were to be masked down to thin horizontal slits. Civilian cars were to have no light at all, and Britons would depend on white paint on curbs and at intersections to guide them as they drove at night. As for pedestrians, there were to be no flashlights; they would not be allowed even a match to see by. To find their way into their own homes after dark, citizens would have to dab some white paint on the doorknob or bell. Without a moon, for all the brilliance of the winter stars—which would become visible over London as they hadn't been for centuries—they wouldn't be able to see their own hands in front of their faces.

  Householders would have to cover their windows with black paint, oilcloth, or blinds made of thick black paper, which would have to be sealed to the window frame—not a sliver of light could leak out. The fines for violations would be stiff, the enforcement rigid.

  When the first real blackout was ordered in September 1939 and all these measures went into effect, many people slept with their jewelry and money, a flashlight, and a first-aid kit on a chair by the bed. In addition to covering their windows, the more conscientious taped the glass in hopes of protecting it from shattering and made a room for refuge in the basement, with a strong table to hide under, mattresses, blankets, food, water, candles, and books and cards to pass the time.

  To those who ventured into the streets during the blackout, the night world was a wilderness. Not only did they bump into newly placed piles of sandbags and barricades, into barbed wire and machine gun emplacements, but they also walked into familiar walls and trees, into canals, off railway platforms, and into each other. Bus conductors couldn't tell the copper coins from the silver. People didn't always know their own roads or recognize their own houses. Familiars passed each other on the street and traveled next to each other on trains unbeknownst to one another. Without streetlights, and with masked headlights, travel at night became so perilous that in the first four months of the blackout, 2,657 pedestrians were killed in road accidents, twice the number as during the same months the year before.

  The first extreme regulations were relaxed in mid-October as a middle ground between safety and fear was negotiated. Blackout hours shrank: the blackout now began a half-hour after sunset and ended a half-hour before sunrise. A little sliver of illumination from streetlights—called "glimmer lighting" or "star-lighting"—was permitted at intersections. Civilian drivers were allowed to use headlight masks. The number of roadway casualties fell, though this was also helped by a new speed limit of 20 miles per hour in densely populated neighborhoods during blackout hours. Gas rationing lessened the flow of traffic as well.

  Cinemas and theaters were allowed to reopen, and during the war years the cinema proved to be extremely popular. As long as people sat transfixed in the dark caves of the movie houses, they could forget the lightless world outside and the strain of everyday living—the threat of falling bombs, the rationing of tea and eggs, sugar and meat. As the sprockets of the projector precisely reeled the film forward—one frame moving past the light as another advanced toward it—a shutter closed and then opened again in order to stop the light from projecting during the brief moment the frames were in motion. On the screen, the images moved seamlessly as light and shadows illuminated an upturned face, a calculated act of murder, or a chorus line of dancers. But without those dark moments interspersed between the light, the film would appear to be no more than jerky vertical movements. The illusion of constancy viewers had as they gazed at a man eating his shoe or sliding down a banister in tie and tails would be lost.

  At Christmastime, 1939, shops were allowed limited lighting, as were some theaters, on condition that all had to batten down during air raid warnings. Museums and galleries, which had previously been closed, opened, too, though most of their valuable works had been shipped to safer places. Pedestrians were allowed to use flashlights again, but the lamp had to be covered with two thicknesses of white paper and the light had to be switched off during alerts. They couldn't have given off more light than the stone lamps of the Pleistocene.

  The distinction between night and day was absolute, as it hadn't been since the shuttered, silent nights of the Middle Ages. Life continued in want and isolation as everyone waited within their husks for peace to favor them again.

  By the time of the Blitz, in the late summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had developed radio beams that helped navigators locate targets, so they could aim with some accuracy in bad weather or on dark nights. Still, the full moon was called the Bomber's Moon. Vera Brittain described the night of September 7, 1940:

  From different angles, at different heights and with different speeds, came fifteen hundred aeroplanes of all types and sizes dropping bombs by the ton in eight hours of terror.... Furious fires, climbing the midnight sky from slums and docks, destroyed in a moment the simple precaution of the blackout;...civilians listening in the shelters and basements to the ceaseless roar
of the planes and the intermittent thud of bombs, lost all sense of time, of order, even of consciousness. That night at least four hundred people perished; on the next, two hundred.

