Let There Be Dimmers on Our Glowing Planet
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America roared into the electric age and didn't stop to consider what it had wrought until just short of the 100th anniversary of Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb.
That's what Jane Brox, author of "Brilliant," argues, and she dates that realization not to the 1965 blackout that closed down most of the northeast but to President Nixon's dictum in the wake of the 1973 energy crisis that all nonessential lighting -- holiday lights, advertising, the lights of Broadway -- be dimmed. "Something essential had been taken away," she writes, "something larger than sheer illumination: the assumption that we could live without thinking about energy, that we could take it all for granted."
Humans have been lighting their environment with hearths and torches for half a million years but the lamps date from no more than 40,000 years ago. Some of the earliest were found in the prehistoric caves of Lascaux, in France. The complex and lyrically beautiful paintings, dating from 18,000 years ago, were created by the light of tallow cupped in limestone.
The painters saw only a small fragment at a time of the huge and complicated panorama, which spreads over numerous chambers of the cave and uses the contours of the rock to create the illusion of movement. Lascaux serves as the subject for both prologue and epilogue to her book. The light at Lascaux was "as it would be for ages to come: light, its limits, and then the dark."
Ms. Brox's narrative is in many ways a social history, told through man's relationship to light. In the Middle Ages cities were dark at night, residents locked into their houses. The term "curfew" dates from this period (couvre le feu), for the moment the lights were doused the streets became too dangerous to navigate.
By the 1700s cities were sporadically lit with whale oil lamps, kept alive by lamplighters. They tended to extinguish easily. Most were out by 9:00 or 10:00. Linkboys, bearing links, or torches, took over, hiring themselves out to pedestrians and lighting their way home. Eventually city lights came to define the very idea of urbanity, she writes. The countryside remained mostly in darkness until the Roosevelt era, when the hydroelectric projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority finally made possible the spread of electricity to rural areas.
First Published July 27, 2010 2:00 am
