Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  Scientists and archaeologists came as well and mapped the cave: Chamber, Hall, Gallery, Passageway, Apse, Shaft, and Nave. They named the paintings: Frieze of the Black Horses, Frieze of the Small Stags, Procession of Engraved Horses, Frieze of the Swimming Stags, Niche of the Felines. After the war, the number of visitors to Lascaux increased markedly, and in time a walkway was put in.

  During the thousands of years that the Lascaux Cave had remained undiscovered, the temperature inside never rose above 59 degrees, and the humidity level stayed constant. When the cave was crowded with visitors, the temperature sometimes rose to nearly 90 degrees. In 1955 excess carbon dioxide, produced by the visitors' breath, caused the first noticeable signs of deterioration in the paintings. Water droplets began to appear on the walls, and as they trickled down, they erased the pigments on the backs and necks of the animals. In 1958, to mitigate this problem, an air-exchange machine was put in, but it also worked to scatter the pollen that came into the cave on the visitors' feet. As a result, algae—"green leprosy" it was called—began to ravage the paintings. The animals were disappearing "in a prairie" of algae, Ravidat recalled. Also apparent was the "white disease"—crystals of calcite encouraged by the increased levels of carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature—which began to cloud the paintings. To protect them, the cave was closed to the public in 1963.

  In 1981 Mario Ruspoli was asked by the French Ministry of Culture to make a cinematographic record of the Lascaux paintings. It took him years to complete his work, since he was allowed access to the cave for only twenty days a year, in March and April, when the cave was at its coldest. His crew could work for only two or three hours at a time so that the heat emanating from their bodies and their hand-held, 100-watt quartz lamps could dissipate. Just two of their lamps could raise the temperature by several degrees and also raise carbon dioxide and moisture levels. One human body gave off more heat than the lamps. Ruspoli recalled:

  The lights were never held on a particular spot for longer than twenty seconds, and at the end of each take they were turned up to the ceiling or down to the floor, causing the image to fade into darkness.... After shooting it was advisable not to light the lamps for a little while in order to allow the slight rise in temperature caused by the bodies and the quartz lamps ... to disperse.

  Our precision lenses sometimes surpassed the powers of perception of the naked eye, bringing out details which were only just discernible, particularly in the painted surfaces and around the figures.... At first it seemed that it would be impossible to film with so little light ... but in actual fact the opposite proved to be true.... Our modest resources and the restricted lighting that was permitted made us take a new cinematic approach to the art on the cave walls.... We had to use swift, precise and spontaneous takes, the camera moving forward through the dark cave and disclosing the space as it emerged.... This slow unfolding of the images in the silence of the cave took us to the edge of another world ... and we ourselves gradually began to feel like initiates.... The Upside-down Horse curves round a pier and the Great Black Auroch makes use of the curious relief of its concave niche: when it is seen at an angle from the end of the Gallery, only its head is visible; the body is concealed behind a projection in the rock and is only revealed when one moves towards it.... We noticed all this as we advanced, lamps in hand, along the wall toward the back of the cave. The painted figures emerged gradually from their hiding-places in the rock and this movement made them seem to come alive.... To the members of my team and myself, Lascaux became a sort of second homeland.

  PART IV

  Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV,

  Pale Fire

  Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light.

  —RALPH ELLISON,

  Invisible Man

  17. Blackout, 1965

  ...we have built the great cities; now

  There is no escape.

  — ROBINSON JEFFERS,

  "The Purse-Seine"

  THE RURAL ELECTRIFICATION PROGRAM slowed to a near halt when supplies and manpower were redirected to fighting World War II, but once hostilities ceased, the electrification of the American countryside resumed. By 1960, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rural Electric Administration, 96 percent of American farms were connected to electric lines. The average rural customer used about 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, compared with the 1935 average of 60 to 90 kilowatt-hours per month. Although farms continued to disappear, rural lines connected more and more people as potato and beet fields, pastures, apple orchards, and orange groves were plowed under and turned into suburban neighborhoods. With the advent of nuclear energy, it was rumored that electricity would become too cheap to meter.

  During these postwar years, the U.S. power industry remained stable. The New Deal regulations were still in place, and the industry grew at a steady 7 to 8 percent per year. The utility companies had come to be thought of as natural monopolies, and the power grid had reached a size and significance that could never have been imagined in the late nineteenth century, when a writer at Harper's, commenting on the accomplishment at Niagara, declared, "It is scarcely to be expected that current can be brought as far as New York [City] to commercial advantage." Individual power stations, including Niagara, had now grown to serve areas that could encompass entire states, and not one of them stood alone: each was connected to, and might borrow from, a host of others in an electric grid. The point of generation was often far from the point of demand, and the interlacing corridors of long-distance wires that cut through rough, quiet, country linked farms, cities, and suburbs—places with ever-changing historical realities and interrelationships—in a shared fate.

