History of street lighting in the United States

The earliest street lights in the colonial America were oil lamps burning whale oil from the Greenland or Arctic right whales of the North Atlantic, or from sperm whales of the South Atlantic, South Pacific, and beyond. Lamplighters were responsible for igniting the lamps and maintaining them. As early as the 1750s, inventor Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia introduced innovations in oil lamp design, such as using two woven wicks to siphon oil from a reservoir, and flat panes of glass which could be easily replaced and were cheaper than blown glass bowls. In Boston, a citizens' committee led by John Hancock installed more than 300 oil lamps from England in 1773. The year before, a newspaper editorial had called for a system of public lamps to prevent crime and protect citizens at night. The glass globes were placed on posts ten feet high and spaced fifty feet apart along the street, following the system used in London. These early street lights were "more suggestive than real"; in practice, pedestrians moved from one pool of light to another, walking through shadow in between. In New York, more than 1,600 oil lamps were in use as city street lights in 1809. The city had started using spermaceti oil, which burned more brightly than candles, in its street lamps from as early as 1792. Philadelphia was close behind during this period, with 1,100 street lamps. == Gas street lighting ==

Gas lamps gradually started replacing oil street lamps in the United States, beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century. The first US city to use gas street lights was Baltimore, starting in 1817. Gas light was up to ten times brighter than light from oil lamps, but by present-day standards, the lights appeared "distinctly yellow and not very bright". In 1841, British author James Silk Buckingham observed that New York City's street lights were inadequate: “The lamps are so far apart and so scantily supplied with light that it is impossible to distinguish names or numbers on the doors from carriages or even on foot without ascending the steps." By 1893, New York City had 26,500 gas street lights and only 1,500 electrical lights. == Electric street lighting ==

Arc lamps The first public demonstration of outdoor electrical lighting in the US was in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 29, 1879. Inventor Charles F. Brush had been perfecting the dynamo arc light, which could produce a glow equivalent to 4,000 candles in a single lamp. By 1917, the number of incandescent filament lamps used in street lighting had reached 1,389,000 across the United States, while the number of arc lamps had started to decline. Mercury vapor lamps By the mid-20th century, increasing motorization necessitated better illumination, particularly in business districts where there was more mixing of cars and pedestrians, as well as along commercial thoroughfares. Mercury vapor streetlights started to be used more widely in the United States after 1950, mainly due to their cost efficiency. Lamp manufacturers started to promote sodium vapor lamps for "crime fighting", a marketing strategy that backfired when cities such as Newark and New Orleans rejected sodium vapor, to avoid publicly stigmatizing high-crime neighborhoods. brighter than mercury vapor light, which has been described as a "harsh metallic blue" in hue. During the OPEC oil embargo, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced a plan to make Chicago "the first large U.S. city to have sodium vapor lamps on all residential streets", replacing 85,000 mercury vapor streetlights. the newspaper's own architecture critic worried about the "eerie, ominous quality of sodium vapor illumination". Light emitting diodes In recent years, efforts to make street lighting more energy efficient have focused on using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to replace high-pressure mercury (HPM), metal halide (MH), and high-pressure sodium (HPS) luminaires. LEDs also produce a whiter light, and can be installed as part of a centrally managed system with further energy saving controls, such as part-night lighting and dimming. Although the up-front costs of installing LED fixtures is significant, municipalities switching to LED street lighting generally expect to recoup their investment through reductions in ongoing electricity and maintenance costs. Many of the early projects in the United States also benefitted from economic stimulus block grants. In 2007, the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced plans to become "the first US city to convert all of its downtown streetlights to LED technology." The city replaced 120-watt bulbs which lasted only two years with 56-watt LEDs that would last a decade, and expected to reduce its public lighting energy use by half. However, for the first two years, DTE Energy continued to bill Ann Arbor at the same rate as before, because the street lights were not metered, and electricity charges were estimated based on past use. Under the direction of the state utility regulator, DTE Energy eventually revised its rates for Ann Arbor based on the expected energy use for "experimental lighting technology", and credited the city retroactive to the installation. As of January 2011, the city of Ann Arbor had switched 1,400 of its 7,000 streetlight fixtures to LEDs, and saved approximately $200,000, including reduced maintenance costs. == Other electric light generation methods ==

Towers Many cities across the United States experimented with tall tower structures to deliver light to entire city neighborhoods, similar to the arc lamp installation at the Wabash County Courthouse in Indiana. Most of these cities erected only one or two towers, before falling back on traditional lamppost lighting. One exception was Los Angeles, which erected 36 towers, fifteen of which were 150-feet tall and equipped with three 3,000-candlepower arc lamps each. The city of Austin purchased 31 of Detroit's used moonlight towers in 1894. The induction lamps were expected to last 100,000 hours before requiring maintenance and consume 30 to 40 percent less electricity, thereby saving an estimated $1 million annually. Astronomers from the nearby Palomar Observatory had objected to replacing the HPS lamps with light sources with higher color temperatures, which would increase light pollution and interfere with their research. == Urban Light ==

Urban Light at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Center, Los Angeles, is an assemblage of historical street lights taken from actual usage in Southern California in the form of a 2008 sculpture by Chris Burden. == See also ==