8/25/2014 CABINET // Blinded by the Light

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ISSUE 21 ELECTRICITY SPRING 2006
Blinded by the Light
SASHA ARCHIBALD

Few concepts are so intimately wed as that of knowledge and light. Yet
among the myriad experiences of light"dawning awareness," "dim
understanding," "seeing the light," etc.there is one that seems to have
little relationship to the province of philosophy: a kind of light that does not
permit clarity of thought, but is instead blinding, painful, or disorienting.
Whereas the light of illumination might be described as "the letting appear"
that does not itself appear,
1
this other kind of light is said to dazzle, or to let
nothing appear, at least nothing besides itself. Those lacking insight are
usually considered "in the dark," but dazzlement is often a better
description: the madman of Michel Foucault's Madness & Civilization, for
instance, is not deprived of light, but actually "drunk on a light."
2
Similarly
do the cave dwellers of Plato's allegory suffer when coaxed out into the sun.
Truth, it seems, is only revealed by a very controlled and precise amount of
illuminationtoo little of it, or too much, and light fails the task.
The Spatial distribution of incandescent light under verious lampshades, from
Louis Bell, The Art of Illumination, 1912
With the advent of electric light in the nineteenth century, the distinction
between illumination and dazzlement took on new life in the literal, physical
experience of the general public. Electricity at the turn of the century was
not a scaled-back version of electric light today, but rather just the opposite:
Finally with the means to light each crack of every sidewalk and each corner
of every railway station, people did exactly that. According to one newspaper,
the houses in St. Petersburg, Russia, were lit so as to see a fly on the wall,
even a fly 400 paces from the source of light,
3
while another paper described
with awe how "the trees and flowers are plainly visible in every detail of leaf,
petal and twig ... the very stones of the gravel walk, the mosses on the wall
... are visible."
4
Whereas most of daily life before electricity was conducted in
the shadows, electro-enthusiasts aimed to eradicate the shadow completely,
to march into the twentieth century in a blaze of unadulterated light. In
some cases, the demand for brightness even outstripped the availability of
electricity. According to Gsta M. Bergman's history of theater lighting, the
"incipient light cult" that hit theaters in the 1880s, for instance, was
actually not directly attributable to electric lightonly a few theaters were
wired for itbut to its associative effects: electric light in a few theaters
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seems to have provoked brighter lights in all theaters.
5
"It would seem that
[electricity's] mere existence makes an increase of light necessary," as one
reviewer wryly commented.
6
Such bombastic enthusiasm for the new
technology created spaces that were dizzyingly brightspaces where,
paradoxically, it was impossible to see anything besides the light itself.
To be fair, the brightness wasn't all due to overzealous installation. There
was little to choose from in the way of electric lights at the time, and few, if
any, devices capable of diminishing the light's intensity. The usual story of
electric light (at least in America) begins with Thomas Edison unveiling his
incandescent bulb at Menlo Park in 1879, but in fact, the incandescent was
Edison's attempt to improve on another form of electric illumination in
widespread usethe arc lamp. Invented in 1801 by Sir Humphry Davy, the
arc lamp created light (and a great amount of heat) via an electric charge
arcing between two rods of carbon. The first arcs required a source of power
independent to each and constant monitoring of the burning rods, but
following centralized power stations ("dynamos") and improved design, the
light came into common use. It was several times over the brightest artificial
illumination available: for comparison, a gas lamp measured between three
and eight candlepower (the standard for light measurement at the time), a
carbon incandescent between 300 and 500, and an arc lamp anywhere from
10,000 to 100,000. At the top of its range, the arc was about as bright as a
modern searchlight.
"A lamp for a nightmare!" was how Robert Louis Stevenson described the
sterile white light of the arc lamp, a light that completely lacked the warm
orange tones of gas or yellowish cast of candlelight. "Such a light as this," he
continued, "should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the
corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror."
7
The arc was
indeed used in lunatic asylums, but also in factories (where it was
responsible for the first night shift), as well as exhibit halls, railway stations,
and libraries. The light of a department store, as described by mile Zola in
his 1883 novel Ladies' Paradise, was a penetrating "white brightness of a
blinding fixity": "There was nothing now," Zola's character states, "but this
blinding white light."