  In each power station, watchers in the command center hunched day and night over consoles, scanning screens, dials, and gauges that monitored turbines and took account of current running back and forth over thousands of miles of lines. Such a network proved economical: "In times of normal demand for electricity the member companies [could] shut down some of their expensive steam-fed facilities and 'ride' on the cheaper current provided by hydroelectric generators." And on the whole, it was more reliable. If, for instance, a generator had to be shut down for maintenance or repair at an eastern Massachusetts station, power could be borrowed from New York or Wisconsin, for there was virtually no electrical distance between them. Power could be generated in New York and travel to New Jersey before arriving in Massachusetts if need be. While all this was being accomplished, people in Boston might notice nothing more than a momentary flicker of their lamps.

  But for all the massive reach of electricity, the generation of electric power also stood in the same delicate balance as in 1910, when Edward Hungerford detailed the way a cloud could stress the power systems of New York City, for the need to maintain an equilibrium of supply and demand hadn't changed. There was more at stake, of course. The balance had to be maintained across numerous power stations, and—since electricity moved back and forth across the wires—surges, flow reversals, or disruptions at one power plant could have far-reaching ramifications and might ultimately affect the synchronicity of the entire system.

  That synchronicity was essential. By 1965 all public utility generators east of the Rocky Mountains ran in sync with one another so that alternating current could be seamlessly switched from one generator to another throughout the system. You might think of their working sound as the music of our spheres, for if even one were to fall out of phase and begin spinning at its own speed, if its steady, precise humming became discordant—a wobbly song of its own—well, then...

  A slight variation [could] be tolerated if it [was] soon brought into line. A major variation [would force] other generators to "hunt" for a new phase more aligned to the maverick's.... The out-of-phase current finally [would cause] other generators o
n the circuit to shut down. The more generators that cut off, the more that [would] follow suit. For any generator feeding current into the system at that point would be so overloaded that its safety devices, the circuit breakers, would bring it to a halt.

  What goes on across the power grid, it's said, "is like a game of tug of war, which works as long as neither side—the generating stations and the load centers—wins. If one side falters, and the rope moves too far, everyone on the other side will fall down."

  All through the brief daylight hours of November 9, 1965, the forty-two interconnected power stations between Ontario and Boston that made up the Canadian and U.S. Eastern Interconnection hummed along. There were no extraordinary demands on the supply: the weather was mild and the sky clear. As the sun set shortly before five o'clock, farmers in the countryside, with their fields all plowed under and their barns full of hay, were beginning the evening milking. In small towns, stores flipped over their Open signs and closed up shop. Everywhere, wives and mothers began preparing dinner while children sat transfixed in front of the TV watching The Three Stooges. City office workers, their day done, jammed the elevators, subways, escalators, streets, and trains. Car lights formed brilliant rivers down avenues and across bridges, their drivers obeying, anticipating, or trying to beat the red, amber, and green signals that had been directing the flow of traffic ever since the first four-way, three-color stoplights—based on controls used by railroads—were devised in the 1920s.

  Nowhere were more people in transit than in New York City, when, at 5:16 P.M., more than three hundred miles to the north, at the Sir Adam Beck No. 2 generating station in Ontario, a relay—a device about the size of a telephone of the time which automatically regulated and directed the flow of current—failed to give off the proper signal. As a result, a circuit breaker did not open, which caused excess electric current to surge through the system. According to John Wilford and Richard Shepard,

  Because the relay did not work, there was an overload on the line. This caused relays on other lines feeding through the plant to operate circuit breakers and the total of 1.6 million kilowatts going through the Beck station suddenly reversed course—as electricity will do when it is unable to flow in the direction it is supposed to.

  Much of all this vast quantity of electric current raced back across upper New York State, tripping safety equipment from Rochester to Boston and points beyond. At this point the second phase in the breakdown occurred. Consolidated Edison in New York City, and other power companies to the south that had been receiving power from the area knocked out of service by the power surge, were hit by a reverse flow in their own lines. Their power rushed, somewhat as air will rush to fill a vacuum, into the upstate New York—New England—Ontario region. The generators in New York City and elsewhere, inadequate to fill the huge power vacuum, automatically shut themselves off.

  Twenty-eight of the forty-two power plants in the region shut down, and the darkness sped south and east within the span of just over twenty minutes. At 5:17 Rochester and Binghamton, New York, shut down. Then eastern Massachusetts, the Hudson Valley, New York City, and Long Island lost power. All of Connecticut shut down at 5:30. Parts of Vermont and southwestern New Hampshire—the last to go—went dark at 5:38. The plant on Staten Island maintained power because it was able to break free of its network connection before failure. This good fortune was as bewildering as the bad:

  In the New York State system ... the 345,000 volt lines ... are so designed so that a region hit by a local power failure can immediately have a surge of energy sent to it from ... another power source.... To be capable of this instantaneous action, the system must be able to accept a wide range of power loads. Hence the main trunk, the electric superhighway bisecting the state, is not equipped with circuit-breakers sensitive to slight changes in load. The decision to cut a local system out of the grid is a human one and the actual cut-off must be done manually at a local control center.

