Academic literature on the topic 'Electric lighting – Oregon – History'

The paper deals with the history of development of the outdoor lighting in Tomsk. The stages of pre-electric and electric lighting are described and their connection with the most important discoveries and inventions in the field of lighting technology. The paper traces the outdoor lighting development in Tomsk from the first kerosene street lamps to modern energyefficient photodiode lamps. This dynamics reflects the development of lighting engineering and town planning policy at the historical stages of the 19–21st centuries.

Every fifth inhabitant of our planet has no access to electric lighting. Most of them are poor people living in remote areas of developing countries. Recent progress in solid-state lighting technologies offers good opportunities to develop, commercialize and introduce off-grid lighting systems based on application of white light emitting diodes (WLEDs) in combination with photovoltaic solar panels, wind generators or tiny hydro power plants. Though strongly dependent on the mainstream progress in implementation of LEDs for general lighting, application of this technology in developing world has specific challengers, difficulties and even advantages. Lighting technology the developing world is up to leapfrog from splinters and kerosene wick lamps directly to LED lamps leaving incandescent and fluorescence lamps behind. Achievements and problems, history and future of implementation of solid-state lighting in remote villages of developing counties are discussed in this chapter.

Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.

Founded in 1892, General Electric set out to dominate the American electrical industry. This article is an explanation of how the company accomplished this goal in the highly profitable electric lamp (“light bulb”) market. GE's techniques included technology leadership through in-house development and the purchase of patent rights, discriminatory agreements with suppliers based on market power, and cartel arrangements of various sorts, both foreign and domestic. The article shows how one company was able to use financial and market power, combined with early control of a rapidly developing technology, to gain and then hold a major American market for half a century.

The paper is designed to reveal the aesthetics of artificial lighting and its influence on the architecture of the 20th century. The main topics discussed are electric lighting, which appeard in our history at the end of the 19th century, and the technical development of lighting till the middle of the 20th century. Connections of artificial lighting with visual arts, its influence on advertisement, building architecture and the whole city are analysed. An idea is proposed that although lighting by nature was purely functional, very soon it acquired symbolic ambitions to represent architecture. In modern times architects understood that lighting was both a technological development and a symbol of a new era, when there appeared an independent field of creation - lighting architecture. Santrauka Straipsnyje nagrinėjama dirbtinio apšvietimo estetika ir jos įtaka XX a. architektūrai. Išryškinta XIX a. pabaigoje atsiradusio elektrinio apšvietimo svarba ir atskleista apšvietimo techninė raida iki XX a. vidurio. Nagrinėjamos dirbtinio apšvietimo sąsajos su vizualiaisiais menais, apšvietimo įtaka reklamai, pastatų architektūrai bei visam miestui. Straipsnyje keliama idėja, kad nors apšvietimo prigimtis pradžioje buvo grynai funkcionali, ji greitai įgavo simbolinių ambicijų – reprezentuoti architektūrą. Architektai į apšvietimą žvelgė ne tik kaip į technologinę pažangą, tai buvo naują erą ženklinantis simbolis, erą, kurioje atsiranda didelės įtakos visoms kūrybinėms idėjoms turinti nauja savarankiška kūrybos sritis – šviesos architektūra.

Signs of improvement in the early twentieth-century Brazilian economy enabled a process of urban renewal. One of the most visible features of Brazilian urban modernization was street and house lighting, as well as electricity for tramways and industry. Conflicts between the Canadian company Light and the Brazilian firm CBEE over the supply of urban electricity to Brazil's main economic centers—Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador—mirror the contradictions in the country's capitalist formation during the first decades of the twentieth century. From an emerging market view, and through political debates, this article addresses the development of electric utilities in major Brazilian cities.

145 years ago, in 1876, Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov received a patent number 112024 for an electric candle. This event turned out to be one of the starting points in the history of electrical engineering and human progress. In a short period of time, the importance of electricity in the life of society has increased many times. The article describes one of Yablochkov's many projects of those years ‒ the electrification of the covered Paris hippodrome, located next to the Alma Bridge. The hippodrome was a place of colorful theatrical performances and the world's first circus-theater, lit on a permanent basis by electricity.