8
Indeed, descriptions of electric light in this period as
brilliantly white are repeated ad infinitum, and epitomized in the terming of
Chicago in 1893 "The Great White City," or New York's strip of early electric
signs "The Great White Way." In the form of street lighting, the light's
intensity created violent contrast between lit and unlit. The usual solution
raising the light and doubling its strengthexponentially increased the total
amount of light, against which women were known to open their umbrellas.
There was surely a degree of pain suffered for such brilliance. It was
impossible to look directly at a nearby arc lamp; even at long distances, the
light seared the eye. Stories of temporary vision loss were not uncommon,
and there seems to have been growing awareness in the phenomenon of
after-images as a warning sign of retinal fatigue.
9
Writers complained that
schools were a "factory for bad eyes"
10
and lighting specialists articulated
their professional goal as alleviating the pangs most people feel when
viewing buildings lit up at night.
11
The arc lamp was not the only problem, as
the new carbon incandescents were also dangerously bright, especially when
used in the home. In one case of "retinal burn," a person sitting two feet
from an unshaded incandescent went blind after a few weeks of daily
exposure.
Louis Bell's The Art of Illumination, first published in 1902 and revised and
expanded a decade later, seems to have been the first publication to draw
attention to the situation. Argued with the pedantic tone of a man who feels
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himself the sole voice of reason in a sea of stupidity, Bell insists that the
current application of electric light is lacking both wisdom and taste, to grave
consequences. The most important factor in electric illumination, he writes,
is the relative intensity of the light source, or its "intrinsic brilliance."
12
Contrary to intuition and common practice, visibility does not endlessly
improve with lights of higher and higher intrinsic brilliance; it gets worse.
Even the Alaskan Indians, Bell points out (illustrating with a small diagram),
have the sense to protect their eyes, and from light less severe than that of
an unshaded incandescent. In sum, one must always remember that "the
human eye is not merely a rather indifferent optical instrument, but a
physical organ."
13

Bell found the aesthetic effects of excessive illumination as troublesome as
the physiological risks. He includes how-to instructions on lighting reception
halls versus cellars versus billiards rooms, drawings of "do and don't"
lampshades, and recommendations for paint colors that best counteract the
sterility of electric light. He was by no means the first to point out that too
much electric light reveals things better left hidden. Theater critics had long
complained that electricity undermined the illusionist effects of scenery,
props, and makeup, making everything look crude and garish while at the
same time destroying any perception of depth of field.
14
In the drawing
rooms or parlors of the few who could afford electricity, the light made a
mockery of an atmospheric evening. Neither was it very flattering. Bell's
particular rant, though, signals the receptiveness of a larger audience to
such complaintsor a brief moment when electricity's success as an
illuminant was not so assured. Indeed, Bell does not hesitate to furnish
advice like, "a tallow candle, just where it ought to be, is better than a
misplaced lamp."
15
Nor did the wonders of electricity dissuade him from hope
in capturing the firefly's phosphorescence.
Electric light did not waver in the balance for long. Just four years after the
first edition of The Art of Illumination, the Association of Illumination
Engineers convened their opening address, declaring that "our eyesight is
suffering permanent injury" and thus immediate action was necessary.
16
Illumination engineering rapidly evolved as a professional field that by using
a combination of optic physiology, geometry, mechanics, and
entrepreneurship obviated the very concerns Bell articulated. Illumination
engineers were remarkably quick to understand and solve the particular
problems of electric light, and to provide the means by which electricity
moved from being a conspicuous technology to an ordinary one. Simply put,
illumination engineers made electric light useful. For their accomplishments,
they were heralded as "artists" and lighting a bona fide art formrightly so,
given the crudity of their precedent.
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Display designed by Maxfield Parrish for GE, ca. 1925. Used in hardware stores
for customers to test their bulbs before purchasing.
New inventions combined with smart advertising to assure electricity's
success as an illuminant, a success best judged by the ubiquity of electric
light today. By 1915, the arc lamp was consigned to the lighting of
skyscrapers and to warfare, where it was finally put to good use in startling
the enemy. The National X-Ray Reflector Company made its first fortune in
the sale of light reflectors that promised to "Tire Eyes Less!" by reducing
electric glare. General Electric vastly expanded their line of fixtures
elaborately shaped as flower bouquets, vines, and buds in a successful effort
to soften the connotations of electric light and increase its appeal to female
consumers.
