Preindustrial era Early lamps were used in the
Ancient Greek and
Ancient Roman civilizations, where light primarily served the purpose of
security, to both protect the wanderer from tripping on the path over something and keep potential robbers at bay. At that time, oil lamps were used predominantly, as they provided a long-lasting and moderate flame. A slave responsible for lighting the oil lamps in front of Roman villas was called a . In the words of
Edwin Heathcote, "Romans illuminated the streets with oil lamps, and cities from
Baghdad to
Cordoba were similarly lit when most of Europe was living in what it is now rather unfashionable to call the Dark Ages but which were, from the point of view of street lighting, exactly that." So-called "
link boys" escorted people from one place to another through the murky, winding streets of medieval towns. Before
incandescent lamps,
candle lighting was employed in cities. The earliest lamps required that a
lamplighter tour the town at dusk, lighting each of the lamps. According to some sources, illumination was ordered in London in 1417 by Sir
Henry Barton,
Mayor of London, though there is no firm evidence of this. Public street lighting was first developed in the 16th century, and accelerated following the invention of lanterns with glass windows by Edmund Heming in London and
Jan van der Heyden in Amsterdam, which greatly improved the quantity of light. In 1588 the Parisian Parliament decreed that a torch be installed and lit at each intersection, and in 1594 the police changed this to lanterns. Still, in the mid 17th century it was a common practice for travelers to hire a lantern-bearer if they had to move at night through the dark, winding streets. King
Louis XIV authorized sweeping reforms in Paris in 1667, which included the installation and maintenance of lights on streets and at intersections, as well as stiff penalties for vandalizing or stealing the fixtures. Paris had more than 2,700 streetlights by the end of the 17th century, Under this system, streets were lit with lanterns suspended apart on a cord over the middle of the street at a height of ; as an English visitor enthused in 1698, 'The streets are lit all winter and even during the full moon!' In London, public street lighting was implemented around the end of the 17th century; a
diarist wrote in 1712 that 'All the way, quite through Hyde Park to the Queen's Palace at Kensington, lanterns were placed for illuminating the roads on dark nights.' A much-improved oil lantern, called a , was introduced in 1745 and improved in subsequent years. The light shed from these
réverbères was considerably brighter, enough that some people complained of glare. In 1798, he used gas to light the main building of the
Soho Foundry and in 1802 lit the outside in a public display of gas lighting, the lights astonishing the local population. The first public street lighting with gas was demonstrated in
Pall Mall, London on 4 June 1807 by
Frederick Albert Winsor. In 1811, engineer
Samuel Clegg designed and built what is now considered the oldest extant gasworks in the world. Gas was used to light the worsted mill in the village of
Dolphinholme in North Lancashire. The remains of the works, including a chimney and gas plant, have been put on the National Heritage List for England. Clegg's installation saved the building's owners the cost of up to 1,500 candles every night. It also lit the mill owner's house and the street of millworkers' houses in Dolphinholme. In 1812,
Parliament granted a charter to the London and Westminster
Gas Light and Coke Company, and the first gas company in the world came into being. Less than two years later, on 31 December 1813, the
Westminster Bridge was lit by gas. Following this success, gas lighting spread outside London, both within Britain and abroad. The first place outside London in England to have gas lighting, was
Preston, Lancashire in 1816, where
Joseph Dunn's Preston Gaslight Company introduced a new, brighter gas lighting. Another early adopter was the city of
Baltimore, where the gaslights were first demonstrated at
Rembrandt Peale's Museum in 1816, and Peale's Gas Light Company of Baltimore provided the first gas streetlights in the United States. In the 1860s, streetlights were started in the Southern Hemisphere in
New Zealand. In Paris, public street lighting was first installed on a covered shopping street, the
Passage des Panoramas, in 1817, private interior gas lighting having been previously demonstrated in a house on the rue Saint-Dominique seventeen years prior. The first gas lamps on the main streets of Paris appeared in January 1829 on the
place du Carrousel and the
Rue de Rivoli, then on the
rue de la Paix,
place Vendôme, and rue de Castiglione. By 1857, the
Grands Boulevards were all lit with gas; a Parisian writer enthused in August 1857: "That which most enchants the Parisians is the new lighting by gas of the boulevards...From the church of the Madeleine all the way to rue Montmartre, these two rows of lamps, shining with a clarity white and pure, have a marvelous effect." The gaslights installed on the boulevards and city monuments in the 19th century gave the city the nickname "The City of Light."
Kerosene streetlamps were invented by Polish pharmacist
Ignacy Łukasiewicz in the city of
Lemberg (
Austrian Empire), in 1853. His kerosene lamps were later widely used in Bucharest, Paris, and other European cities. He went on to open the world's first mine in 1854 and the world's first kerosene refinery in 1856 in
Jasło, Poland.
Oil-gas appeared in the field as a rival of coal-gas. In 1815,
John Taylor patented an apparatus for the decomposition of "oil" and other animal substances. Public attention was attracted to "oil-gas" by the display of the patent apparatus at
Apothecary's Hall, by
Taylor & Martineau. During the period of gas lighting, lights were not generally left on for the entire night, nor were they necessarily turned on during periods of
moonlight. In an article about the development of streetlighting in three industrial cities, Mark Bouman reported that
Max Greve, the mayor of
Bochum,
Germany, "fought all his life against 'absurd modernism,' which would have had the lights on even when the moon shone."