  October 15 saw 410 raiders over London. They dropped 538 tons of explosives, which killed 400 civilians and injured 900 more. Hundreds of fires burned throughout the city. It would go on night after night for months, then intermittently for years. The two-minute rise and fall of the air raid warning, the sirens through the boroughs, the sound of the raiders coming. "Whatever part of London we live in," Brittain wrote, "they always seem, by day or by night, to be passing just overhead." Then the whistle and crackle of bombs falling, "the clatter of little incendiaries on roofs and pavements"; burglar alarms, dogs barking, glass breaking, fire bells, the rain of rubble, walls tumbling, metal crashing, wood splintering. Sounds—and what the imagination made of them. "Yet another raider came up from the southeast," wrote Graham Greene, "muttering ... like a witch in a child's dream, 'Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?'"

  And what if there happened to be quiet? "Over the night, like a suffocating coverlet, lies that sinister silence, characteristic of all raid periods free from noise, which make us feel that a large number of unpleasant occurrences are happening somewhere else."

  At the warning, many left their darkened rooms for the basement; for a corrugated metal Anderson shelter in the garden; for churches, schools, or the tube, where they waited for daylight as the air soured around them. Even deep underground, those seeking refuge could feel the percussive effects of the bombs as they rested their heads against the wall. People were most visible in hiding. "[They] had taken over the Underground.... It wasn't only on the platforms it was in an empty tunnel, too, where they were excavating to put a new line in.... I had never seen so many reclining figures," remembered sculptor Henry Moore, "and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture." He drew them, faces nestled in the valleys of their bedclothes, some with their mouths slack and open, others with their jaws clenched, heads buried in the crook of an arm or turned to another. "And amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers formed together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of passing trains."

  The day was "a pure and curious holiday from fear.... The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache." Amid the dust and grit; the stopped clocks and shaken plaster; the vases, toilets, and tables set for dinner exposed to the street; the acrid smell of bombed factories, dye houses, and tanneries; the stink from broken sewer pipes and domestic gas lines—every seeping little loss—funerals crawled along the cobbles and amid the rubble. Summer seeds drifted in and took hold in what remained of kitchens and bedrooms. The dazed walked to their jobs, made their breakfasts, and polished broken glass.

  Life was hardly different in Moscow, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Paris, Dresden, Cologne: all enduring aerial bombardment, all under some kind of blackout order. Stone cities turned into dust. Wood cities burned. Hans Erich Nossack described his approach to Hamburg after a night of bombing:

  What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost. It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible.... And already we were perplexed and did not know how to explain the strangeness. Where once one's gaze had hit upon the walls of houses, a silent plain now stretched to infinity.... Solitary chimneys that grew from the ground like cenotaphs, like Neolithic dolmens or admonishing fingers.... How many things we had learned in school, how many books we had read, how many illustrations we had marveled at, but we had never seen a report about anything like this.

  The eastern seaboard of the United States remained protected from aerial bombardment by the ocean, by the inability of planes to fly across it without refueling. Even so, in 1941 New York began to prepare for a blackout, too. General civil defense planning had been under way for months. "There is said," reported the New York Times, "to be a genuine fear that the American people would embark on innumerable programs for the defense of their home cities—programs that might have no merit beyond the enthusiasm of the promoters. The [commission set up by the War Department aims] to forestall, by planning, the bungling of improvizations [sic]."

  Manhattan was already subdued by the war, by rationing, and by the dimming of the lights in Times Square and along the waterfront, ordered to prevent the silhouetting of vessels in the docks and shipping lanes, which would have made them easier targets for German U-boats. Still, New York was the premier electric city, and though officials had the example of London to emulate in its methods for blacking out, it took more than a year, and numerous district drills, to prepare the borough of Manhattan—with its hundreds of miles of streets, its fourteen thousand acres—for its first complete drill. The day and time of the beginning of the drill—9:30 P.M. on May 22, 1942—and its duration—twenty minutes—were widely advertised beforehand and entirely expected. It turned out to be a foggy night with a cool wind. In Times Square, immediately before the air raid drill, wardens and policemen began to call, "Get off the streets.... Everybody off the street." Pedestrians crowded into doorways and under marquees. They piled into the subway entrances. According to the New York Times:

  The crowds melted into the darkness, taking refuge wherever possible. You could stand in the center of Broadway or Seventh Avenue and barely discern a moving form. Several rooms in the Claridge Hotel still showed pale light. The wardens and policemen shrilled their whistles or called hoarsely to these places. "Lights out, Claridge! Put out those lights!" The cry went up from male and female voices, and one by one the Claridge lights died.... Now and then a man or woman, or a couple, broke for cover and the patter of their feet was clear and distinct above the whispers of those already under shelter.... Kiosk lights at Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue were blurry globes in the rain. A zealous warden, unable to find some one to put it out, dumped a basket of rubbish over one of these lamps but the beams lanced out from under the blanket and threw shafts into the shining gutter.

  There were no lights all the way up Fifth Avenue, throughout Greenwich Village, in the fog and rain of Harlem, or along the crooked, narrow streets of Chinatown. On the East Side, shades were drawn over the Sabbath candles in the windows. Millions breathed in the dark, sitting in living rooms or standing at the sink or in entry halls, on the dance floor, or by their work stations. Although there was no order for quiet, few spoke above a whisper.

  When the all clear was sounded at 9:50 P.M. and the lights came on, they hadn't been doused long enough to give people's eyes time to adjust to the dark. Chemical changes in the retina had not yet occurred. In Times Square, almost immediately after the drill, voices rose above the noise of traffic starting up, and dance music leaked out of nightclubs. Crowds poured out of the entryways and up the subway stairs and moved steadily along the streets once more. "As the lights came on again in hotels and shop windows and traffic lamps winked red and green through rain, the crowd cheered."

  In London, when after nearly six years of nighttime restrictions the blackout order was lifted, the exhausted populace didn't seem to have the heart to light up the city again. The New York Times reported, "For every undraped window there were twenty in darkness. Some of the black-out windows showed chinks of light, which hitherto would have brought the air raid warden to the door.... Department stores stayed dark, as did the electric signs on Piccadilly. It will be some time before wiring can be refurbished." The streetlamps also remained dark, because their wires needed to be refurbished as well. "The few householders who left their windows bare had to remember that a front room from the street looked like a well-lighted stage set and act accordingly. Mostly they blacked out, as before."

  16. Lascaux Discovered

  DURING THE LONG MONTHS in which the lights were out all over Europe, the Paleolithic drawings in the Lascaux Cave were discovered. On September 8, 1940, in the Vézère Valley in the Black Périgord o
f France—then known as Vichy France—seventeen-year-old Marcel Ravidat, along with several friends and Ravidat's dog, were roaming the hills above their town. In the nineteenth century, the land had been cultivated with grapevines, but when the vines were killed by phylloxera, local farmers dug them up and planted the area in pines. When one of the trees toppled over early in the twentieth century, it revealed an opening in the ground about the size of the entrance to a fox's den, which the farmers blocked off to protect their cattle from possible injury. Legend has it that during Ravidat's walk, his dog fell into the hole, and when Ravidat scrambled to the dog's rescue, he noticed an opening to a deep shaft. He and some friends returned four days later. "I made myself a very rustic but quite adequate lamp from an old oil pump and a few meters of string," Ravidat recalled. "When we arrived at the hole I rolled some large stones into it and was surprised at the time they took to reach the bottom.... I set to work with my big knife ... to widen the hole so that we could get into it." After hours of digging, planning, and crawling, they arrived at the floor of the cave. "We raised the lamp to the height of the walls and saw in its flickering light several lines in various colours. Intrigued by these coloured lines, we set about meticulously exploring the walls and, to our great surprise, discovered several fair-sized animal figures there.... Encouraged by this success we began to go through the cave, moving from one discovery to the next. Our joy was indescribable."

  In the following days, other boys came to explore the cave, as did the local schoolmaster and then local men and women. Within a few weeks, people from all over the region began to arrive—more than five hundred visitors in the span of one week. "Like a trail of gunpowder the rumor of our discovery had spread through the region," Ravidat said. Old women brought their own candles to see by. They walked over rough ground and climbed down the narrow entrance. The paintings then, seen by the light of rudimentary lamps and small open flames, must have appeared much as they had in the Pleistocene.