by Jane Brox
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, Disenchant
ed 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.
[>] "During the d
ay": Karl Gutzkow, quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 537.
[>] "The new mode of illumination": Frederick Penzel, Theatre Lighting Before Electricity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 54.
"a kaleidoscope": Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 175.
"As the darkness came on": Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," in The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), p. 648.
75 "As the night deepened": Ibid., p. 650.
[>] "Some rushed about": "Bereft of Light: Terrific Explosion at the Metropolitan Gas Works," New York Times, December 24, 1871, p. 5.
CHAPTER 5: TOWARD A MORE PERFECT FLAME
[>] "A candle, you know": Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 13.
[>] "brilliantly white, inodorous": Campbell Morfit, A Treatise on Chemistry Applied to the Manufacture of Soap and Candles (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1856), p. 543.
"mortal man should feed": Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 325.
[>] "any common use": "Camphene and Burning Fluid," New York Times, November 28, 1854, p. 4.
"a burning fluid lamp": Jane Nylander, "Two Brass Lamps...," Historic New England Magazine, Winter/Spring 2003, http://www.historicnewengland.org/nehm/2003winterspringpage04.htm (accessed February 12, 2009).