The emergence of movie palaces is traced for St. Catherine Street in Montreal, Yonge Street in Toronto, and Granville Street in Vancouver. Beginning in 1896, film shows were included in a range of urban amusement places. When dedicated movie theatres opened by 1906, they were quickly built throughout the city before the downtown "theatre districts" became well defined. Not until about 1920 were first-run vaudeville-movie palaces at the top of a spatial hierarchy of urban film-going, lasting into the 1950s. After outlining the formation of movie palace film-going, the paper notes how the downtown theatres were next to each city's major department store. A theoretical analysis of how amusement and consumption make "being downtown" significant in everyday urban life follows. A review of the social uses of electric lighting and urban amusements finds that movie palace marquees become a symbol for the organization of downtown crowds and consumers into attentive mass audiences. A brief account of the decline of the movie palace, from the 1970s to 2000, concludes by reviewing the outcomes of replacement by multiplex theatres, demolition, or preservation.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Electric Utility Industry sponsored a one-acre working model called the Electrified Farm. Facing increasing competition from the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration, the farm’s corporate sponsors used the exhibit to advocate a new, electrified rural lifestyle enabled by private power and industry. Sarah Rovang demonstrates that the eight buildings of the Electrified Farm, designed by the firm of Harrison & Fouilhoux, evinced a cohesive modern aesthetic that stylistically echoed the modernity of the exhibit’s electrical lighting, appliances, and farm equipment. At the exhibit, electricity rendered farm work and domestic labor more efficient and professional, but it did not fundamentally disrupt entrenched ideals of the family farm. Contextualizing the farm’s architecture within contemporary stylistic and cultural trends, Envisioning the Future of Modern Farming: The Electrified Farm at the 1939 New York World’s Fair reveals the sponsors’ multiple and ultimately incompatible ambitions for the future of American agriculture, highlighting in particular the problematic implications of the Electrified Farm for gender relations and farm labor.

Federal policies have targeted electric lighting since the 1880s with varying success. This dissertation examines the history of those policies to understand policy makers’ intent and how their decisions affected the course of events. This qualitative study poses three research questions: How have changes in lamp efficacy affected policy development? How and why have federal policies targeted electric lighting? How have private sector actors adapted public policy to further their own goals? The analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach taking advantage of overlapping methodologies drawn from policy and political sciences, economics, and the history of technology. The concepts of path dependency, context, and actor networks are especially important.

Adoption of electric lighting spurred the construction of complex and capital intensive infrastructures now considered indispensable, and lighting always consumed a significant fraction of US electric power. Engineers and scientists created many lamps over the decades, in part to meet a growing demand for energy efficient products. Invention and diffusion of those lamps occurred amid changing standards and definitions of efficiency, shifting relations between network actors, and the development of path dependencies that constrained efforts to affect change. Federal actors typically used lighting policy to conserve resources, promote national security, or to symbolically emphasize the onset of a national crisis.

The study shows that after an initial introductory phase, lighting-specific policies developed during two distinct periods. The earlier period consisted of intermittent, crisis-driven federal interventions of mixed success. The later period featured a sustained engagement between public and private sectors wherein incremental adjustments achieved policy goals. A time of transition occurred between the two main periods during which technical, economic, and political contexts changed, while several core social values remained constant. In both early and later periods, private sector actors used policy opportunities to further commercial goals, a practice that public sector actors in the later period used to promote policy acceptance. Recently enacted energy standards removing ordinary incandescent lamps in favor of high efficiency lamps mark the end of the later period. Apparent success means that policy makers should reconsider how they use lighting to achieve future goals.