Farola fernandina Farola fernandina is a traditional design of gas streetlight which remains popular in Spain. Essentially, it is a neoclassical French style of gas lamp dating from the late 18th century. It may be either a wall-bracket or standard lamp. The standard base is cast metal with an escutcheon bearing two intertwined letters 'F', the
Royal cypher of King
Ferdinand VII of Spain and commemorates the date of the birth of his daughter, the
Infanta Luisa Fernanda, Duchess of Montpensier. File:Base de farola fernandina.jpg|Typical base and escutcheon of a
farola fernandina File:Aranjuez FarolaFernandina.jpg|A
farola fernandina in
Aranjuez File:Aranjuez PalacioReal Farola.jpg|Streetlight in Ferdinand VII style near the
Royal Palace of Aranjuez Arc lamps arc lamp on the Avenue de l'Opera in Paris (1878), the first form of electric street lighting The first electric street lighting employed
arc lamps, initially the "electric candle", "Jablotchkoff candle", or "
Yablochkov candle", developed by Russian
Pavel Yablochkov in 1875. This was a carbon arc lamp employing
alternating current, which ensured that both electrodes were consumed at equal rates. In 1876, the common council of the city of
Los Angeles ordered four arc lights installed in various places in the fledgling town for street lighting. On 30 May 1878, the first electric streetlights in Paris were installed on the avenue de l'Opera and the
Place de l'Étoile, around the
Arc de Triomphe, to celebrate the opening of the
Paris Universal Exposition. In 1881, to coincide with the Paris International Exposition of Electricity, streetlights were installed on the major boulevards. The first streets in London lit with the electrical arc lamp were by the
Holborn Viaduct and the
Thames Embankment in 1878. More than 4,000 were in use by 1881, though by then an improved differential arc lamp had been developed by
Friedrich von Hefner-Alteneck of
Siemens & Halske. The United States was quick in adopting arc lighting, and by 1890 over 130,000 were in operation in the US, commonly installed in exceptionally tall
moonlight towers. Arc lights had two major disadvantages. First, they emit an intense and harsh light which, although useful at industrial sites like dockyards, was discomforting in ordinary city streets. Second, they are maintenance-intensive, as carbon electrodes burn away swiftly. With the development of cheap, reliable and bright
incandescent light bulbs at the end of the 19th century, arc lights passed out of use for street lighting, but remained in industrial use longer.
Incandescent lighting , showing the position of leads and lights along the network of city streets in 1888 The first street to be lit by an
incandescent lightbulb was Mosley Street, in
Newcastle. The street was lit for one night by
Joseph Swan's incandescent lamp on 3 February 1879. Consequently, Newcastle has the first city street in the world to be lit by electric lighting. The first city in the United States to successfully demonstrate electric lighting was
Cleveland, Ohio, with 12 electric lights around the
Public Square road system on 29 April 1879.
Wabash, Indiana, lit 4 Brush arc lamps with 3,000
candlepower each, suspended over their courthouse on 2 February 1880, making the town square "as light as midday".
Kimberley,
Cape Colony (modern South Africa), was the first city in the
Southern Hemisphere and in Africa to have electric streetlights – with 16 first lit on 2 September 1882. The system was only the second in the world, after that of
Philadelphia, to be powered municipally. In Central America,
San Jose, Costa Rica, lit 25 lamps powered by a hydroelectric plant on 9 August 1884. Nuremberg was the first city in
Germany to have electric public lighting on 7 June 1882, followed by Berlin on 20 September 1882 (Potsdamer Platz only). Timișoara (present-day Romania) was the first city in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to have electric public lighting, on 12 November 1884; 731 lamps were used. On 9 December 1882,
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia was introduced to electricity by having a demonstration of 8 arc lights, erected along
Queen Street Mall. The power to supply these arc lights was taken from a 10 hp Crompton DC generator driven by a Robey steam engine in a small foundry in Adelaide Street and occupied by
J. W. Sutton and Co. In 1884,
Walhalla, Victoria, had two lamps installed on the main street by the Long Tunnel (Gold) Mining Company. In 1886, the isolated mining town of Waratah in
Tasmania was the first to have an extensive system of electrically powered street lighting installed. In 1888, the New South Wales town of Tamworth installed a large system illuminating a significant portion of the city, with over 13 km of streets lit by 52 incandescent lights and 3 arc lights. Powered by a municipal power company, this system gave Tamworth the title of "First City of Light" in Australia. On 10 December 1885,
Härnösand became the first town in Sweden with electric street lighting, following the
Gådeå power station being taken into use.
Later developments Incandescent lamps were primarily used for street lighting until the advent of high-intensity
gas-discharge lamps. They were often operated at high-voltage
series circuits. Series circuits were popular since their higher voltage produced more light per watt consumed. Furthermore, before the invention of photoelectric controls, a single switch or clock could control all the lights in an entire district. To avoid having the entire system go dark if a single lamp burned out, each streetlamp was equipped with a device that ensured that the circuit would remain intact. Early series streetlights were equipped with isolation transformers. that would allow current to pass across the transformer whether the bulb worked or not. Later, the
film cutout was invented. This was a small disk of insulating film that separated two contacts connected to the two wires leading to the lamp. If the lamp failed (an
open circuit), the
current through the string became zero, causing the voltage of the circuit (thousands of volts) to be imposed across the insulating film,
penetrating it (see
Ohm's law). In this way, the failed lamp was bypassed and power was restored to the rest of the district. The streetlight circuit contained an automatic current regulator, preventing the current from increasing as lamps burned out, preserving the life of the remaining lamps. When the failed lamp was replaced, a new piece of film was installed, once again separating the contacts in the cutout. This system was recognizable by the large
porcelain insulator separating the lamp and reflector from the mounting arm. This was necessary because the two contacts in the lamp's base may have operated at several thousand volts above ground. ==Modern lights==