  But on Staten Island, for some reason, a circuit breaker tripped unexpectedly, automatically severing it from the rest of the grid. The manager of system operations there could only say, "I don't know why it opened."

  Northern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland had systems that carried lesser voltage, and their circuit breakers were set to trip automatically, which severed them from the grid in time. The state of Maine's power system was only weakly connected to the rest of New England's and so was able to cut itself off from the failure and subsequently lend power to parts of New Hampshire. The lights in these areas formed a fringe of illumination around a vast darkness: almost everyone across 80,000 square miles of the northeastern United States and part of Ontario—30 million people—had lost their electricity.

  At the time of the breakdown, there was no apparent reason for the outage—no storm, no high winds or lightning, no trees touching high-tension wires—and the cause would not be known for days. In each power plant, engineers and technicians were left to wonder whether something in their own system had triggered the shutdown, while people in the countryside—accustomed to occasional local outages even in good weather—naturally thought that maybe a car had hit a pole somewhere down the road. In the cities, there were vague notions of sabotage: "'The Chinese,' a housewife on New York's East Side thought when she saw New York fade from her window, and then was a little ashamed." And "through the minds of two knowledgeable newspapermen flashed the same thought at about the same time, as they were to discover later. Both thought, 'The anti-Vietnam demonstrators have pulled something off.'" Some said it was an earthquake; others recalled extraordinary times. "I could see the New York skyline from my windows," remarked a woman from Brooklyn. "All of a sudden, it's dark—dead, kind of. The last time was in the war, it was dark about the same way."

  In New York City—the world's most concentrated electric market—800,000 people were trapped in the subway; countless others were in elevators—"like hamsters in their cages," a New York Times reporter would say—or in offices high up in skyscrapers. Those riding on escalators "glided down more and more slowly, until, at last, they were scarcely moving at all." Not everyone risked descending to the street by way of the darkened stairwells. More than five hundred people would spend the night in the forty-eight-story skyscraper that housed the offices of Life magazine, and an emergency medical center would be set up in the lobby.

  Those already in their cars and on their way home had limited fuel, since gas pumps needed electricity to run. All the stoplights failed, and although some citizens tried to direct traffic and policemen set flares in the roads at dangerous forks and intersections to help drivers negotiate their way, most of the city was quickly snarled in gridlock. Some native New Yorkers walked across the bridges—flashlights and transistors in hand—for the first time in their lives. Others caught rides by hooking onto the back bumpers of crowded buses. Cabbies hiked up their fares. A. M. Rosenthal wrote, "As usual New Yorkers helped gouge themselves. They stood in the roadway, flagged down taxis and shouted 'Thirty dollars to Brooklyn!' 'Ten dollars to the Village!'" It would be said of that night that it was easier to cross the Atlantic to Cairo than to get to Stamford, Connecticut, from the city.

  ***

  "The more efficient the technology, the more catastrophic its destruction when it collapses," observes Wolfgang Schivelbush. This was a given, and although utility executives and engineers always acknowledged that a widespread failure of the grid could occur, few believed that it would, and they'd made no contingency plans for an extensive, cascading failure. Their confidence had fostered a sense of complacency: out of 150 hospitals in New York City, fewer than half had adequate backup power. Doctors had to perform emergency surgeries by flashlight, and five babies were born by candlelight at St. Francis Hospital.

  Likewise, the airports were entirely unprepared for the loss of power. They had no radar for six hours and no field lighting. High above the city, airplanes lost their ground orientation and were unable to land. "It was a beautiful night," recall
ed one pilot. "You could see a million miles. You could see the Verrazano Bridge and parts of Brooklyn, but beyond Brooklyn, where we usually see the runways at Kennedy and Floyd Bennett Field it was dark.... I thought 'another Pearl Harbor.'" Kennedy International Airport closed down for almost twelve hours, though several hours into the blackout, LaGuardia was able to light one runway with power from a water-pump generator. Both New York airports had to cancel or divert about 250 flights; some had to be rerouted as far away as Bermuda.

  The fine, clear voices that ordinarily gave the news of world—the dead in Vietnam, the protesters at home, the condition of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower's heart—turned tinny and staticky, reduced to the sound on transistor radios. The first reports that came through were wildly inaccurate, claiming that the blackout stretched all the way to Miami, that it reached to Chicago, that Canada lay in darkness. The fears would not be allayed for several hours. "We still knew nothing about what had really happened, what had created our predicament," recalled a New Yorker writer, "but just then anybody who might still have been worried that the blackout heralded a foreign takeover was reassured by an announcement from the Pentagon, over the little transistors, that it had no effect on our 'defense posture.'...The power companies soon provided similar comfort, with their talk of 'outage.'" Still, rumors would live long after the lights returned.