Melondrop’s Reviews > Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century > Status Update

The evolution of 'homogenous light' into two increasingly different species, 'outside light' and 'inside light' (or 'distant' and 'close' light), relates to the wider social process by which the public and the private were increasingly separated in bourgeois life.

The open flame of gaslight linked it, however distantly, with the old unity of fire and light, but no reminiscence of this lingered with incandescent electric light. According to Bachelard, the incandescent bulb 'will never allow us to dream the dreams that the light of the living oil-lamp conjured up. We live in the age of administered light.'

Only the [parts] of the lamp...are the province of the artist. All the rest...are factory-produced. This dualism means that the lamp is a hybrid. Half of it is created by the living hands of artists and reflects their personalities...while something of the deathly chill and hardness typical of machine-made products adheres to the other half. The soul of a work of art is chained to the dead body of a machine.

lantern smashing: the desire to wreak such destruction and also to experience a symbolic sexual release in the loud splintering of breaking glass were probably the deeper motives of lantern smashing. Every attack on a street lantern was a small act of rebellion against the order that it embodied and was punished as such.

On the process of literally modernizing the eye, the perception, to be able to take in the electric lightbulb: "Everyday perceptions, still geared towards the gas flame, had to be trained to see the filament at all...looking at the filament's progress allows us to follow the physical microstructure of the modernization process. The eye would have to come to terms with the results."

On the normalization of gas explosions: The public's fears on the one side, the industry's obvious lack of concern on the other, and governmental supervisory bodies mediating between them - this is how the lines of battle were drawn up when the 19th century spawned industries that posed a potential threat to health. Positions have not changed much to the present day.

Instead [of considering its industrial use], for Lebon, gaslighting possessed its own intrinsic value, as something that contributed to the civilization and progress of humanity. Accordingly, he saw gas production less as the exploitation of a previously neglected waste product than as a realization of a philosophical principle.

Natural gas was known in the late 17th/early 18th centuries as “inflammable air” or “spirit” - spirit in particular lending itself to a feeling of the occult or supernatural, in addition to how this gas was only used to entertain party guests for the first many decades of its use.

The new factories needed new sources of light. Artificial light was needed to illuminate larger spaces for longer periods of time. In the factories, night was turned today more consistently than anywhere else. Industrial requirements could not be satisfied simply by multiplying traditional sources of light.… The only way to increase the amount of light was the heighten the intensity of the individual light source.

The transition of lighting from ostentatious displays of wealth and waste by nobility to ways of elongating the workday and allowing factory labor to exist, harkening the age of industrialization.