Pour justifier son point de vue dans une controverse scientifique, Volta fabrique un dispositif, nommé postérieurement "pile de Volta", qui constitue le premier générateur permettant l'obtention d'un courant permanent. Après ses voyages en Europe pour montrer sa découverte, et sa publication dans une revue scientifique, les premières applications suivent immédiatement, notamment grâce à Davy. La "lumière électrique" apparaît et son développement ne s'arrêtera pas jusqu'à nos jours. Arc électrique, bougie Jablochkoff, ampoules électriques, tubes néon, telles sont les différentes technologies mises en œuvres dans les années 1840 - 1910. Le plus étonnant, sans doute, est le fait que pendant toutes ces années, il n'est pas possible de préciser exactement ce que recouvre la notion de courant électrique. En quoi la connaissance de l'électricité, et donc de la lumière électrique, est pertinente et enrichissante pour le regard, le plaisir, l'analyse des tableaux liés à la nouvelle lumière artificielle apparaissant au tout début du XIXe siècle ? Ce travail est fondé sur le présupposé suivant : le regard d'un scientifique peut apporter à la compréhension d'un tableau. La connaissance des faits scientifiques, de leurs observations ou leurs conceptualisations, leurs hésitations, leurs imprécisions accompagnant la naissance et le développement de la lumière électrique semble nécessaire à la grille d'analyse des œuvres. Dans quels lieux et à quelles époques se manifeste cette nouvelle lumière ? Comment est-elle reçue dans le milieu intellectuel ou dans la presse ? Quelles évolutions la lumière électrique entraîne-t-elle et comment sont-elles montrées ? Entre le mitan et la fin du XIXe siècle, quelles évolutions des technologies de la lumière électrique se produisent-elles ? Quels sont alors les sujets nouveaux traités par les peintres ? L'analyse, sous la lumière électrique, d'une partie de l'histoire de l'art a montré de nouvelles peintures montrant des lumières électriques vues de face de Sonia Terk Delaunay à Gontcharova et à Balla, des éclairements saturés de Sluijters à Rockwell ; des faisceaux structurant l'espace nocturne, de Nevinson à Vallotton ; l'action politique sous la lumière électrique de Devambez à Deïneka et à Steinlen ; des paysages nocturnes des villes de Hassam à Ury ; des approches expressives de la ville de Kirchner à Masereel ; des intérieurs sous la lumière électrique de Vuillard à Hopper. Des peintres que l'on n'associerait pas spontanément à la lumière électrique ont également apporté une contribution à la lumière électrique comme Gérôme, Monet, Manet, Picasso. Cet ensemble fort disparate dans le style, de peintres de toutes nationalités, traduit des appropriations variées de l'apparition, puis de la présence et du développement de la lumière électrique dans la société
To justify his point of view in a scientific controversy, Volta made a device, later called "Volta pile" or "Volta battery", which was the first generator that made it possible to obtain a permanent current. After his travels in Europe to show his discovery, along with its publication in a scientific journal, the first applications followed immediately, thanks in particular to Davy. The "electric light" appeared and its development has continued ever since. The electric arc, the Jablochkoff candle, light bulbs, neon tubes. - these are the various technologies implemented in the 1840s - 1910. The most surprising, no doubt, is the fact that during all those years it was not possible to specify exactly what the notion of current covered. In what way can the knowledge of electricity, and therefore of electric light, be relevant and enriching for the eye, the pleasure, and the analysis of paintings related to the new artificial light that appeared at the very beginning of the 19th century? This work is based on the following assumption: a scientist's perspective can contribute to the understanding of a painting. The knowledge of the scientific facts, their observations or their conceptualizations, their hesitations, their inaccuracies accompanying the birth and the development of the electric light seem necessary to help establish a complete analysis of the works. In what places and at what times did this new light manifest itself? How was it received in the intellectual sphere or in the press? What evolutions did the electric light cause and how were they represented? From the mid- to late nineteenth century, what evolution in electric light technologies occurred? What, then, were the new subjects dealt with by painters? The analysis, under electric light, of one part of the history of art has revealed : frontal views of electric lights in paintings by Sonia Terk Delaunay, Goncharova and Balla; saturated illuminations in the works of Sluijters and Rockwell ; beams structuring the night space, from Nevinson to Vallotton; political action under Devambez's electric light in Deïneka and Steinlen's work; night landscapes of cities from Hassam to Ury; expressive approaches of the city from Kirchner to Masereel; interiors under electric lighting by Vuillard and Hopper. Even painters that we do not spontaneously associate with electricity and electric light such as Gérôme, Monet, Manet, and Picasso have also made a contribution to the artistic representations of electric light. This highly disparate collection of painters of all nationalities reflects the varied appropriations of the appearance, presence and development of electric light in society

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.