17
For similar reasons, the company also renamed the
incandescent the "Mazda," based on the name of the Persian god of fire, and
hired Maxfield Parrish, the wildly popular artist and illustrator, to design print
advertisements and product merchandise, including a celebrated line of
calendars. In most cases, Parrish's GE ads do not appear to be related to
electricity at all, but depict Venetian lamplighters, pretty flamenco dancers,
or primitive man with his fire in the background and a naked nymph in the
foregroundbut this was exactly the point. Tiffany lamps (and their
imitations), first produced in 1899 and the result of a nearly fifteen-year
collaboration between Louis Tiffany and Thomas Edison, proliferated, as a
means to diffuse and pleasantly color the harsh electric whiteness. And
finally, in 1915, the landmark invention in the history of electric light made
innocuous: concealed light bulbs. Taking the lampshade one drastic step
further, electric bulbs at the 1915 Panama-Pacific World's Exposition were
hidden under statues, embedded in sidewalks, camouflaged by bushes, or
tucked in architectural adornments.
Of course, not all electric light became mundane. New York City's Great
White Way, for instance, the panoply of moving electric signs on Broadway,
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wouldn't reach its zenith for another two decades, while neon lights, light
shows, and nocturnal architecturethe idea of designing architecture toward
a building's nighttime rather than daytime appearance (e.g. Las Vegas)
were still to come. The enthusiasm for making electric light spectacular,
however, was always matched by an equal enthusiasm, albeit much more
difficult to chronicle, for making electric light invisible. The difference
between these two modes of illumination crystallized and split paths in the
first two decades of the twentieth century, the former succeeding by loudly
declaring itself, and the latter, by obscuring its own artifice.
In 1929, the Prefect of the Seine ordered the removal of all electric signs in
France not directly adjacent to the businesses they advertised. French
citizens, wholly in support of the measure (as were Germans), haughtily
declared, "Paris is proud to be known as the City of Light, but she wants it to
be intellectual rather than electric."
18
Electric light was now the thing that
crassly announced its own existence, and America was free to use it how it
pleased. The restthe light that simply illuminatedwas returned to
philosophy.
Maxfield Parrish, Prometheus, 1919. From a 1920 GE calendar.
1 Hans Blumenberg, "Light as a Metaphor for Truth," Modernity and the
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Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), p. 31.
2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 108.
3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in
the 19th Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), p. 118.
4 4The Sanitarian, 1878. Cited by Schivelbusch, p. 114.
5 Gsta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell
International, 1977), p. 287.
6 E. Mascart, from J. Lefevre, L'Electricit au thatre (1884). Cited by
Bergman, p. 296.
7 Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Plea for Gas Lamps" (1917). Cited by
Schivelbusch, p. 134.
8 Cited in Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and
Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), p. 161.
9 Staring at an arc lamp, as Schivelbusch notes, was very much like staring at
a "small sun" (Schivelbusch, p. 118). After-images had in fact been studied as a
scientific phenomenon for some time. Three famous nineteenth-century
scientists, including Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, severely
damaged their eyes by staring at the sun in order to produce after-images. See
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. 141.
10 Cited in Louis Bell, The Art of Illumination (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1912),
p. 344.
11 W. D'A. Ryan, "Illumination of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,"
General Electric Review, Vol XVIII, no. 6 (June 1915), p. 580.
12 Bell, p. 11
13 Ibid., p. 2
14 Bergman, p. 294. See also Schivelbusch, p. 199.
15 Bell, p. 306
16 Schivelbusch, p. 180.
17 Flower motifs were supposedly Mary Edison's idea, and the only known
instance of the inventor's wife having any part in his business decisions. See
Charles Bazerman, The Languages of Edison's Light (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1999).
18 Cited in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a
New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 343.
Sasha Archibald is an associate editor of Cabinet.
Cabinet is a non-profit organization supported by the Lambent Foundation, the
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2006 Cabinet Magazine