Electrical Aptitude Practice Test 2

Lighting the Night: A Short History of Street Lamps

¹For most of history, city streets were almost completely dark after sunset, and people who went out at night carried their own torches or lanterns. Paris was one of the first large cities to organize public lighting. In 1667, under King Louis XIV, the city began installing and maintaining lanterns along its streets, and by the end of the century it had more than 2,700 of them. These early lanterns gave only a dim glow. In 1745 an improved oil lamp called the réverbère, which used a reflector to spread its light, was introduced.

²Gas lighting brought the next great change. When coal is heated in a closed vessel, it gives off a gas that burns with a bright flame, and this gas could be carried through pipes to lamps across a city. In 1807 Frederick Albert Winsor demonstrated gas street lamps along Pall Mall in London. A gas company chartered in 1812 began supplying the city, and Westminster Bridge was lit by gas in December 1813. Across the Atlantic, Baltimore became the first American city with gas street lights when its gas company lit its first street lamp on February 7, 1817.

³Gas lamps were brighter than oil lamps, but each one still needed daily care. Lamplighters walked their routes at dusk, using long poles to open the gas valve and light each lamp, and returned at dawn to put the lamps out.

⁴The arrival of electricity changed street lighting again. An arc lamp makes light from an electric current jumping across a small gap between two carbon rods, and its glare is far stronger than any gas flame. On May 30, 1878, Paris installed electric arc lights on the Avenue de l'Opéra. In the United States, Wabash, Indiana, lit its courthouse square with four arc lamps on March 31, 1880. Because arc lamps were so powerful, some cities mounted them on tall towers to light whole neighborhoods at once, and by 1890 more than 130,000 arc lamps were in use across the country.

⁵During the twentieth century, most cities replaced their gas lamps with electric ones. After World War II, sodium lamps, with their yellow-orange glow, became common. Today many cities are switching to light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which use less energy.