One of the greatest technological breakthroughs of humanity was the ability to construct a device and eventually a system which would provide a more efficient, safe, clean, convenient and relatively inexpensive form of illumination than ever used previously electric light. The introduction of this new technology into Oregon communities in the early years of this century was a remarkable accomplishment. Along with memories of the light itself, important and intriguing recollections of "life lived yesterday" are often associated with these early days of electric lighting. Because these "yesterdays" are becoming more distant from the present, persons holding those memories are reaching ages where such information becomes difficult to recall, vague, distorted and often forgotten altogether. In this study, memories of how electric light affected people were recalled differently in some aspect by informants, whether it was used for the purpose of lighting streets and buildings or on personal properties within the home and on farms. Published information describing the effects of electric lighting on society is relatively scarce. Consequently, persons with important previous experiences are in many instances the only source of insight on how our predecessors lived before electric light was in use and especially how this technological breakthrough may or may not have affected their lives. Those published descriptions of pre-electric life that do exist are most commonly found in obscure publications, often originating in small or private electric company newsletters and annual reports. Very few of these reports were compiled in a systematic scheme later to be interpreted quantitatively and in light of previous research. My own interest in this subject was piqued when I realized that both oral histories and technical data on how electricity affected individuals of the Pacific Northwest region is profoundly poor in comparison to material available on other parts of the country. With this understanding, 32 individuals representing a span of 30 years, five states and 15 different communities throughout Oregon, were interviewed over the course of four months. The informants were asked questions pertaining to their lifestyle and memories before, during and after the introduction of electricity, and more specifically about the advent of electric light into their communities and homes. Because the study utilized a minuscule sample size in comparison to the state population, generalizations were not appropriate. Nevertheless, the oral histories provided a greater insight into how the introduction of electric light and electric power affected the life of an Oregonian.
Graduation date: 1994

It was New Year’s Eve 1879, and the small community of Menlo Park, New Jersey, was overrun. Day after day the invaders had appeared, their numbers mounting as the new decade approached. When the New York Herald dispatched a man into the New Jersey countryside to report on the scene, he described a spectacle somewhere between a county fair and an inauguration: “They come from near and far, the towns for miles around sending them in vehicles of all kinds—farmers, mechanics, laborers, boys, girls, men and women—and the trains depositing their loads of bankers, brokers, capitalists, sightseers, hungry agents looking for business.” At first it had been hundreds, but by the last evening of the year, some 3,000 had gathered. They were here to see the future. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, master of the telephone and telegraph, was said to have a new marvel, and it was his most amazing yet. If the newspapers could be believed, the Wizard of Menlo Park was lighting up the night with a magic lamp that ran on electricity. The news had first broken ten days earlier. A reporter from the Herald had spoken with Edison, who showed off his latest success: a light bulb that would glow for dozens of hours without burning out. On December 21, the Herald trumpeted the achievement, taking an entire page plus an extra column to describe the bulb (“Complete Details of the Perfected Carbon Lamp”) as well as Edison’s trial-and-error search for it (“Fifteen Months of Toil”) and the electrical system that would power it (“Story of His Tireless Experiments with Lamps, Burners and Generators”). Other newspapers soon picked up the story, and Edison, never one to pass up good publicity, announced he would open his laboratory after Christmas. Members of the public could come see the marvel for themselves. And what a marvel it was. Perhaps in this age, when city folk must travel miles into the country to not see an electric light, it’s hard to appreciate the wonder of that night.

When Edison introduced his new-fangled electric-lighting system, he found a receptive audience. The public, the press, and even his competitors— with the possible exception of the gaslight industry—recognized that here was a technology of the future. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, had a tougher time. In 1876, just three years before Edison would create a practical light bulb, Bell’s invention of the telephone fell flat. “A toy,” his detractors huffed. What good was it? The telegraph already handled communications quite nicely, thank you, and sensible inventors should be trying to lower the cost and improve the quality of telegraphy. Indeed, that’s just what one of Bell’s rivals, Elisha Gray, did—to his everlasting regret. Gray had come up with a nearly identical telephone some months before Bell, but he had not patented it. Instead, he had turned his attention back to the telegraph, searching for a way to carry multiple signals over one line. When Gray eventually did make it to the patent office with his telephone application, he was two hours behind Bell. Those two hours would cost him a place in the history books and one of the most lucrative patents of all time. Some months later, Bell offered his patent to the telegraph giant Western Union for a pittance—$100,000—but company officials turned him down. The telephone, they thought, had no future. It wasn’t until the next year, when Bell had gotten financing to develop his creation on his own, that Western Union began to have second thoughts. Then the company approached Thomas Edison to come up with a similar machine that worked on a different principle so that it could sidestep the Bell patent and create its own telephone. Eventually, the competitors combined their patents to create the first truly adequate telephones, and the phone industry took off. By 1880 there were 48,000 phones in use, and a decade later nearly five times that. More recently, when high-temperature superconductors were first created in 1986, the experts seemed to be competing among themselves to forecast the brightest future for the superconductor industry.